Category: gender

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College-Aged Genders

And the NYT does yet another piece on gender and specifically, this time, on how college-age students are opting out of gender:

Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.

“You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”

P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”

I’ve generally seen and heard PPP more often (preferred personal pronoun) but whatever: liberation from gender, either way.

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One of Everything

Another amazing story out of India: a man’s stomach complaints turn out to be a uterus & ovaries. Imagine going into a hospital as a man with abdominal pains and winding up having a hysterectomy.

“The external reproductive organs of the patient were masculine and he has no problems whatsoever with his sexuality. He had functional male genitals and there was no formation of breasts in the patient. It’s an embryological accident at the time of embryonic formation,” he said.

The patient, who was said to be as “stunned” as his doctors at the discovery, is recovering in hospital and is being supported by his family.

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? I had a doctor tell me once about a patient who had terrible acid reflux, and it turned out his stomach was backwards, so that the shallow end of it was at the end of the esophagus.

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‘Realness’ as Reality

‘Realness’ may be a ball contest category, but when it turns into a litmus test, it’s a bullying stick.

Tobi Hill Meyer has pulled together a list of what it means to be a “real” transsexual woman. Here are a few:

You’re not a real transsexual woman if you transitioned after 45 (or 35, or 25, or 18 depending on who you ask)
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you ascribe to feminist gender deconstruction theory
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you buy clothes in the men’s department
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you don’t have a GI/GID diagnosis or can’t afford the process to get one
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you are caught without makeup on
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have facial or body hair that you don’t shave
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have facial or body hair that you have to shave
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you don’t wear dresses and skirts all the time
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you never crossdressed before transitioning
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have ever identified as a crossdresser
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you become sexually aroused while wearing women’s clothing
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have sex with men
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have sex with women
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you are not sexually available to men
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have sex using a strap on
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have sex
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you allow yourself to be seen naked before vaginoplasty or with anything others might consider a penis
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have ever done sex work
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you haven’t considered suicide
You’re not a real transsexual woman unless your only alternative to transition is suicide
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you’re still attending Southern Comfort
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you didn’t keep up with your dilation
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you are not stealth
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you are stealth
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you’ve been to camp trans
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you perform as a drag king
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you have ever performed as a drag queen
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you ever pee standing up
You’re not a real transsexual woman if you play sports (no exceptions for being on the women’s rugby team, but maybe for softball)

She points out that most cis women wouldn’t pass these tests, even the ones that aren’t trans specific. One of the things I feel like I say over & over again is that all women, trans and non-trans, can fail the test called “woman”. Plenty of us do on a regular basis.  Obviously her comments come out of this whole transgender/transsexual argument, which tires me.

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Turning Girls Into Boys?

Okay, here’s some odd news:

Girls are being ‘converted’ into boys in Indore – by the hundreds every year – at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation. This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty.

The whole article is here.

I don’t understand how this could even be possible, to be honest, since genital surgery for FTMs is notoriously difficult and expensive.

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Tweet O Gender

Here’s some new bullshit. There’s a new website called tweetolife that, according to its tagline, is “the science of human life in Twitter messages”. Oh boy. The idea is that you can put in phrases & find out how men & women use them. So you might come up with results that when men use the word “suck” it’s often accompanied by, say, “Favre” and when women, or teenaged girls, use “suck” it’s more often with “Bieber”.

So what’s my problem? In the About section, they explain:

We analyzed millions of tweets collected by researchers from the University of Edinburgh between November 2009 and February 2010. For gender differences, we separated the tweets into two subsets as male and female tweets by using the first names of the Twitter users.

So now we can come up with amazing data on the differences between male & female tweeters, right?

Um, no. For starters, (1) I’d like to know where they put Chris, Pat, and Alex. I assume they (2) weeded out any Twitter feeds from groups or organizations, since who is actually doing the tweeting is variable. Then, too, there’s probably (3) a shared computer or 2 (hundred thousand) out there, which means at least a few people are tweeting as people they are not. Plus there are all the (4) intentional gender switches, (5) the genderless/multiply-gendered people who don’t have an option that describes their genders, the (6) emerging trans people who are “trying on” their new gender online first, the (7) guys trying to hit on women by pretending to be women online, (8) the women using male IDs to avoid the detection of said men, etc. etc.

Someone may know you’re a dog, but no one knows if you’re male or female on the internets.

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Global Gender Diversity Map

PBS has put together an interactive map of third gender traditions from all over the world for the new documentary “Two Spirits”. Their blurb:

On nearly every continent, and for all of recorded history, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders. Terms such as transgender and gay are strictly new constructs that assume three things: that there are only two sexes (male/female), as many as two sexualities (gay/straight), and only two genders (man/woman).

Yet hundreds of distinct societies around the globe have their own long-established traditions for third, fourth, fifth, or more genders. Fred Martinez, for example, was not a boy who wanted to be a girl, but both a boy and a girl — an identity his Navajo culture recognized and revered as nádleehí. Most Western societies have no direct correlation for this Native “two-spirit” tradition, nor for the many other communities without strict either/or conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender. Worldwide, the sheer variety of gender expression is almost limitless. Take a tour and learn how other cultures see gender diversity.

Very cool stuff indeed.

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More Sissy Boys

The CNN Anderson Cooper special on “The Sissy Boy Experiment” continues to inspire blog posts in both the gay and trans blogosphere.

At Joe.My.God, an open thread features hundreds of comments from gay men about their gender non-conformity of childhood.

Meanwhile, on Mercedes Allen’s blog, Marti Abernathy clarifies that in fact, Ken Zucker of CAMH is still conducting reparative therapy on gender non-conforming children.

I highly recommend Rottnek’s Sissies & Tomboys for further reading on gender non-conformity and GIDc.

More soon too on the complicated interplay of transphobia, homophobia, & (what I like to call) gender panic.

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“Herbivore” Men

It’s something akin to metrosexualism, but in Japan, there is a male gender called “herbivore men”. The term was coined based on the play between “flesh” and “sex” and “meat”.

Author and pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa coined the term in 2006 in a series of articles on marketing to a younger generation of Japanese men. She used it to describe some men who she said were changing the country’s ideas about just what is — and isn’t — masculine.

“In Japan, sex is translated as ‘relationship in flesh,'” she said, “so I named those boys ‘herbivorous boys’ since they are not interested in flesh.”

We might use the term effete in English, but that might be a mistake because this term isn’t about men being feminine per se — it’s about them being less sexual, less lustful, or maybe even asexual. I’m sure it varies greatly depending on the “herbivorous” man in question.

There has always been a connection between meat-eating and passion, of course, as Graham well knew when he created Graham crackers – the intent of which was to curb lustfulness – but as someone who has recently returned to vegetarianism, I find the equation of sexless and meatless a little ridiculous, along the lines of thinking rhino’s horn will embolden erections.

In that same CNN article, the author also notes:

Typically, “herbivore men” are in their 20s and 30s, and believe that friendship without sex can exist between men and women, Fukasawa said.

Aside from the obvious heterosexism of that idea (assuming all men desire women, & vice versa) thats the When Harry Met Sally thesis all over again, isn’t it? It makes me tired.

I am very interested in separating out the various threads in this mishmosh of ideas. On the one side we’ve got desire, meat-eating, & masculinity; on the other, asexuality/low libido, vegetarianism, & femininity.

Which makes my brain go in about a million directions at once: yes, we could use more monkish men in the world, absolutely. But also: the whole dislike of virility/violence/masculinity kind of pisses me off, too.

Discuss.