A gentle prod, and its result
The reason I so appreciate bright, perceptive people – as opposed to ideologues whose intelligence does little to illuminate – is that they manage to both instruct and learn with a certain grace. Among such rarities in the transblogosphere is Zoe, whose direct speech and clear humanity always make her worth reading, even if one doesn’t always agree with her every conclusion.
Imagine my satisfaction, then, when with only a small bit of prompting on my part, she completely “got it,” and returned in her own words the essence of a point I’ve been trying to make for a very long time.
The occasion was a comment thread following her welcome to newer readers of her blog, arriving via a link from a well-known science blog, in which she said:
I don’t reject binary male/female roles, neither does anyone who’s transsexual.
I understood full well the context and point of the statement, but felt that it skirted the kind of language representing a point of view which I have always contested. And so I replied (and here follow three comments of mine, deleting the the intermediate exchanges, in which I pressed the point just a little further):
Does this mean that a willingness to reject such roles disqualifies one as transsexual?
I thought that transsexualism was a medical condition, not a social statement.
I question neither the implications of surgery nor the observable consistencies of behavior.
I was suggesting, rather, a possible issue with framing.
I am trying to suggest a point regarding how language can used to constrain permissible behavior.
I know many cissexual people who to some degree “reject binary roles.” I see no reason why transsexual people may not similarly reject such roles, to within roughly similar degrees.
To which Zoe finally responded:
After giving it some thought, I agree.
There’s a number of issues. The primary one is that not everyone agrees that the evidence for biological causation is so convincing. Such people may see transition as being a denial of the binary, rather than an affirmation. Some of these people will have transitioned, and it would be the height of arrogance for me to say “well, no true Scotsman (or the equivalent) would do that”.
Others may agree with the biological causality, but see Gender Role as it is defined in our society as being so overwhelmingly a social construct that the biological bit can be safely ignored. They may deny the Gender Binary as the result.
I agree, mostly, but not completely. It might be 70% social construct, it might be 90% social construct, it’s certainly mostly social construct, but I don’t think the remainder can be “safely” ignored.
That’s a matter of political, rather than scientific, opinion.
I’m arrogant, but even my arrogance has limits. To state that someone can’t be TS purely on the basis of their beliefs, political or scientific, would make me look like an equine posterior.
Furthermore… I’ve been going on at great length about “biology is fuzzy” with a “bimodal distribution”, but I haven’t looked as carefully as I should about the implications of some people being BiGendered.
It means that some people may transition, not because they have to, but because they want to and are able to function adequately in either gender role. For example, some may really do an FtoM transition in order to partake of male privilege. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.
The Bailey/Blanchard Autogynaphilia theory is mostly bunk. But if a biological causation is true, as I believe it to be, then there really are some bigendered people born in male bodies who are androphillic.
Some of that small minority really may transition purely in order to have straight sex, as Blanchard maintains. They’d be a minority of all young transitioners, but yes, it’s quite conceivable that some may exist. It’s even probable that some do.
Whether such bigendered people should be called “male” or not is another matter. It would be as inaccurate as calling bisexuals “straight”, or “gay” for that matter.
People who transition, and do so successfully, leading successful female lives, well, how can I deny that they are Transsexual women?
Even though if they are bigendered, their transition subverts the whole concept of a strict gender binary?
As always with Zoe, there are plenty of points of departure here, many places where one might wrinkle a brow a bit and rev up with a “well, yes/maybe but…”. But that’s part of the pleasure of an exchange with someone less committed to a particular campaign than to the process of exchange itself.
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