information addict

If you were to try to decide what qualifies a person as male or female, what quality would you choose?

I can think of eight candidates:

1. Identity (whatever the person says they are, they are)
2. Sexual orientation (boys dig girls, vice versa)
3. Secondary sex characteristics (e.g., boobs/no boobs, pubic hair patterns, distribution of fat on the body)
4. External genitalia (e.g., clitoris, labia, vaginal opening/penis and scrotum)
5. Internal genitalia (e.g., vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes/epididymis, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate, etc)
6. Hormones (preponderance of estrogens/androgens)
7. Gonads (ovaries/testes)
8. Chromosomes (XX/XY, the SRY gene)

[…]

If these criteria don’t always line up, then we have to pick one as THE determinant of sex.  But any choice would ultimately be arbitrary.  The truth is that none of these criteria could ever actually definitively qualify a person as male or female.

The alternative would be to require that a person qualify as male or female according to ALL of the criteria.  And you might be surprised, then, how many people are neither male or female.

purpleprimate:

My second tumblr blog.

awesome.

The notes on my story consisted of two full single-spaced pages of text. It was savage. Among the first comments this editor (and I do not know who he or she is) offered: “It’s quite a challenge for a writer of one sex to explore writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. Bev Vincent has not done a convincing job.”

The protagonist in my story is a man.

I’ll sit here for a few seconds while that sinks in.

Me, the guy who’s pictured above, failed to do a convincing job of writing from the perspective of a man.

(emphasis mine)

This story is incredible. The author was told that his story was “too personal, introspective and emotional” to be written from a man’s perspective—all because the editor thought the author was a woman. (via hollyblack on Twitter)

abbyjean:

I hate it, every single time.  Name, sorted.  Then…  clunk.  Sex – M or F.  Sod. It seems like an easy question, right?  For most people it is.  For me, it should be an easy question.  I live and identify unequivocally as female.   I’m not a genderqueer person for whom the very either/or question is wrong.  So why the rising sense of panic? The problem is this, my birth certificate says I am male, my gender presentation is female.  They do not match.  Until I can afford expensive genital surgery, I cannot change the marker on my birth certificate.  No matter what I put, in a cissexist world, I am situated as a liar.

A small example:  Imagine you went to the hospital, with stroke-like symptoms (it was later found to be “complicated migraines”).  Because you want to actually be treated, you do not out yourself as transsexual.  When the triage nurse filled in the forms, he puts female, and you leave it there.  All is fine, the doctor for once treats you seriously, possibly because of the presence of your mum, aunt and cousin (quick lesson you learn when dealing with doctors while trans: there’s safety in cis scrutiny.  Bring your mum or your partner with you into the examination room).

Fast forward to a week later, and I’m (sorry, you) at a neurology department to see a specialist to organize an MRI, when one of the reception people comes out to see you and starts screaming that you’re a GODDAMN LIAR because your forms say I’m female but some quirk of the computer system has found your birthdate and surname and pinged up an old treatment from when you were six.  Because of this, they decide that your name isn’t real either, and it takes three trips to different departments with your changed birth certificate (changed in name but not in sex).  In the end, they put a post-it on your file, with your name, your legal bloody name, in quotation marks like it’s a fucking nickname.  And these are the people who are supposed to help you.

Now imagine what happens in an emergency situation. Imagine you’re me, six months before this, and you’re young and naïve and full of stupid, figuring that putting M will help them you treat you better (ha!), checking yourself in to see a doctor because you’re struggling to breathe.   And the dude takes one look at your forms and your barely passing self, and refuses to enter the room.  He just stands there at the edge, asking you to holler symptoms at him, and you sit there knowing that if you collapse, this man will pause and debate whether to save you or not.  This is what happens when forms, bodies and cis prejudice collide.

Now imagine what you do in a Customs line when you enter a country.  Imagine you’ve heard from acquaintances who’ve been turned away by the US, or that worst-case-scenario lurking at the back of your head about Homeland Security issuing a memo about “cross-dressed terrorists.”  What do you put then?  What do you wear then?  How do you present?

Imagine how vulnerable you feel.  Driving (what if a cop pulls me over).  At the bank (what if they think I’m trying to scam my own money).  At the doctors.  At school.  At work.  At anywhere they want a piece of ID, anywhere they want you to tick a box that divides humanity into two.   Anywhere they want you to fill out a form.  Confess, little tranny girl, confess.  Tell them what in their minds what you “really” are.  Or else.  And they’ll get you anyway.

robot-heart-politics:

needtherapy:

Parents of children born with an ambiguous gender often beg doctors to let them choose one gender or another. Now, in Sweden, a couple has decided to raise their now 2-year-old with no gender. Of course, the kid has one, but they won’t tell anyone what it is. They dress the kid in any old colors. When they change the diaper, they hide its parts. The kid’s name is Pop. “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother told a Swedish newspaper. “It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

I’m not sure about this.  It’s one thing to decide to be androgynous as an adult.  It’s quite another thing to force it on a child, who very well might be a little boy who loves the color blue and playing with Tonka trucks.  Forcing a child into a gender-free identity doesn’t seem any different than forcing it into a male or female identity.

But what are they forcing on the child? At two, a child isn’t really self-selecting. Most children at two are given either/or options. You can wear this or that. You can play with this or that. You can do this or that. Too many options can cause meltdown for most two-year-olds. Two year olds rarely dress themselves, buy their own toys, or really make any decisions for themselves, at least none we’d really trust them to make on their own. So let’s stop trying to argue we’re uncomfortable with this situation because we’re talking about a child who desperately wants tonka trucks or Barbie dolls, but his/her parents won’t let him/her play with one or the other because they are trying so hard to make the child gender-neutral. That isn’t what is going on here.

If anything, other children are the ones being forced into gender-specific clothes and toys. We give two year old girls two options: you can wear the pink or the purple shirt, you can play with the Barbie or the baby doll. We give two year old boys two options: you can wear the blue or the green shirt, you can play with trucks or action figures. Even children who are born with ambiguous genitalia are often forced into a specific sex, usually through “corrective” surgery, just so that we can give them a gender and sigh with relief that they are finally “fixed.” Where’s the choice in that? And how do we know that little boys aren’t picking the tonka trucks just because Mommy and Daddy have been handing them tonka trucks since they were old enough to pick them up?

In all seriousness, one day little Pop will end up being potty trained, and little Pop will realize he/she has genitalia. And just like every other kid who ever took a bath with another kid with different private parts, Pop will also realize he/she has a sex. (That is a sex, not a gender, btw.) Pop will probably start picking up on gender cues and will probably realize that those gender cues are tied to genitalia and will probably start mirroring gender it sees in other people like him or her and will some day actually start self-selecting gender. Of course, I hope whatever gender little Pop decides to start mirroring, his or her parents are more supportive of that choice than those parents with “sissy” boys who play with dolls or want to take ballet classes, but who repeatedly force their sons into activities they don’t like because they aren’t being “men,” or those parents with “tom boys” who try to force their daughters into bows and Barbie dolls because that’s what little girls are made of. Either way, though, that’s not happening now.

So. Can we please, PLEASE, lose the meme that we’re upset with this situation because Mommy and Daddy are depriving this child of something he/she desperately wants? Because they aren’t. We are upset with this situation because we don’t know how to deal with a world in which gender isn’t being proscribed and performed starting practically at birth, so that we know exactly how to think of people and know exactly where they belong in the world before we even know them. For all those grown-ups who have been raised in a gendered society and who are fumbling for the appropriate compliments (handsome or pretty? strong or sweet?), who don’t know whether to refer to Pop as he or she, who don’t know what toys to buy for Pop and who don’t know whether Pop should be invited to a little girl’s birthday party (replete with pink balloons and Disney Princess paper plates) or a little boy’s birthday party (replete with blue icing and trains on the cups), yes, this is a very uncomfortable situation. For Pop, though, this is just the way things are, and maybe Pop is luckier for not knowing that one’s gender, personality, interests, etc. are all supposed to be decided before one even takes its first full breath in the world.

Word.

At first I didn’t know what to do, so I took a half-step back; I shared my experiences with those parents who had tried to therapize this behavior out of their kids. They tried behavior modification. They saw specialists. Pretty much nobody gets to this place, of researching, understanding, tolerating and then accepting, this behavior, until they’re forced to.

Behavior modifcation, for the parents I spoke with, didn’t work. Their kids got worse. Hysterical, screaming, self-mulitating, seven-year-old-talking-about-suicide worse.

More and more therapists are giving up on trying to extinguish this behavior, not because they are intimidated by the GLTBQ agenda, but because the treatment simply doesn’t work. And procedures you perform over and over again that don’t work are called malpractice. Suppression seem to harm many of these children. They report higher incidences of stress, self destructive impulses. Suicides. Yes, there are studies. Even with the stress of living in a world which rejects them, as you do, they are happier fighting that battle than suppressing this part of what they are.

Read the whole thing. Seriously.