Well, no.
You might have noticed–please say you noticed–that I’ve been posting lightly lately. That’s because I’m getting ready to undergo top surgery. My first operation ever. It’s, well, a huge fucking deal, and it’s making me think hard about all kinds of things (“Will I finally be able to wear tank tops?”). It’s also rather a complicated emotional burden to be carrying. My family has (finally) gotten to the point where they can talk about transition itself, but they’re not quite ready for, “So, when I get my tits amputated….” It’s also hard to talk about it in complex terms; the Standard Transsexual Narrative goes, “I was unhappy and longed for surgery, and then I had surgery and was happy.” To be fair, a great many transsexuals have experiences that are about that straightforward. It’s not that far off the mark for me, even.
I’m gonna put up some posts about “the surgery,” and all of the baggage it’s accumulated. The body-image and disorder stuff I was posting about have a lot of theoretical aspects in common, I think.
On a related note, I was sort of blogthropologized a few nights ago. My housemate’s friend invited me out for dinner, saying she wanted to talk about gender…stuff. She explained some of her meditations on gender, and the way gendered expectations had shaped her life, and then she sort of asked me what I thought. How I felt. What did I think gender was all about? What did I think “man” and “woman” and “male” and “female” really meant?
My response?
“…Um?”
And inside I was going, I don’t know! If I let myself care about any of those things, I’d go out of my mind from pain and fear. I don’t try to answer those questions. I know all the answers, and they tell me that my whole life is wrong. Whatever “real” men and “real” women are, I’m not one of them.
She was sort of aghast. She couldn’t understand how I could actually change genders and/or sexes without having some essential working definition of each one. How did I even keep track? How did I know where I was? How did I explain all of this to myself?
I don’t. I stopped, because the attempt was killing me. In order to transition, I had to stop thinking about what transition meant. I had to get out of my head and into my body. I had to forget, and must continually forget, that I’m A Transsexual. I can’t think about what that does to my life. I can’t think about what that makes me. I can’t think about where that puts me, in terms of the borders I grew up with. I can’t think about what The Surgery means to the society that has made it the defining event of The Transsexual Experience. I can’t think about what this body I live in is.
Which is all to say that I’ve needed to write about this for a long time.
[...] who Chris positions as the friendly squishy pacifists of the scary-looking-creature world. Feministe:Thoughts on Upcoming Surgery She was sort of aghast. Sh [...]
I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of gender. In a society where the prevailing wisdom suggests that most gender roles are socialized, I think you make an important point: some things are just personal, and run deeper than the power of the human mind to understand.
“Piny, regarding gender, please speak on behalf of your people…”
It’s disturbing that people still insist on talking about gender in terms of binaries. Gender is an expression of who we are, not how we fit into the preconscribed roles of “man” or “woman.” And how are we supposed to ever truly express the fluidity of our beings when who we are is constantly informed and dictated by the sometimes bogus ideals of cultures, societies, politics, classes, and races that are ever-changing themselves? And truly, if this expression is even possible, is it really anyone’s business who we are inside?
Dear Piny,
You are a thoughtful, dear, courageous young man and I wish you and your family love and healing, and that the surgery goes well.
I would also add that you are a natural teacher in your desire to clarify and explicate issues, and I for one, have learned from you.
I send the light to you.
yrs, dharmadyke
I hate the binary thing too. A kid here at school who is, I believe, genderqueer (I don’t know R. that well, haven’t spoken to hir in a while, so I can’t say whether ze’s trans or whatever) was thinking about coming to the seder my friends and I were having last week. And when I mentioned it, using hir new name and the neutral pronouns, my friends were confused. Was R. trans? They could understand that. But the concept of genderqueer was kind of beyond them.
Anyway, I’ll stop blathering. Best of luck with your surgery, Piny. I’ve missed your postings, and I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
You are more of a man than most purportedly “real men” I know. You are going to do great. I hope it IS as easy as surgery. If I could wish hapiness for you I would but I can at least wish that hapiness is easily found for you.
I hope you have plenty of hands to hold before/during & after surgery, and Im sure you know that this community is pulling for you and cyber-holding your hand.
Ill be thinking of you and wishing you joy.
I do wish we had more words than “man” and “woman,” or at least broader socially acceptable definitions, or the abolition of them except to refer to chromosomal differences, cause I’m not a man by any stretch, but when I look around at other women, I don’t feel like I exactly fit in that category, either: I don’t do the makeup or the shaving or the cooing over babies or hope my male SO will give me a big flashy diamond (I hope we’ll end up cohabiting at some point, but y’all can keep that whole marriage thing far away, thankyouverymuch) or play psychological games to try to “make” him do the things I think are appropriate and “manly” and I don’t pout or sulk or play the “helpless female” role and I choose my clothes based on comfort and pockets rather than fashion.
For the most part, I’ve either never gotten into the typical female things, or I’ve examined them and rejected them, along with a lot of other “normal” cultural values and behaviors, which leaves me kinda wondering where the hell I am in all of this. And annoyed that so many silly things (see: fascination with certain forms of carbon as the ideal expression of love or some crap like that) are attached to being a woman, and even other women I know who have similarly rejected a lot of the typical cultural crap still do some of the other stuff, so I feel like there’s some connection in my brain that never formed (see: cooing over infants, fascination with makeup and clothing).
” . . . Um?” seems like the most reasonable response possible to questions about what all those gender things mean.
Brilliant. Staying in your body is something that people should just, y’know, do, whether it’s in regard to gender or anything else.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, everyone, and for sharing your own experiences.
*snort*
I don’t think she wanted me to speak for all transsexuals. I think she just assumed that, as a transsexual, I’d probably given this a lot of thought (fair enough) and that I therefore had some valuable conclusions (not so much). It was just sort of surprising, since she had clearly given this a lot of thought, too. She wasn’t living an unexamined life by any means. Her confusion was a pretty good indication of her desire to interrogate all of these concepts.
I have encountered the belief that transsexuals are naturally more enlightened than, uhm, you people, but that theory has always been really vague. No one’s ever clarified what that special knowledge might be, which leads me to believe that it’s just mystification, sort of a reverse version of the freak blur that we’ve traditionally been saddled with. That and the fact that it’s demonstrably untrue; transsexuals have as much training in sexism as anyone else who grows up in patriarchy.
FINE. Be that way.
I’ve gone through some plastic surgery procedures to tighten up skin that didn’t quite follow the plan when I (had) lost weight, and it’s a pretty painful thing. Granted, I had my boobs lifted rather than removed entirely, but the physical pain is likely to be similar.
Get the good drugs. And Benadryl is your friend for post-procedure itching.
Whatever, hater. You know I’m an immortal two-spirit shaman on the inside.
I’ll be posting about this in greater detail, but I understand some of the procedures to be remarkably similar; basically, whether any given ftm surgery is more like a reduction or more like a mastectomy depends on the size and shape of the chest in question.
From what I’ve heard about all of the options, though…yeah, pretty much. The soreness is about the same.
Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. I’m so not looking forward to a week of no showers.
I think it’s wonderful that your housemate’s friend is interested in learning and trying to understand. More open minds would be a good thing. But it is frustrating that everyone starts the inquiry from the binary, the dichotomous, the black and white. Forgetting about haters for a moment, all who seek to learn — those who have put considerable thought into what it means to be man or woman just for the sake of understanding, and even those of us who question where we fit on the continuum — are saddled by these societal, cultural, political constructs. They are pounded into our heads from possibly even before birth. (One has to wonder what effect it may have on a gender formation when a mother fantasizes about buying little pink dresses and dollies for her yet unknown fetus; or when a father brings home a little baseball mitt and truck and shows it to the mother.)
The thing about these binaries, is that no matter how widely or closely spaced one tries to position them in the scope of examination, there remain infinitesimal spaces fitting in between. There simply cannot be enough words to describe the many variations in how a person can just BE in terms of gender. And that doesn’t even begin to address the other known, related issues, such as sexuality and affectation, or any of the other, yet to be discovered, aspects of personhood. If only we could back up and just accept what is, we will begin to see not to just the black and the white and the grey, but all of the true colors and beauty of Nature.
Good luck, Piny. I enjoy your posts and look forward to more.
[...] who Chris positions as the friendly squishy pacifists of the scary-looking-creature world. Feministe:Thoughts on Upcoming Surgery She was sort of aghast. Sh [...]
Best of luck.
I don’t really have a clue what makes ME (female-bodied, androgynous-minded) tick, genderwise and otherwise, despite much thinking about it. It is interesting to hear other people’s thoughts or pragmatic responses to move forward despite gaps in one’s mental map about gender.
I had breast reduction surgery two years ago because I was sick of having each breast the size of my head, and my spine was really suffering. Despite the pain, the relief I felt immediately at looking at my bandaged chest and not seeing the lumps of flesh I had come to loathe was profoundly exhilarating. I can only imagine that your sense of a burden lifting will be even more immense, piny, and I hope that you too will be exhilarated.
if you could somehow put that process – forgetting you are a transsexual – into some kind of easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, i’d be willing to pay a lot of money for it. and speaking as someone who has trouble forgetting, yeah, attempting to figuring it all out is a slow death. better than dying all at once though :)
Ah yes, the old “What do female and male really mean?” question. Hold on, I’ll get to that–right after I finish, “What is the meaning of life?”
By the way, I’m really happy for you, piny. I wish you a quick recovery with minimal discomfort. Sending warm, healing thoughts in your direction…
47.
Or, wait. Was it 42?
According to Douglas Adams, the answer is 42. :)
Wow, I can so relate to those words.
Society defines female and male in such narrow, unrealistic ways, that even cisgender women and men often feel like they do not fit the definitions. It’s not terribly surprising that the same issues affect trans people in ways that can be so shattering to the attempts we make at understanding ourselves. We often find ourselves trying to form a sense of self by adapting to a system that excluded us in the first place—a harrowing, if not impossible task.
It seems that analyzing gender is very much like looking at a jumbled nest of wires and trying to figure out which connection goes where. Once we toss aside the restrictive definitions that society lumps upon us, we find that the underlying reality is a confusing mess. We invest so much of ourselves in a system that is so convoluted and ill defined that no one can define it in a way that people agree on.
And yet, gender seems to lie so deeply at the core of people’s sense of who they are. It intertwines itself into the way we interact with other people, with ourselves—even with inanimate objects. Our personalities seem to construct themselves from so many flawed parts and yet, those parts are integral to who we are.
So, what choices do we have? We could grab some ready made, off the shelf definition of gender. That often winds up being ineffective and self-destructive, given the eons of oppression intertwined in those definitions. We could rummage around and cobble together our own personal definition of whatever gender we inhabit. We could just toss the whole notion of gender right out the window and say, “I’m neither male nor female. I’m just whatever I am.”
As a transwoman, option one never worked for me. I tried option three several years after I transitioned. In the process of doing so, I lost all connection with my self and other people—I felt numb, totally numb. Option three seems to work well for some people, though. It was a disaster for me. Personally, I’ve settled on option two. After a year or two of thinking of myself as neither female nor male, I realized that a part of myself felt a deep, deep connection with women and that I was suffering because that part of myself was… well… starving. So, pain and emptiness lead me back to seeing myself as a woman, in spite of my past.
I don’t know were this sense of connection comes from—maybe it’s all a product of social pressure, maybe it’s spiritual in nature, maybe it’s… just whatever it is. I’ve had to learn how to screen out what sounds like the voice of society and just listen to what my heart is telling me—to define myself for myself. It’s the only thing that seems to work for me. It’s so difficult to filter out the effects of culture and social pressure, though. Sometimes, listening for that inner voice is like finding a weak radio station in a sea of static.
I have a born woman friend whose build was short and heavily bosomed. She came to the conclusion about a decade back that she wasn’t about to birth children and she was tired of her posture problems caused by the frontage. She decided she didn’t want reduction, she wanted *flat*.
Well, you’d think she’d just declared she was going to kill and eat kittens every second Thursday. The cosmetic surgeon decreed she needed to see a psychiatrist who pressed her about hating her feminine self. She asked him, yes him, if he would be asking these things if it was a breast enlargement surgery, which left him sputtering.
Her male spousal unit was furious with the guy too for the not so hidden intimation she was cuckoo for wanting her breasts flattened for anything less than cancer. Ok, we were all pretty sniffed about it. Drastic enlargement good, drastic reduction bad? Talk aboutcher need for therapy. She demanded another psychiatrist with not quite so obvious enculturated problems (not quite her language), who then signed off on her as not being some keeerazy self mutilating amputation surgery whack head job (sadly, they do exist). She’s been a flat happy camper ever since.
Best wishes on your body sculpting. Hope it accomplishes the identity comfort you seek.
piny:
I’ve enjoyed your posts since I started lurking here. Always well thought out and well written, and sometimes damned amusing! :-) I’ve also *really* enjoyed your posts on transgender issues of all sorts — I am one of those woefully uninformed people (less uninformed now, thank you!) who would like to know more but really, really doesn’t want to offend anyone, even by ignorance. Your writing has informed and challenged me, given me a place to start looking for information and thinking about gender and all of its hairy questions, and I thank you for that. Really.
Best of luck with the surgery! I’ve never had anything like it, but a very good friend of mine went through breast reduction surgery a couple of years ago. The worst part of it for her was coming out of the anesthetic. They ended up keeping her overnight even though it was supposed to be day surgery. (!!! I have to admit, I never understood THAT theory!) So, if you are at all sensitive to anesthesia, be sure to tell your surgeon, your anesthesist (should you get to meet him/her), your nurse, and anyone else who will listen. And yeah, get the GOOD painkillers, even if you only use them to help you sleep. Keeping the nerves from getting overstimulated with the pain signals is a Very Good Thing.
I had a truly bizarre experience with shrinks who expected me to define gender before they would take my gender seriously.
“What does it mean to be a man or a woman?”
“Ummm, mostly the way people expect you to think and act.”
“Can’t people go against what other people expect?”
“Well, yes, but…. ummm…. I don’t know. My head is exploding now, and I feel like crap.”
And then, quite suddenly one day, “Why don’t you try living as male for a while and see what happens?”