It’s a little different with gender. Like consider if I was ugly and I hate the experience of living in my body despite It’s generally considered pretty impolite to comment on that sort of thing. A barista saying “Good day ugly person, how would you like your coffee?” would probably elicit frowns and gasps from onlookers. Like it’s generally possible to go around knowing you’re not great looking because you are no surprise to yourself but it’s possible to exist in a state where you are not always conscious of the perceptions and thoughts of how other people code you because your attention can be allowed to drift. But the constant feedback snaps you back into place.
Gender comes with a whole bunch of assumptions, way people unconsciously react, restrictions on places and events where you are considered an oddity and commentary. How often does a person refer to you in the third person where you can hear? How often are you called “sir” or “ma’am”. Every instance of that happening in society is lke that person being called ugly by the barista above. You are suddenly aware of the way your body is preceieved and all the social baggage in your life that you have to deal with. For the rest of the world being called mister, sir, miss or ma’am doesn’t strike the same cord as “ugly” does in everyone. The people who feel nothing from those gendered words don’t even notice them. But when you are trans you are reminded the same way you are if you stand naked before a mirror.
Because when I was figuring myself out there wasn’t much information about the existence of trans people I didn’t really know surgery was an option I could pursue. There were issues with my body that puberty had already made irreversible and there’s a moment you realize no fairy godmother is going to come out of the woodwork to make things right. So I sobbed long and hard in the shower just in complete dispair that this was it. No one would ever see the real me, I would be invisible trapped my life would never be better. That this was it.
I ended up not transitioning for reasons of love. My partner whom I love more than life has a phenotype preference. Normally I have a lot of tricks to get through my day. I distract myself, I try never to linger in front of mirrors and when I do I try to focus on the clothes I am wearing or my hair or the scraps of my physical appearance I like. I ask my friends to use names, pronouns and social aspects of gender to help me continue on crutches through my social interactions… But whenever I am misgendered in public or on the phone a part of me goes right back to that moment in the shower every single time. It can happen multiple times a day because I don’t pass. People freely remark on my biggest hatred of my physical experience on this earth directly to my face and there is not a damn thing I can do about it but take the hit most days because out there what’s happening is normal. I live in that world because the sacrifice I made ultimately brings me joy regularly…but my relationship isn’t typical. It’s not everyone who finds someone they feel is worth making daily sacrifices to be with and it requires a lot of things to be going right in my life to be okay. But I still have bad days… If I remained stuck in that moment in the shower over and over again with nothing to show for my trouble and no way out that feels like relief I would be tempted to do a lot worse than just slice off a couple of chunks of flesh.
Being fat holds social stigma sure… But how strong could you be in the face of that if people, not just cruel ones, everyone, made oinking noises in your wake everywhere you go?
That all makes sense. I’m curious then, since the gender dysphoria is exacerbated by the way society treats people based on gender, would people no longer require gender affirmation if we abolished gender and we only referred to people as they/them?
Is being transracial different than transgender given that race and gender are social constructs?
During segregation in the United States, would you say that black people would have benefitted from the government providing them racial affirmation surgery if they felt that they were not comfortable in their bodies, were a different skin color and had to face it constantly?
To that point, is gender affirmation surgery a band-aid to the real problem of conformity to society’s gender construct?
I think you would probably see a massive upset in the binary trans community if there was a push to a fully “gender free” world. Consider that a lot of binary trans people don’t like the custom of introducing themselves with their pronouns. They want to allow the cultural signifiers to do the talking for them and some feel like having to constantly say their pronouns is essentially people not reading and validating their physicality. Pronoun introductions are an accommodation specifically for non-binary trans people who don’t have cultural visual signifers that allow that read. Gender presentation is a form of language. Like if you like to dress and culturally act like a woman that doesn’t nessisarily mean you are trans. Femboys might strike some as being trans people but they aren’t. Being trans ultimately comes down to a combo of how you feel about your physical body
Also just because two things are social constructs doesn’t mean they operate on the same rules. Fat is a social construct that we are actively working as a society to deconstruct. It’s basically on a culture by culture basis but because all human populations have differently sized people that’s a universal fight. Race however isn’t like that. It is tied into long histories with complex power dynamics. People around the world do have medical procedures to lighten their skim because of beauty standards caused by occupation by European powers that treated being the lightest beige as a moral issue. We are in the midst of trying to deconstruct that narrative and divorce it from the legacy of supremacy. Maybe in the far future when we’ve put those supremacist narratives to bed and not treated different peoples like the things that they hold as culturally sacred is something we can play dress up in for giggles then we could talk about cross racial stuff… But ultimately respect comes from honoring boundaries.
As for the question about black people in the states. I am not black. I can’t speak for that community with authority but I understand that a lot of the people I personally know would rather widen the constructs that exist around beauty to recognize what they have is also beautiful and wonderful. Like the people you love are beautiful to you. If the faces of the people who raised and loved you are a color that society values less it doesn’t mean you value it less you want other people to see them the way you naturally do.
Your last question is difficult because it’s not the gender construct but the construct of sex… Which I know is really weird but sex is also a construct. The preservation of the idea of what is phenotypically male or female has it’s own history as being constantly proven to not be a binary. “Gender” had the original origins of existing to try and preserve the idea of a sexual binary by applying a sort of sex supremacist narrative. There is a LOT of pressure trans people face to adhere to a cultural idea of sex and a lot of gatekeeping that happen regarding treating someone’s gender as valid only if they look the part… But that’s only half the story. I know trans women who would sell their souls to have periods and get pregnant and breastfeed and experience all the messy aspects of physical femaleness that women routinely complain about. That’s not a cultural desire. Personally I don’t care so much about ever having kids. I am functionally a gay man. Do I wish I could properly be a top and have boners and ejaculate and all that stuff. Yeah sure. It’s really hard to get aroused when you are limited by hardware you don’t like interfacing with but because I care more about other functionalities of day to day of getting by in society. Even if everyone called me by the correct pronouns without fail and didn’t treat me like I was at best a preteen boy and invited me to the cookouts it wouldn’t stop me from falling into a week long depression every time I had to buy a new pair of pants. I can never look good to myself this way. People who know what I need still fuck up from time to time and I can tell their brain codes me based on my physical characteristics. As much as they try to stop it that reflex is baked in and me asking them to help me is introducing a cognitive load that they don’t have with people who have physically transitioned to the point where the switch in the veiwer’s brain actually flips. So the answer to your final question is both yes and no. Some people would be fine with using non-binary coping strategies which would cause some people to be more content without resorting to surgery but ultimately others would not because the root isn’t always strictly cultural.
In a gender free world everybody would have the same pronouns. No need to introduce yourself. If society stopped reminding a trans person that they’re in the body of a specific gender, wouldn’t they then be on the same level of necessity as somebody who wants surgery because they do not like some other aspect of their body? If gender is not a thing, you only have to worry about your own perception of yourself, like how a fat person or a woman who wants a BBL does.
Are you saying that until we abolish racism there could not exist transracial people? The history of power dynamics with race also exists with sex/gender. We would have to then abolish sexism before transgender people could exists.
I don’t think being transracial would be based on beauty. Just like being transgender, being transracial means that you feel that you were born in the wrong body. If being transgender is dependent on beauty standards could we not expand beauty standards and widen the construct of gender to allow transgender people to feel more comfortable in their bodies? Men can feel beautiful and women can feel masculine. A penis can be beautiful and a vagina can be masculine. The question remains though. Should we provide medical care to people who are transracial?
To your last point, it sounds like even if we abolished gender, transgender people would still suffer from dysphoria, which I then wonder how much of the dysphoria is around how you are perceived vs how you feel about your body? It might then in fact be a band-aid to another problem in the same way somebody might get a BBL to make them feel more comfortable during sex.
As much as you seem to want trans racial stuff to be a thing at present it’s a pretty frowned on practice. Most of the trans community look at broaching the discussions about it to be straight up transphobic because there is at present one guy out there named Oli London who currently has used his desire to look like a Korean popstar and other antics more or less as stunts for attention and has become the sort of thing transphobes point to to regularly use to discredit both trans narratives and questions around disrespectful cultural appropriatation as being crazy or to derail and discredit people of color who have been very clear that they are not a costume or an identity group that accepts new members that way. If you want to try cosmetically race swapping that’s basically up to you but at present you’d likely be pretty isolated and potentially make a lot of enemies because you’d be seen as trying to pit trans people against people of color. Beyond what is ethical or not the subject makes me personally uncomfortable not the least because it’s a narrative that often seeks to try and pin trans people into some kind of double standard. We are a group of people who feel the way we do about sex and gender. We have zero insights into people who want to change racial characteristics. If they exist at all and not just for attention seeking troublemaking then what they are doing is a conversation to have with them and whatever racial group they seek to emulate.
Something I also notice is that you keep saying being trans is dependant on beauty standards… Which is misguided. While there are trans people who seek to be beautiful a lot of that os more from a hunger for validation. Cis people desire beauty just as offen. But most of the trans people in my immediate circle are more… How do I say this… Aiming for personal comfort rather than beauty? Like don’t get me wrong I would like just once in my life to dress up for a wedding and not feel like a dysphoric wreck for trying to find clothing that doesn’t bring attention to the issues of being the opposite proportion from what I wish I was…but I don’t feel the need to be a handsome bloke. I just want to wear clothes to a special event that don’t need to be tailored all to fucking hell, clean up a little nicer than usual and not feel like a complete steaming pile of shit… But if my partner was properly bi and someone was like “Okay you will be instantly fully transformed into a man but you will look like you hit every branch on the ugly tree.” yeah. I wouldn’t mind that.
I use being ugly as a parable to cis people because generally from what I have gatherered its not like the vast majority have an intrinsic internal gender preference at all. Most of you have, as far as I can tell, never experienced anything like actual gender euphoria so I can’t use the experience of what gender incongruity feels like directly. Because of that I have to use things as analogs though they are always imperfect. Description of some of the paradoxes of gender dysphoria and euphoria are really difficult to conjure properly because it properly has to do with a sense of recognition…
You know that reaction you have when you see another human and you instantly recognize whether they are of a masculine or feminine body type and if you encounter someone who could be either it inspires that curiosity and attention while you try and figure it out because there’s a chunk of your brain that treats that information as vitally important? Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria works through that mechanism. Your internal sense of yourself is one thing but your external peices register to yourself as not matching so it causes this strict mental disconnect. The result is you feel very empty. Your name never feels like it belongs to you. It’s something you respond to as a function but it feels like it belongs to someone else. Your existence feels like you are performing a part in a play. Your friendships exist behind this barrier where you want desperately to feel connected but they never quite understand you or it feels like they are somehow keeping you at arms length. Nothing feels authentic to you, you might as well not even really be there because it’s all functionality happening to someone else. Then enevitably you play around with gender performance somehow. Doesn’t matter what, a short haircut, you wear a dress, someone says “oh sorry sir!” when they bump into you and you get a sudden flash of existing. For that little moment you suddenly feel real. It’s a thrilling feeling like you have been invisible all your life but suddenly someone saw you! Desire flares up to connect and ne present and exist in your own skin because for a second it feels like you are actually THERE for once. Dysphoria can feel like intense jealousy for the things that make you feel more alive but more often than not it’s this sort of numbness.
Cis people often don’t nessisarily understand it until they actually experience a trans person they know transition and then there’s a moment somewhere along the line where that recognition mechanism kicks in and they actually start experiencing that person as their gender… or they see the difference in how someone who used to struggle and seem sort of listless, anxious and absent suddenly is very vibrantly living in the moment and is sharp and attentive. Unless you’ve properly transgressed that boundary yourself it’s difficult to properly explain the phenomenon.
Appreciate the response. Did not intend to make you feel uncomfortable. Im not aware of this Oli person. Just like there are some people who may use transgender identity as a stunt, I believe there may be people who authentically may feel trans-something else. I’ll leave that convo at that.
I wasn’t saying being transgender is about beauty initially. You had mentioned that transracial is about beauty, and I responded saying that if this is the case then there must be some aspect of conforming to beauty standards with transgender people.
Cis people feel gender euphoria all the time in the context of being praised for conforming to social standards of gender. Women being praised for being beautiful. For being pregnant and raising a baby. Men for being strong. For having lots of monetary power and being sexually active. Everybody is just trying to be seen and accepted by society’s standards. When you’re a child and you grow up and are finally addressed as a man or a woman. That’s huge.
I appreciate taking the time to help me understand your feelings and your perspective on how the rest of the transgender community feels. I have no doubts about how you feel about yourself and I don’t question the validity. I have difficulty understanding the boundaries of being trans and the thresholds for what should be provided medically to people as a human right vs what should be treated as a mental health issue.
I’ll continue to do research and talk to people about it.
I think there’s something of a difference between the nature of being praised for gender conformity and the mechanisms of gender euphoria. The main thing is that euphoria and dysphoria is completely independent of any external reward systems and often contradicts social rewards for conformity. If you are reacting to someone’s praise that isn’t gender euphoria that’s more like social conditioning. Cis people definitely do gender as per the philosophy of Gender performativity and we as social animals react to praise for doing something correctly… but Gender euphoria as trans people experience it is something more like a built in reward system which continually fires off feedback.
I have met cis people who definitely have described experiencing gender euphoria or dysphoria but they really aren’t common. Ask cis folk if you were to wake up tomorrow and you were physically the other gender how would you react to that and more often than not the answer is basically that you think you’d adjust after a period of weirdness to your new role just fine. If you fall into that category I think you are not actually a person who experiences internal gender preference, you just experience gender as a source of praise for participating in culture. It is a much rarer cis person who answers that they would feel a profound sense of loss and horror in that situation. It’s lead me to believe that there is a cis equivalent of the trans experience of gender silently living their best lives but are about as rare as trans people are demographically while most cis people are functionally null gender. While null gender people may register that they are part of a group it’s a matter of practicality. Whatever box they get sorted into they just want to perform the box well. They do not see their gender as being intrinsic to them at a level of fundamental need.
My controversial opinion is I think some people do soul searching regarding this trait and eventually end up in the non-binary community and come to a sort of agender or gender politic where they simply feel societies gender norms are limiting and bullshit because they recognize it means nothing personally to them. While non-binary is under the trans umbrella and some non-binary people experience euphoria/dysphoria just regarding a mix of phenotype or experience it on an inconsistent basis some people use the term “non trans non-binary or genderqueer” to describe that particular state of feelings that gender isn’t something that resonates with them deeply… But that identity may lie on an assumption that cisness is dependent on a internal inante sense of gender and that all cis people basically have an innate gender sense it just is in alignment.
The thing is with the cis experience is that people don’t really ask “what makes a person cis?” We as trans people are driven to try and figure out internally and legitimize to cis people why we are the way we are because we present to them as something broken. Cis people are just assumed to be functioning so we don’t really dig into their mechanisms to understand the other half of gender from an veiwpoint that treats transness and cisness from a neutral standpoint that values the two states of being as equal. From a trans point of view we can tell that what most cis people describe doesn’t at all sound like what we are experiencing. When they try to assert that they do they sub in things that made them feel good that was gender related but the thing that made them feel good about it was feeling confidence knowing that they are being rewarded externally somehow.
But we as trans people also understand being showered with compliments or feeling reaffirmed by milestone social rituals that have a gendered component come from the outside world and sink in. I experienced a lot of compliments and social ritual for my gender performance back when I was performing cis normativity and while I did feel rewarded and flattered for the efforts of essentially performing gender it was like someone was complimenting a costume I was wearing. I did great job on the costume woo! Attention and acolades yay! ! But it felt like doing a drag performance or a wearing a Halloween costume. Most trans people have a period where they try and perform their birth sex’s gender norms intensely, better than anyone trying to fill that numbness with a different form of external praise from extreme conformity. It’s why so many trans women end up in the military. They are trying to overide the innate internal voice by utilizing the methods of validation. Performing the socially expected archetype does have a reward system that can feel good. But it’s like trying to drink water to combat being hungry. It will fix your thirst if you are thirsty but a fundamentally different need is what is demanding satisfaction.
While we haven’t typified if there is a specific physical structure of the brain that underlies transness I do think that there is something rather specific. When I speak to other trans people my age even though we all grew up isolated there are parts of our experience that is intimately recognizable to each other. However it’s my worry that if we ever figured out a mechanism that underlies transness people would essentially try to fix that structure as being “the problem”.
Throughout history trans people have existed on the axis of gender having come to their identities entirely in a vacuum which makes me think that it’s got something to do with potential structures of the brain we do not yet fully understand and that identifing cis people who experience actual gender euphoria might be the key to actually pinpointing it. I have definitely had some involved conversations with this variety of cis person and a number of them also recognize that they do not experience gender like other cis people do. That there is a fundamental difference in their experience between brain and body than other cis people and when they talk to us they understand us almost instantly more implicitly.
Trans racial people thus far seem to be a minority amoung minorities. It seems to me the people who describe their experiences point to pop culture depictions or idealized stereotypical notions of their desired cultural experience rather than a lived experience the same way people want to be medieval knights or jedi or fursonas and adopt those aesthetics as being identities but it’s entirely possible that I am wrong. I am not their psychologist. I just know that if it’s honestly held belief based out of a biological based imperitive it’s got about a thousand tons of cultural baggage to wade through and of that’s the case I wish them luck.
Your previous example and explanation of gender euphoria was based around an external perception of your gender and the consequent reward. Did I misunderstand?
What are the innate ways that you feel the gender that you feel? And how would you get euphoria from this without external perception? I don’t think we feel or perceive gender, but rather universal human characteristics have been categorized into gender. A penis and a vagina are just body parts. Gender is merely one’s own creation. I don’t think wanting to have a penis is different than wanting to be taller. What you perceive as being a man, may not be what a cis man perceives as being a man, but neither is more accurate about being a man than the other.
I believe there are more parallels of dysphoria between cis and trans people than we want to admit. Being transgender is not an entirely unique experience but a derivation of other types of dysphoria, depression and struggles with social conformity. If we understand that we can understand each other.
I think people are afraid to express other types of transness or do not have the words to express what they feel yet. Even cis people do not understand themselves because they are just considered normal like you said.
I think there is a misunderstanding there. Like I said gender incongruence is really hard to explain. You keep describing gender from the perspective I commonly see from cis people which treat both gender and physicality very flippantly. You said it yourself - you don’t think you feel or percieve gender but look at is as a series of universal characteristics and that genetalia are just body parts… But that is not how I experience gender nor does that explanation resonante with most trans people I have talked with. Within many of us dwells a deep preference to embody a certain physicality and cultural spot in it’s physical, mental and spiritual aspects.
When I am speaking with women there is a deep feeling that they are alien to me. I understand them from a place of having experienced their socialization and I may be friends and admire them but my brain registers them as distinctly not like me. The company of men, cis or trans, however there is a spark of recognition and feeling of likeness. With my body there is not just a preference but a sharp sense of repugnance for aspects that do not align. Pregnancy is not just off the table - the idea is abhorrent - like I used to routinely punch myself in the guts over and over again when such considerations arose to the point where I risked perforating organs and was told my my doctor that I needed to stop. But the idea of fulfilling the biological role of pregnancy or experiencing the faintest brush of motherhood was so alien to my sense of identity that I knew that if I were ever in a place where I was forced to go through that it wouldn’t matter what happened afterwards, even if things were to conclude with no lasting physical damage the result of that history in my experience would be so at odds with my sense of self that there is literally no force on earth that would keep me alive. I would find something very tall and jump.
I experience what some would term an extreme gender preference/aversion. My exterior secondary sex attributes are ultimately more tolerable. It is an understatement to say I do not like them but I can value them as things my partner likes. My main issue with them being that they create a distance between me and other men. My male friends who despite my wishes still subconsciously react to me as though I am “other” ranging from them treating me like a young boy or with the sort of physical touchy dynamic they reserve for their female friendships. They do not subconsciously react to my friends who have gone through HRT that way… Not even close.
I grew up in a household with lax gender norms. I fundamentally believe that being one sex or another should present no limitations. I live in one of the most trans friendly cities in the world where there is fairly widespread acceptance… But as much as the discussions of gender egalitarianism try and place things in the strict realm of being just performativity that is not my experience. I think actually the belief is way too optimistic and the invention resulting from null-gender genderblindness . It doesn’t matter how open minded people individually become at some level they still subconsciously react to perceived sex characteristics and we as trans people are hyper aware of this and whatever compells us comes from within. I have torn apart my own mind trying to pinpoint it’s source but it’s ineffable as much as it’s all consuming.
There’s something in the satisfaction rate of gender affirming surgeries for trans people which is incredibly unusual. The common satisfaction rate for run of the mill cosmetic surgeries is about 75% to 90%. With trans bottom surgery, the biggest scariest one most likely to have complications that effect your pelvic floor muscles and represent a potential loss of ability. A surgery where 15% of the total surgeries basically do not meet the requirements medical professionals have for considering it to be a success. That surgery has a regret rate of 2%. That’s an incredible statistical anomaly. I know people in the 15% one of them spent 2 years unable to walk more than two city blocks without crippling pain and will likely not ever recover her pelvic floor to full… She is emphatic that even if she got the guaranteed same outcome all over again she would not hesitate to have that surgery over again rather than live as she was. That is not how most surgeries are recieved. For contrast very safe fast procedures with no downtime fhat are strictly aesthetic in nature for both cis and trans patients even minor imperfections in results cause massive craters in the data.
It’s why we trans people tend to react aggressivively when people try to trivialize the issue. We regularly meet resistance by people who as far as we can tell are not capable of understanding the actual severity and experience of gender preference. We can explain it over and over again but 9/10 cis people will keep trying to tie it to your own experiences with self perception and it never works. It never accurately describes the journey we are on or our takeaways from our interactions with other people
It’s a little different with gender. Like consider if I was ugly and I hate the experience of living in my body despite It’s generally considered pretty impolite to comment on that sort of thing. A barista saying “Good day ugly person, how would you like your coffee?” would probably elicit frowns and gasps from onlookers. Like it’s generally possible to go around knowing you’re not great looking because you are no surprise to yourself but it’s possible to exist in a state where you are not always conscious of the perceptions and thoughts of how other people code you because your attention can be allowed to drift. But the constant feedback snaps you back into place.
Gender comes with a whole bunch of assumptions, way people unconsciously react, restrictions on places and events where you are considered an oddity and commentary. How often does a person refer to you in the third person where you can hear? How often are you called “sir” or “ma’am”. Every instance of that happening in society is lke that person being called ugly by the barista above. You are suddenly aware of the way your body is preceieved and all the social baggage in your life that you have to deal with. For the rest of the world being called mister, sir, miss or ma’am doesn’t strike the same cord as “ugly” does in everyone. The people who feel nothing from those gendered words don’t even notice them. But when you are trans you are reminded the same way you are if you stand naked before a mirror.
Because when I was figuring myself out there wasn’t much information about the existence of trans people I didn’t really know surgery was an option I could pursue. There were issues with my body that puberty had already made irreversible and there’s a moment you realize no fairy godmother is going to come out of the woodwork to make things right. So I sobbed long and hard in the shower just in complete dispair that this was it. No one would ever see the real me, I would be invisible trapped my life would never be better. That this was it.
I ended up not transitioning for reasons of love. My partner whom I love more than life has a phenotype preference. Normally I have a lot of tricks to get through my day. I distract myself, I try never to linger in front of mirrors and when I do I try to focus on the clothes I am wearing or my hair or the scraps of my physical appearance I like. I ask my friends to use names, pronouns and social aspects of gender to help me continue on crutches through my social interactions… But whenever I am misgendered in public or on the phone a part of me goes right back to that moment in the shower every single time. It can happen multiple times a day because I don’t pass. People freely remark on my biggest hatred of my physical experience on this earth directly to my face and there is not a damn thing I can do about it but take the hit most days because out there what’s happening is normal. I live in that world because the sacrifice I made ultimately brings me joy regularly…but my relationship isn’t typical. It’s not everyone who finds someone they feel is worth making daily sacrifices to be with and it requires a lot of things to be going right in my life to be okay. But I still have bad days… If I remained stuck in that moment in the shower over and over again with nothing to show for my trouble and no way out that feels like relief I would be tempted to do a lot worse than just slice off a couple of chunks of flesh.
Being fat holds social stigma sure… But how strong could you be in the face of that if people, not just cruel ones, everyone, made oinking noises in your wake everywhere you go?
That all makes sense. I’m curious then, since the gender dysphoria is exacerbated by the way society treats people based on gender, would people no longer require gender affirmation if we abolished gender and we only referred to people as they/them?
Is being transracial different than transgender given that race and gender are social constructs?
During segregation in the United States, would you say that black people would have benefitted from the government providing them racial affirmation surgery if they felt that they were not comfortable in their bodies, were a different skin color and had to face it constantly?
To that point, is gender affirmation surgery a band-aid to the real problem of conformity to society’s gender construct?
I think you would probably see a massive upset in the binary trans community if there was a push to a fully “gender free” world. Consider that a lot of binary trans people don’t like the custom of introducing themselves with their pronouns. They want to allow the cultural signifiers to do the talking for them and some feel like having to constantly say their pronouns is essentially people not reading and validating their physicality. Pronoun introductions are an accommodation specifically for non-binary trans people who don’t have cultural visual signifers that allow that read. Gender presentation is a form of language. Like if you like to dress and culturally act like a woman that doesn’t nessisarily mean you are trans. Femboys might strike some as being trans people but they aren’t. Being trans ultimately comes down to a combo of how you feel about your physical body
Also just because two things are social constructs doesn’t mean they operate on the same rules. Fat is a social construct that we are actively working as a society to deconstruct. It’s basically on a culture by culture basis but because all human populations have differently sized people that’s a universal fight. Race however isn’t like that. It is tied into long histories with complex power dynamics. People around the world do have medical procedures to lighten their skim because of beauty standards caused by occupation by European powers that treated being the lightest beige as a moral issue. We are in the midst of trying to deconstruct that narrative and divorce it from the legacy of supremacy. Maybe in the far future when we’ve put those supremacist narratives to bed and not treated different peoples like the things that they hold as culturally sacred is something we can play dress up in for giggles then we could talk about cross racial stuff… But ultimately respect comes from honoring boundaries.
As for the question about black people in the states. I am not black. I can’t speak for that community with authority but I understand that a lot of the people I personally know would rather widen the constructs that exist around beauty to recognize what they have is also beautiful and wonderful. Like the people you love are beautiful to you. If the faces of the people who raised and loved you are a color that society values less it doesn’t mean you value it less you want other people to see them the way you naturally do.
Your last question is difficult because it’s not the gender construct but the construct of sex… Which I know is really weird but sex is also a construct. The preservation of the idea of what is phenotypically male or female has it’s own history as being constantly proven to not be a binary. “Gender” had the original origins of existing to try and preserve the idea of a sexual binary by applying a sort of sex supremacist narrative. There is a LOT of pressure trans people face to adhere to a cultural idea of sex and a lot of gatekeeping that happen regarding treating someone’s gender as valid only if they look the part… But that’s only half the story. I know trans women who would sell their souls to have periods and get pregnant and breastfeed and experience all the messy aspects of physical femaleness that women routinely complain about. That’s not a cultural desire. Personally I don’t care so much about ever having kids. I am functionally a gay man. Do I wish I could properly be a top and have boners and ejaculate and all that stuff. Yeah sure. It’s really hard to get aroused when you are limited by hardware you don’t like interfacing with but because I care more about other functionalities of day to day of getting by in society. Even if everyone called me by the correct pronouns without fail and didn’t treat me like I was at best a preteen boy and invited me to the cookouts it wouldn’t stop me from falling into a week long depression every time I had to buy a new pair of pants. I can never look good to myself this way. People who know what I need still fuck up from time to time and I can tell their brain codes me based on my physical characteristics. As much as they try to stop it that reflex is baked in and me asking them to help me is introducing a cognitive load that they don’t have with people who have physically transitioned to the point where the switch in the veiwer’s brain actually flips. So the answer to your final question is both yes and no. Some people would be fine with using non-binary coping strategies which would cause some people to be more content without resorting to surgery but ultimately others would not because the root isn’t always strictly cultural.
In a gender free world everybody would have the same pronouns. No need to introduce yourself. If society stopped reminding a trans person that they’re in the body of a specific gender, wouldn’t they then be on the same level of necessity as somebody who wants surgery because they do not like some other aspect of their body? If gender is not a thing, you only have to worry about your own perception of yourself, like how a fat person or a woman who wants a BBL does.
Are you saying that until we abolish racism there could not exist transracial people? The history of power dynamics with race also exists with sex/gender. We would have to then abolish sexism before transgender people could exists.
I don’t think being transracial would be based on beauty. Just like being transgender, being transracial means that you feel that you were born in the wrong body. If being transgender is dependent on beauty standards could we not expand beauty standards and widen the construct of gender to allow transgender people to feel more comfortable in their bodies? Men can feel beautiful and women can feel masculine. A penis can be beautiful and a vagina can be masculine. The question remains though. Should we provide medical care to people who are transracial?
To your last point, it sounds like even if we abolished gender, transgender people would still suffer from dysphoria, which I then wonder how much of the dysphoria is around how you are perceived vs how you feel about your body? It might then in fact be a band-aid to another problem in the same way somebody might get a BBL to make them feel more comfortable during sex.
As much as you seem to want trans racial stuff to be a thing at present it’s a pretty frowned on practice. Most of the trans community look at broaching the discussions about it to be straight up transphobic because there is at present one guy out there named Oli London who currently has used his desire to look like a Korean popstar and other antics more or less as stunts for attention and has become the sort of thing transphobes point to to regularly use to discredit both trans narratives and questions around disrespectful cultural appropriatation as being crazy or to derail and discredit people of color who have been very clear that they are not a costume or an identity group that accepts new members that way. If you want to try cosmetically race swapping that’s basically up to you but at present you’d likely be pretty isolated and potentially make a lot of enemies because you’d be seen as trying to pit trans people against people of color. Beyond what is ethical or not the subject makes me personally uncomfortable not the least because it’s a narrative that often seeks to try and pin trans people into some kind of double standard. We are a group of people who feel the way we do about sex and gender. We have zero insights into people who want to change racial characteristics. If they exist at all and not just for attention seeking troublemaking then what they are doing is a conversation to have with them and whatever racial group they seek to emulate.
Something I also notice is that you keep saying being trans is dependant on beauty standards… Which is misguided. While there are trans people who seek to be beautiful a lot of that os more from a hunger for validation. Cis people desire beauty just as offen. But most of the trans people in my immediate circle are more… How do I say this… Aiming for personal comfort rather than beauty? Like don’t get me wrong I would like just once in my life to dress up for a wedding and not feel like a dysphoric wreck for trying to find clothing that doesn’t bring attention to the issues of being the opposite proportion from what I wish I was…but I don’t feel the need to be a handsome bloke. I just want to wear clothes to a special event that don’t need to be tailored all to fucking hell, clean up a little nicer than usual and not feel like a complete steaming pile of shit… But if my partner was properly bi and someone was like “Okay you will be instantly fully transformed into a man but you will look like you hit every branch on the ugly tree.” yeah. I wouldn’t mind that.
I use being ugly as a parable to cis people because generally from what I have gatherered its not like the vast majority have an intrinsic internal gender preference at all. Most of you have, as far as I can tell, never experienced anything like actual gender euphoria so I can’t use the experience of what gender incongruity feels like directly. Because of that I have to use things as analogs though they are always imperfect. Description of some of the paradoxes of gender dysphoria and euphoria are really difficult to conjure properly because it properly has to do with a sense of recognition…
You know that reaction you have when you see another human and you instantly recognize whether they are of a masculine or feminine body type and if you encounter someone who could be either it inspires that curiosity and attention while you try and figure it out because there’s a chunk of your brain that treats that information as vitally important? Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria works through that mechanism. Your internal sense of yourself is one thing but your external peices register to yourself as not matching so it causes this strict mental disconnect. The result is you feel very empty. Your name never feels like it belongs to you. It’s something you respond to as a function but it feels like it belongs to someone else. Your existence feels like you are performing a part in a play. Your friendships exist behind this barrier where you want desperately to feel connected but they never quite understand you or it feels like they are somehow keeping you at arms length. Nothing feels authentic to you, you might as well not even really be there because it’s all functionality happening to someone else. Then enevitably you play around with gender performance somehow. Doesn’t matter what, a short haircut, you wear a dress, someone says “oh sorry sir!” when they bump into you and you get a sudden flash of existing. For that little moment you suddenly feel real. It’s a thrilling feeling like you have been invisible all your life but suddenly someone saw you! Desire flares up to connect and ne present and exist in your own skin because for a second it feels like you are actually THERE for once. Dysphoria can feel like intense jealousy for the things that make you feel more alive but more often than not it’s this sort of numbness.
Cis people often don’t nessisarily understand it until they actually experience a trans person they know transition and then there’s a moment somewhere along the line where that recognition mechanism kicks in and they actually start experiencing that person as their gender… or they see the difference in how someone who used to struggle and seem sort of listless, anxious and absent suddenly is very vibrantly living in the moment and is sharp and attentive. Unless you’ve properly transgressed that boundary yourself it’s difficult to properly explain the phenomenon.
Appreciate the response. Did not intend to make you feel uncomfortable. Im not aware of this Oli person. Just like there are some people who may use transgender identity as a stunt, I believe there may be people who authentically may feel trans-something else. I’ll leave that convo at that.
I wasn’t saying being transgender is about beauty initially. You had mentioned that transracial is about beauty, and I responded saying that if this is the case then there must be some aspect of conforming to beauty standards with transgender people.
Cis people feel gender euphoria all the time in the context of being praised for conforming to social standards of gender. Women being praised for being beautiful. For being pregnant and raising a baby. Men for being strong. For having lots of monetary power and being sexually active. Everybody is just trying to be seen and accepted by society’s standards. When you’re a child and you grow up and are finally addressed as a man or a woman. That’s huge.
I appreciate taking the time to help me understand your feelings and your perspective on how the rest of the transgender community feels. I have no doubts about how you feel about yourself and I don’t question the validity. I have difficulty understanding the boundaries of being trans and the thresholds for what should be provided medically to people as a human right vs what should be treated as a mental health issue.
I’ll continue to do research and talk to people about it.
I think there’s something of a difference between the nature of being praised for gender conformity and the mechanisms of gender euphoria. The main thing is that euphoria and dysphoria is completely independent of any external reward systems and often contradicts social rewards for conformity. If you are reacting to someone’s praise that isn’t gender euphoria that’s more like social conditioning. Cis people definitely do gender as per the philosophy of Gender performativity and we as social animals react to praise for doing something correctly… but Gender euphoria as trans people experience it is something more like a built in reward system which continually fires off feedback.
I have met cis people who definitely have described experiencing gender euphoria or dysphoria but they really aren’t common. Ask cis folk if you were to wake up tomorrow and you were physically the other gender how would you react to that and more often than not the answer is basically that you think you’d adjust after a period of weirdness to your new role just fine. If you fall into that category I think you are not actually a person who experiences internal gender preference, you just experience gender as a source of praise for participating in culture. It is a much rarer cis person who answers that they would feel a profound sense of loss and horror in that situation. It’s lead me to believe that there is a cis equivalent of the trans experience of gender silently living their best lives but are about as rare as trans people are demographically while most cis people are functionally null gender. While null gender people may register that they are part of a group it’s a matter of practicality. Whatever box they get sorted into they just want to perform the box well. They do not see their gender as being intrinsic to them at a level of fundamental need.
My controversial opinion is I think some people do soul searching regarding this trait and eventually end up in the non-binary community and come to a sort of agender or gender politic where they simply feel societies gender norms are limiting and bullshit because they recognize it means nothing personally to them. While non-binary is under the trans umbrella and some non-binary people experience euphoria/dysphoria just regarding a mix of phenotype or experience it on an inconsistent basis some people use the term “non trans non-binary or genderqueer” to describe that particular state of feelings that gender isn’t something that resonates with them deeply… But that identity may lie on an assumption that cisness is dependent on a internal inante sense of gender and that all cis people basically have an innate gender sense it just is in alignment.
The thing is with the cis experience is that people don’t really ask “what makes a person cis?” We as trans people are driven to try and figure out internally and legitimize to cis people why we are the way we are because we present to them as something broken. Cis people are just assumed to be functioning so we don’t really dig into their mechanisms to understand the other half of gender from an veiwpoint that treats transness and cisness from a neutral standpoint that values the two states of being as equal. From a trans point of view we can tell that what most cis people describe doesn’t at all sound like what we are experiencing. When they try to assert that they do they sub in things that made them feel good that was gender related but the thing that made them feel good about it was feeling confidence knowing that they are being rewarded externally somehow.
But we as trans people also understand being showered with compliments or feeling reaffirmed by milestone social rituals that have a gendered component come from the outside world and sink in. I experienced a lot of compliments and social ritual for my gender performance back when I was performing cis normativity and while I did feel rewarded and flattered for the efforts of essentially performing gender it was like someone was complimenting a costume I was wearing. I did great job on the costume woo! Attention and acolades yay! ! But it felt like doing a drag performance or a wearing a Halloween costume. Most trans people have a period where they try and perform their birth sex’s gender norms intensely, better than anyone trying to fill that numbness with a different form of external praise from extreme conformity. It’s why so many trans women end up in the military. They are trying to overide the innate internal voice by utilizing the methods of validation. Performing the socially expected archetype does have a reward system that can feel good. But it’s like trying to drink water to combat being hungry. It will fix your thirst if you are thirsty but a fundamentally different need is what is demanding satisfaction.
While we haven’t typified if there is a specific physical structure of the brain that underlies transness I do think that there is something rather specific. When I speak to other trans people my age even though we all grew up isolated there are parts of our experience that is intimately recognizable to each other. However it’s my worry that if we ever figured out a mechanism that underlies transness people would essentially try to fix that structure as being “the problem”.
Throughout history trans people have existed on the axis of gender having come to their identities entirely in a vacuum which makes me think that it’s got something to do with potential structures of the brain we do not yet fully understand and that identifing cis people who experience actual gender euphoria might be the key to actually pinpointing it. I have definitely had some involved conversations with this variety of cis person and a number of them also recognize that they do not experience gender like other cis people do. That there is a fundamental difference in their experience between brain and body than other cis people and when they talk to us they understand us almost instantly more implicitly.
Trans racial people thus far seem to be a minority amoung minorities. It seems to me the people who describe their experiences point to pop culture depictions or idealized stereotypical notions of their desired cultural experience rather than a lived experience the same way people want to be medieval knights or jedi or fursonas and adopt those aesthetics as being identities but it’s entirely possible that I am wrong. I am not their psychologist. I just know that if it’s honestly held belief based out of a biological based imperitive it’s got about a thousand tons of cultural baggage to wade through and of that’s the case I wish them luck.
Your previous example and explanation of gender euphoria was based around an external perception of your gender and the consequent reward. Did I misunderstand?
What are the innate ways that you feel the gender that you feel? And how would you get euphoria from this without external perception? I don’t think we feel or perceive gender, but rather universal human characteristics have been categorized into gender. A penis and a vagina are just body parts. Gender is merely one’s own creation. I don’t think wanting to have a penis is different than wanting to be taller. What you perceive as being a man, may not be what a cis man perceives as being a man, but neither is more accurate about being a man than the other.
I believe there are more parallels of dysphoria between cis and trans people than we want to admit. Being transgender is not an entirely unique experience but a derivation of other types of dysphoria, depression and struggles with social conformity. If we understand that we can understand each other.
I think people are afraid to express other types of transness or do not have the words to express what they feel yet. Even cis people do not understand themselves because they are just considered normal like you said.
I think there is a misunderstanding there. Like I said gender incongruence is really hard to explain. You keep describing gender from the perspective I commonly see from cis people which treat both gender and physicality very flippantly. You said it yourself - you don’t think you feel or percieve gender but look at is as a series of universal characteristics and that genetalia are just body parts… But that is not how I experience gender nor does that explanation resonante with most trans people I have talked with. Within many of us dwells a deep preference to embody a certain physicality and cultural spot in it’s physical, mental and spiritual aspects.
When I am speaking with women there is a deep feeling that they are alien to me. I understand them from a place of having experienced their socialization and I may be friends and admire them but my brain registers them as distinctly not like me. The company of men, cis or trans, however there is a spark of recognition and feeling of likeness. With my body there is not just a preference but a sharp sense of repugnance for aspects that do not align. Pregnancy is not just off the table - the idea is abhorrent - like I used to routinely punch myself in the guts over and over again when such considerations arose to the point where I risked perforating organs and was told my my doctor that I needed to stop. But the idea of fulfilling the biological role of pregnancy or experiencing the faintest brush of motherhood was so alien to my sense of identity that I knew that if I were ever in a place where I was forced to go through that it wouldn’t matter what happened afterwards, even if things were to conclude with no lasting physical damage the result of that history in my experience would be so at odds with my sense of self that there is literally no force on earth that would keep me alive. I would find something very tall and jump.
I experience what some would term an extreme gender preference/aversion. My exterior secondary sex attributes are ultimately more tolerable. It is an understatement to say I do not like them but I can value them as things my partner likes. My main issue with them being that they create a distance between me and other men. My male friends who despite my wishes still subconsciously react to me as though I am “other” ranging from them treating me like a young boy or with the sort of physical touchy dynamic they reserve for their female friendships. They do not subconsciously react to my friends who have gone through HRT that way… Not even close.
I grew up in a household with lax gender norms. I fundamentally believe that being one sex or another should present no limitations. I live in one of the most trans friendly cities in the world where there is fairly widespread acceptance… But as much as the discussions of gender egalitarianism try and place things in the strict realm of being just performativity that is not my experience. I think actually the belief is way too optimistic and the invention resulting from null-gender genderblindness . It doesn’t matter how open minded people individually become at some level they still subconsciously react to perceived sex characteristics and we as trans people are hyper aware of this and whatever compells us comes from within. I have torn apart my own mind trying to pinpoint it’s source but it’s ineffable as much as it’s all consuming.
There’s something in the satisfaction rate of gender affirming surgeries for trans people which is incredibly unusual. The common satisfaction rate for run of the mill cosmetic surgeries is about 75% to 90%. With trans bottom surgery, the biggest scariest one most likely to have complications that effect your pelvic floor muscles and represent a potential loss of ability. A surgery where 15% of the total surgeries basically do not meet the requirements medical professionals have for considering it to be a success. That surgery has a regret rate of 2%. That’s an incredible statistical anomaly. I know people in the 15% one of them spent 2 years unable to walk more than two city blocks without crippling pain and will likely not ever recover her pelvic floor to full… She is emphatic that even if she got the guaranteed same outcome all over again she would not hesitate to have that surgery over again rather than live as she was. That is not how most surgeries are recieved. For contrast very safe fast procedures with no downtime fhat are strictly aesthetic in nature for both cis and trans patients even minor imperfections in results cause massive craters in the data.
It’s why we trans people tend to react aggressivively when people try to trivialize the issue. We regularly meet resistance by people who as far as we can tell are not capable of understanding the actual severity and experience of gender preference. We can explain it over and over again but 9/10 cis people will keep trying to tie it to your own experiences with self perception and it never works. It never accurately describes the journey we are on or our takeaways from our interactions with other people