In physical/geographic communities I belong to (mostly support groups) there is a lot less of a line dividing the genderqueers and TGs from the transsexual men.

Wow, you mean the internet polarizes people? Get out!

I didn’t mean to imply in the post that there’s an overriding disjunct, or that there’s no overlap. There seem, for example, to be a fair number of genderqueer-identified people who present as transitioned men, which doesn’t square with the dichotomy at all. There are also plenty of ftms who either don’t care or whose reservations are not disrespectful. Even online, the two groups often get along okay. I can see how my phrasing might have implied otherwise.

That article was pretty silly, and frankly, I don’t take Buck Angel to be an expert on anything and really wish he hadn’t become the go-to trans man.

It did seem pretty unfair to the woman involved–I think that some of her quotes (for example, referring to a procedure that transmen rather than women with breast cancer undergo as “basically” top surgery for transpeople) were misconstrued by the authors.

I…yeah. I have no beef with his occupation, and if he thinks of that as more responsible than top surgery parties, that’s his right. I don’t think porn is any more universal an option than a burlesque benefit, though.

How does one become a go-to tranny? Are there forms to fill out?

I have said before and will say again that the gay community seems to have its own “gender police” who try to make other peoples’ gender identities correspond with stereotypes about groups in the community. I have faced problems as a feminine lesbian who didn’t change her gender identity to correspond with how lesbians are supposed to behave, but my problems around other gay people dwarf in comparison to how people who upset the gender binary often get treated in both the gay community and outside world. People who don’t encounter problems living their genders in their daily lives don’t seem to have a very good idea of what gender means. I didn’t until I came out and discovered that my gender didn’t correspond to the gender that some people expected me to have.

I know people who are genderqueer and have decided not to take hormones or modify their bodies to pass as one gender or the other (there should be more than two genders; there are certainly more than two ways of living gender) or who have decided to use minimal surgical modifications. I have a good friend who is genderqueer. He identifies more strongly with women than men but has no desire to modify his body to become a woman and still uses male pronouns although he doesn’t identify as entirely male. The interesting thing is that these people who I know who have chosen not to transition per say but are still very much genderqueer get strange looks and questions from other people in the lgbtq community precisely because they violate the gender binary. Ideas about sexual orientation seem to be more advanced in our society right now than ideas about gender.

Genderqueer people are hardly the only ones whose projects are derogated by invocations of the specter of regret. Non-genderqueer transsexuals, along with most of the people I know, are also told “you’ll regret it.”

KH: there was a documentary called Boy I Am, where there was an allegedly feminist debate between cisgender lesbian feminists and transmen (whose feminist ideas weren’t specified) and it all turned into this discussion about how every young woman would take T if she was offered it, because no young woman is ok with her body, and even some transmen said it’s a good thing that they’ve had to fight so long to acquire T, because now they’re certain they want it. That’s such a load of crap! If I need a baby-sitter to tell me when I’m a real man or a real woman and am allowed to take the respective hormones, then fine. Why should I impose this on other people who are much more devoted to their transgender identities?

Thankfully, dean spade was in the documentary and set everything straight, so to speak, but again. How ingrained is our fear of “regret” and how long have we been told that you only get one chance (if that) at setting your body/gender right.

think that the charge of immaturity directed at genderqueer people can be a result of this social understanding of gender. Children are androgynous.

That was so illuminating. People do seem to think that after you’ve been flooded by your sex’s hormones during puberty you have no excuse to behave in a cross-gendered way. This stems from biologism again…

Also, the “you’re confused, and we already tolerated you transitioning once, we’re not giving you a second chance” attitude is intolerant from the very first word. Although transitioning takes a lot out of you even if you only do it once, that’s your problem to deal with, not anyone else’s. Being at ease with one’s gender *should* be given as many chances as one needs. Being happy with one’s gender isn’t at all self-evident, and us transpeople who do manage to fit snugly in one of the two genders are certainly privileged.

Finally, in this link about binding, I found a piece of advice about passing that is also my personal experience:

I love the fact that people don’t even stick to their own ideas about what a male/female appearance really is. “Hmm you look like a man with inexplicable breasts, so I will arbitrarily assume you’re a man.” Funny how it works, isn’t it?

In my experience, too, the distinction between ‘TS’ and ‘GQ’ is much, much less defined. I think it’s pretty important to honour the self-knowledge required by anyone who decides to transform hir body. Many of the genderqueer people I know who desire to embody a plce between or outside gender binaries think intensely, and for a long time, about how to get surgery, whether to have it, whether to take T, what other options are available. They feel pressure to fall on one side of the line, too; particularly in trans communities where there is a real pressure to prove you’re serious by taking T forever and having all the surgeries it’s possible to have. Those people I know who aren’t transitioning towards an endpoint will never have the comfort of reaching that point, coming to rest; they will always have to be making a decision.

Personally, I appear to have ‘transitioned’ fully, or something — I’m on T and have had top surgery, with no intentions of stopping T. I like my body the way it is, but I still don’t feel like I want to be a man. And in terms of my thinking, I’m much more on the ‘genderqueer’ than ‘transsexual’ side. But transmasculine genderqueer friends have said that they feel ‘not enough’ next to me, or fearful that I’ll judge them because they aren’t doing the same thing. This is why it’s so important that fully-transitioning people don’t take on that position of ‘transsexual authority’ in relation to people making different choices. We all want similar things — a way to live in the world with bodies we can love.

That article was pretty silly, and frankly, I don’t take Buck Angel to be an expert on anything and really wish he hadn’t become the go-to trans man.

If someone wants chest reconstruction simply because they are uncomfortable with their breasts–that’s good enough for me. Certainly breast implants take less consideration in society than that.

In physical/geographic communities I belong to (mostly support groups) there is a lot less of a line dividing the genderqueers and TGs from the transsexual men.

I guess that’s all I have to say.

(The philosophical & decision-theoretic literatures have a theory of regret, should anyone be interested in the implications of the concept.)

Terrible at this linking thing, but hte article is called “Bye, Bye, Boobies”

You’ve given me so much more to think about!