Transgender people: do you know/have you met any?

I met a pre-op once. She had a very firm, strong grip, and was quite muscular, which was the only thing that gave it away, as she was otherwise convincing.

i have met at least four, friends/acquaintances of a couple of my ex gfs.

(two were a couple)

Close friend of mine is pre-op, post hormonal treatment at the mo, she was gonna get the surgery this year but has had to put it off for work reasons.

Work with a post op woman back in another helpdesk job, she was a scary Amazon lady but very nice.

Know a couple others online, too. Well, Bimble was one for starters of course.

One of my coworkers, who I have known since I started the job in 1997.

My good friend Elena from college (now Alex) is, I believe, doing hormone therapy at the moment, as is my bestie's friend Saucy (her full name is S4ucy Le0n, how amazing is this?)

The friend I've known longest in Seattle is FTM, as are two others of my knitting group. And several of my daughter's friends. I don't really know any MTF women though.

I had a student who told me she was after class one day, just dropped it casually –– I don't even remember what the context was. I felt...trusted? Did help explain why she was like 6'4" tho.

I did have a long chat with a transwoman who did a tarot reading for me in Balboa park once. It was miserably hot and her foundation was running so we talked about how miserable it is to wear makeup all over your face, and nylons, after she predicted I'd do great in my new job and leave my husband.

Not to my knowledge (sounding just like a politician). I feel like Mrs. C. on Happy Days: "Oh, Howard, I've just got to get out of the house more often."

I've known tons of drag queens and trannies in the more "club kid" mode, but I've only known a few people that I would regard as genuinely transgender (as in they transitioned and took on new names/identities). When I think about it, I've known one M-to-F and one F-to-M.

The close friend of mine who's trans, I've known for years and as much of that as a bloke - beard and all - as the woman she now passes as. And I still find a dissonance about it! The he/she thing and the name change, it not that I havent accepted her change its just what I got used to earlier!

one of my friends is one of the highest elected (or THE highest elected) trans gendered people on the planet.

i had a room mate for a year who was going through a F to M transition

You mean highest elected in politics?

a girl i knew in elementary school has fully transitioned to male, i think. she kissed me on the cheek in first grade.

other than that...i think one of the people i regularly encounter during my volunteer work is MTF, she has "masculine" traits and is verrrry tall

haha yeah in politics. she's on the state board of education. i heard that some time through her first term, some tranny mighht have been elected to italian parliament or something tho

afaict i haven't although i like to think that i have met many who have just had terrific surgeons and i've not thought it a big enough part of a person's personality to see what type of giggly bits they have.

not to my knowledge

Well, Bimble was one for starters of course.

― Cyclone Yazoo (Trayce), Monday, 7 February 2011 04:59 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Didn't know this

Yeah he was a F2M trans. It came up a few times but he didnt make a song and dance about it much.

oh right.

I have known a couple of M2F's it's something that I can't 'understand' but that's because it's not me, and obv don't have a 'problem' if someone else is.

i think we shouldn't really end this thread without a mammoth argument about the semantics of the thing

What are the semantics? Like, you identify as tg or you dont.

i used to hang with these Oberlin and Hampshire grads that were just like art fag girls who werent taking hormones, still had boobs, even wore their hair in a female way but would politely request you refer to them as male, it was a little confusing but i got over it

I've had two transgender work colleagues and have met a couple of other transgender folks in a work capacity in a previous job.

Oberlin™

there was a M2F at one of my old workplaces. When she came back post-op they held a big drinks do in the canteen and the director gave a speech which began "This is P, doesn't she look beautiful?"

There was a quite burly M2F in one of the bands that used to practice in the studio I work in, tattoed Polish metalcore types would sidle away from her in the corridor with looks of horror on their faces.

OK, this is the thread for this story I guess...

The place I used to work at had a M2F transgender who was aiming for the physical change, i.e. surgery. To be able to get this, you have to live as a woman for two years, so this was about to begin. His close friends were being supportive, but the controversy level was high as he was married with two children, but his wife was standing by him, etc.

There was lots of conversation, a lot of pro- and anti- whispering, as you can imagine. The story went round that one of the senior managers had gone to Human Resources and asked, friendly-like, if the person could be fired for doing this? The reply came that not only could he not get fired, but the senior manager could get fired himself under sex discrimination laws. To which the SM obviously indicated that he didn't want him fired, but etc..

So, as you can imagine, there was a lot of tension in the air. My position, as I said upthread, is that I didn't really 'understand' why someone would need to make such a change that required moderating their behaviour for the rest of their life, talking to one of the girls that knew him well, I added that all the things she does (walking, picking up a knife and fork, scratching yr ear) doesn't have to be done ina qualified manner. But, you know, whatever.

Anyway, one thursday there was a big general staff meeting, around 50 people there, (not the M2f person), and the department manager (not the same guy that had gone to HR, but one of those that had not exactly been going "oh good" about it all)described how the person would be officially leaving the company as a man on Friday, returning in two weeks time as a woman in the same job position after that date. There was a lot of describing of the two-years of living rule, that after that time he would be allowed to have the surgery, that he would no longer be wearing (admittedly feminine styled) trouser-suits but actual dresses, that there would be NO anti-vibe around this person, that they would be using the disabled toilet, and so on.

So, anyway, I had had a thought. Toing and froing about this one, the right words, the right order.. Was it ofensive? Would I get immediately sacked? Or would it be taken in the spirit? dot dot dot

So, after around ten minutes of the GM's 'speech', he said "Right, if you have any questions, now would be the best time to ask."

To which I asked "OK, does this mean he's having a leaving drink on Friday then?"

At which point the whole place cracks up, the tension dissipated, and the GM, close to crying, said "ah... I dunno, you'll have to ask him that one"

Lots of people came up to me afterwards, both pro- and anti-, smiling and thanking me for saying that.

And, of course, as a funny line I know I can never top that.

Mark that is a fucking awesome story and good on you :)

As far as I know, I have never met a transgender person.

I have relatively unprogressive opinions on this topic, but I was struck by the rubbishness of a shock horror expose in an Irish tabloid last week, which was of the level of "Sex Change Person Has Job".

I didn't know about Bimble until like 2 months before he died, he was drunk and said it (in chatz) and of course I & whoever else was there didn't believe him. I mentioned it the next day to KJB and i still wasn't sure if he was in on the joke when he confirmed it was true, but he was of course telling the truth. He never spoke about it really after than other than him saying his mum had paid for an op and that he had been engaged when younger.

I have a few acquaintances/friends-of-friends. Kind of surprised I don't know more now I live in the radical queer capital of Britain.

Although I still find it unusual (as in uncommon enough to be interesting, rather than 'ooh strange', I guess), I got my head around the idea relatively young, as my mum was friends with a formerly-lesbian couple one of whom went FTM when I was growing up.

I've known several few TG folks in my life, which I guess isn't surprising considering that I've hung with queer activists, anarchafeminists, etc ever since I was a teen. No transgendered folks among my closest friends though.

"several few" = "quite a few"

I have some transgender customers at work.

Someone very close to me has occupied various points on the queer spectrum for much of the time I've known them. I knew that they i.d.'d as transgender for a while. They hadn't had an operation or even begun using hormones, but they dressed in the different gender role and were in a relationship with someone who had.

One day, they told me that they were considering getting surgery. I let them know that I supported them and loved them, but that it scared me that they were considering doing it. Being operated on is very, very serious. I feel that it probably should not be done unless your life is in danger because when you go under the knife, even in a relatively routine procedure, you are putting your life in danger. You can get a life-threatening nosocomial infection or they can fuck up your anaesthesia or a number of other things. Plastic surgery killed Kanye's mom, to cite a high-profile example. This is something that I believe deep in my heart and it would destroy me to lose this person.

Anyways, the person never did get surgery or take hormones and we're still close. They seem to be doing reasonably well, emotionally. I haven't talked to them about their desire to be transgendered since then, but I worry because I know that obviously that desire is a serious, serious thing too. I don't know how much my discussion with them factored into their decision - probably quite a lot. I hope that it didn't hurt them too much. ;_;

i have got one FTM acquaintance

Well, Jayne/Wayne County is commonly regarded as post-op, but (unless things changed recently) that never happened.

Apparently, the psychiatrist had advised J/WC never to do this as there was a strong chance of suicidal depression.

my wife's undergrad major advisor transitioned (M2F) after she graduated and we ended up reading about it in the NY Post. Also, I don't know to what extent this is relevant but there was a synagogue my family went to once in awhile when I was growing up and one of the regular congregants there was an open transvestite who wore high heels, skirts and carried purses to synagogue. not sure what gender he identified as tho.

a friend of a friend is a transgender woman-who-became-a-man who then had a baby (afaict the same thing as the 'pregnant man' who got all the press a couple years ago but this was before that and i always kinda assumed the guy that went on Oprah was just a media whore making a big deal out of something other people had done before more quietly?), have made small talk several times at parties but i don't know if that makes them an acquaintance (option 1) or just someone i have met (option 2).

The only trans person I have ever known - rather than noticed in passing etc - was an MTF neighbour who had the op 20 years before I met her. D was a sex worker and had been to prison for clipping; the other measure of her as a person was that she'd dated someone in EastEnders and went to the tabloids to get paid for 'TRANNY LOVE OF ENDERS BLOKE' and stuck the proceeds up her nose/in a pipe. Still, even though she is hands down one of the shittiest people I've ever met, I walked by her door one day to hear her trying to ring her mother, who would not speak to her. It was really sad.

had been to prison for clipping

gotta love the uk justice system...

What is clipping in this instance? I'd assume from '...was a sex worker' it's some form of prostitution, but am unsure.

Clipping is slang for the cheat when a prostitute takes a client's money, but does not supply sex.

suzy that story is [funny but] extremely sad! sounds like she was a shitty person with a shittier life.

'funny' here mostly referring to the tabloids thing

I felt really guilty for thinking her life was just a series of bad choices punctuated by the lighting of cigarettes, but then she'd bust out some ridiculous bigoted speech about immigrants or someone else who wasn't entitled to benefits and I'd be silently judging along the lines of 'LOL you hypocritical crack-whore.'

there's a young woman in a discussion group w me who started transitioning recently iirc. It seems like she's already kind of fed up with having to have the "so btw i am a girl" conversation, and indeed with strangers asking 'are you a boy or a girl' out of the blue (which i have seen people do, which, wow, so rude). She's not a very high-heels-and-make-up kind of person, though she does wear skirts sometimes, and her name's quite gender neutral but has a feminine spelling. I sort of want to double-check i'm using the right pronoun (ask whether genderqueer or mtf, i guess) but it feels like... doing something i know is annoying, just for the sake of neatening out my own mental categories. so, idk!

About five years ago I met a tiny little butch lesbian Korean powerhouse named Jean. She was my roommate at the time's best friend and practically lived with us she was over so much. We became close and she was just great. At that point she was pretty content being a girl although she often mentioned wishing she could have her breasts removed and would tape them down regularly. Anyway, everyone that knew her loved her. After a year, I moved into my own place and Jean moved to NY and we weren't in touch as often as we should have been. About a year and half ago I got a call from my old roommate at 7:30 in the morning that Jean had been hit by a car and killed right outside her place in Brooklyn. It was awful. After her death I learned that she'd decided to transition and was about 6 months into the process and taking hormones. She had even started a really well-written and interesting blog on the subject. She had a girlfriend and was apparently the happiest she'd ever been. I still miss her.

:(

Also, I knew about Bimble for a long time before he passed. There must have been some thread where I mentioned some research I'd done on intersex individuals that he found interesting. He IMd me one night and started talking about that and told me he was FtM. After that I think he felt like he could talk to me about it because he would often do so especially when he was having troubles.

I have only met one once so far as I know - there may well be dozens as I am not a particularly observant type around people.

Anyway, this one appeared as a particularly flamboyant woman - all leopard prints, bright lipstick and so forth - in an otherwise very sober meeting. She was also being very loud, scatty and indiscreet, so once I twigged the effect was totally drag-queenie. Certainly the ladies were all giggling along naughtily at her conversation.

I say 'twigged', but actually she announced in a very loud voice that she was transsexual, which was at least partly on-topic in the conversation. The really funny thing was that as she talked about this she continually kept tripping up and had to correct herself to 'transgender', which made me wonder who exactly the more pc terms are meant for.

bashful people who blush at the syllable "sex"?

the only one I really knew was Bimble; there was a professor I think at Spring Arbor University (Free Methodist university I went to for a year) who was MtF, but he didn't get the surgery done til after I had left; I don't think I ever knew who he was...

I know a few. I've met many.

have worked with several over the years, but that's about it

Well, Bimble was one for starters of course.

whoah I did know this.

:(

My position, as I said upthread, is that I didn't really 'understand' why someone would need to make such a change that required moderating their behaviour for the rest of their life, talking to one of the girls that knew him well, I added that all the things she does (walking, picking up a knife and fork, scratching yr ear) doesn't have to be done ina qualified manner.

from the little i know about the subject, i think it is actually just the opposite - transitioning to the gender they most identify with means they can ~stop~ having to self-consciously moderate many of their behaviours.

anyone seen Prodigal Son? very interesting doc about a M2F, but actually ends up being more about her brother.

amy bloom also has a really interested book on this: Normal

*interesting

I have some odds and ends of books that I pick up just around, and one called Transgender Warriors was and has been really fascinating to me. Favorable review here.

from the little i know about the subject, i think it is actually just the opposite

I was basing that on hearing that people do go to 'feminising' classes, to learn walking/wine-glass holding, speaking, etc...

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but.

A guy who used to work where I work transitioned after he left here (he had come in for some consulting work a couple times so I had met him as a man). He dropped in again once after this, I guess in the "living as a woman" phase and I didn't recognize her; pretty passable as a woman. Later got the surgery and moved to the Bay area. And someone said she was living with another M2F.

I know a couple of M2F transgender people. One of them I knew for 3 years before she mentioned this fact, and I almost fell off my chair with surprise.

Normal they have at my public library, I just put it on reserve. They do not have the one Laurel recc'd but it sounds interesting too.

I read a book called Born A Boy, Raised A Girl about David Reimer (orig article the book developed into here). Reimer's physchologist/doctor was a guy named John Money, who I guess was orig a big leading supporter of transppl & research abt transppl. HE...he is a man I would like to figure out.

I know a few. I've met many.

I'm surprised at the number of people who say they have worked with transgendered people. Those who worked with transgendered people, what were your/their jobs? (I mean, I know transgendered people have jobs with other people, so I don't know why I should be surprised. Maybe b/c I've held quite a few jobs but I'm as sure as possible that I have never worked with a TG person. Closest would be a guy I waited tables with who lived as a transvestite for a couple of years while he was prostituting, but I don't think he identified as a woman.)

I have known one TG person, a MTF who was in a couple of my college classes.

Im in IT. You don't see the public working on a helpdesk, so.

(also, ISP work is heavily skewed with nerd/alt lifestyle types anyway quite often)

My mom had a friend who was also a coworker of mine at one point who has since decided he identifies as a woman. I haven't really seen him since the change. It was sort of surprising though, because (1) he didn't come off as feminine at all and (2) he was just physically very unwomanlike and probably does not make the greatest looking woman -- he was sort of stout with a bald head and a turtlish face. He also seemed happy and funny and well-adjusted when I worked with him. One never knows, do one.

The person I mentioned is a software engineer, quite smart (Caltech graduate). I didn't pick up on any feminine characteristics the 2 or 3 times I was around him before the change. In fact, when a coworker told me i had to have her repeat it because I was sure I had misunderstood her.

The only one I know of, and not peronsally, is the author Poppy Z Brite, who I was a huge fan of in college and met a couple of times. Recently I learned through twitter that Brite now identifies as male and goes by Doc. But harder to do that because though she always had a big lgbt following, the early celebrity has made it hard for her to transition from she to he. It's interesting to me ...and a brave step, because you are really inviting people to know you from the inside out, and there's a certain openness that you have to have...I think about it a lot,

Whoa I used to love PZB's stuff in high school. Did not know that!

I never read PZB but I know of her and her cult following. I didn't know that either. interesting!

Jan Morris' memoir "Conundrum" is really interesting, if you want to read somebody talking about transitioning- she was a great writer anyway, and her life was amazing.

now that I think of it, I guess I've known/know four transgender people, not the two listed upthread. I kind of forgot about some folks.

It was kind of interesting but disconcerting to see that one friend who had been cool with being part of a larger "queer" art community in SF in the early 90s got very, er, straightlaced once her surgery was done. Once she was post-op, she just wanted to date a normal dude and be a wife and live in the suburbs and really wasn't into gay activism / lesbians / drag queens /performance art "weirdos" / marginality in general. I guess for me that was when the penny dropped that a deliberately "anti-" stance is something that some queers identity with for life, and for some people, it's a kind of temporary zone while they are on their way to something more gender-normative on the other side of surgery/drugs/transitioning in the case of transgender people, or more gender-normative on the other side of assimilation / focusing on yr career / getting on with life in general. Queerness doesn't seem all that at stake for some people.

I had a big argument with a str8 friend about transgender people once. She was saying (I'm summarizing here) "I feel when I see an obvious transgender person like they are forcing me to be in some kind of play that they are putting on, like I have to pretend to not notice that they are transgender- I feel sort of co-erced into being a prop for their identity". I was annoyed by this argument and just said "What makes you think that this person living their life in gender X or Y is somehow for or about YOU-as-spectator? It's not about you, it's about their autonomy." It was weird, because she was a smart, not-homophobic person, she was cool w gays and lesbians, but trannies, specifically, triggered this reaction.

I have never met one, but I'm sure in my travels I've probably passed some and didn't even know it, the medical technology is getting so significantly better that you cannot tell anymore.

Only ever met one, an RAF helicopter pilot, M2F. Quite disconcerting the first time I met her, looked like Grayson Perry dressed as a woman, even though she was wearing her flying suit. Can't imagine what it must have been like to come out to your fellow pilots and other personnel, the military's not renowned for it's touchy-feely side of things.

Those who worked with transgendered people, what were your/their jobs?

one worked with me at a coffee shop in college, the other did our phone service/system installation at my current office. I'm probably forgetting others, certainly in SF there's plenty

Link to an entry about her FTM transition on PZB's blog if anyone's interested http://docbrite.livejournal.com/766469.html

I met one a few years back when she came to my house to service my washing machine. Christina was her name, MTF. Cool person, huge hands.

I published PZB in the late '90s and haven't been in touch for years, so... whoa!

Yeah I know. She blogged about 12 months ago about how she isn't writing any more and please don't ask her to kind of thing, but the FTM transition thing was something I only recently learned...though all I could think was, well I guess that explains the detailed sex scenes in Exquisite Corpse :)

a series of bad choices punctuated by the lighting of cigarettes

this is rather fine, i'll be passing this line off as my own at the soonest opportunity

I've been in a few bands with a man->woman who dated women and always thought of her as a her, nothing else really. She's a really great person and in all my years of knowing her all of our friends have been supportive of her. Never asked if she had an operation or anything, never really thought it was my business.

Also years ago i lived w this girl who dated a guy who wore fake boobs and was pre-op and I dont know if he ever went thru it. They were crusty art kids but he was definitely into it as a lifestyle choice. I took my girlfriend at the time on some double dates with those two where everyone was cross-dressing, which was pretty fun!

uh PZB is now F2M?
wow.

LOVED HER BOOKS AS A TEEN!

yeah, she was #1 on my list back in the day, for sure

Known a few M2F through the comix scene. Always M2F for some reason.

Have met some. Don't currently know any well.

Used to be friends with someone who was living as a woman and once mentioned saving up for the op. Never did it; has grown a beard and is now introducing himself as his birth name, so I assume he's reconciled with manhood now. (Is it unusual for someone to get that far and change their mind? A friend of a friend seems to be a pretty similar story too.)

A friend of a friend of mine is F to M (rather visibly so) and I *think* his partner is, too, but he is literally so much "half of both" that I just can't tell.

xposts I loved PZB in HS too! (Caitlin Kiernan is trans, too, right?)

I know plenty of drag people, but afaik no transgendered ones.

PZB falls onto my list of people who's artistic output I don't partic. care for, but would love to go out for a drink with. She used to call herself a "non-operative transsexual" which I think is pretty cool.

Re work, of the two M2F women I know, one works as admin in my job (non-govt health org in Australia), so meets all the people who come in to the org
The other is a gynaecologist

I was talking with a friend (straight, male, usually very progressive) about Amanda Lepore and somehow we got onto the topic of whether she was a woman or not. He didn't come right out and say she wasn't, but he asked "Well, did she get ovaries? What about a uterus?" I changed the subject b/c we have a history of arguing, but I think, you know, must be nice to feel entitled to decide another person's gender/sex. (Also, in response to the story of the extreme possessiveness and abusiveness of her the ex-boyfriend who funded much of her surgeries, he expressed some sympathy for him, seeing as he was funding her "art project." Looking back, an argument seems justified....)

"So, if a woman gets a radical hysterectomy, she's not a woman anymore?"

I wouldn't label someone reactionary for that (the first part) - it's hardly outrageous to believe sex/gender to be biological.

must be nice to feel entitled to decide another person's gender/sex

don't think many people really pass this test of absolute non-decision, but 'it must be nice' to

It's just surprising and disappointing when I realize that people who I expect to be enlightened about what I think of as fairly mundane ideas about gender make statements like those above. Maybe my expectations are ahead of reality, but I know certain people whose understanding of gender and sex I expect to be on par with their thoughts on race or homosexuality. E.g., I wouldn't expect any of my close friends to oppose miscegeny, either.

idk, it's not clear your friend 'opposed' whatever it is we're talking about. if your expectation is that everyone accepts that our 'gender/sex' is whatever we decide, and not by anyone else, then yeah, you're probably a little far ahead of reality.

i think you can be okay with people's right to choose their gender and still believe that sex is biologically determined. i do at least. if nothing is biologically determined that why would a transgender individual need to 'trans' their gender? they would just be what they always were

That's an interesting issue. The surgical part is most commonly called *sex* reassignment surgery, and governments consider the person's sex to have been changed. Is there some standard for saying whether a person has changed their sex v. their gender?

seems odd to seek hard-n-fast standards/legitimacy from governments when the whole gist of this argument is that things are fluid/mutable/not subject to determination by outsiders, etc

I know. I just wondered what the standards were (standards of govt., academic, the trans "community", etc.).

Basically, I am trying to figure out how to talk about these issues. Despite my indignation above, I'm not exactly an expert.

I always liked the way Butler broke it down

Ha. I searched the thread before I realized you probably meant Judith.

lol yeah. she writes a lot about the gender/sex division

she sure does

I swore off JB after I a year's worth of religious studies classes where she was the high priestess of the department. Her ideas are great and I learned a ton of fascinating stuff, but her (and other queer theorists') writing is just so convoluted and dense. Needlessly so, I would say. Regardless, can you point me toward some sort of digest of her breakdown that you refer to?

Was it de Beauvoir that said people are not born, but rather become women?

there is some truth to that

It was her, yes.

Xposts: For what it's worth, my introduction to Judith Butler was from this, which is not only from an article about transgendered individuals (specifically the one alluded upthread re: dr. john money etc.) but is also written in relatively accessible English. I don't think she talks about sex/gender distinctions, but it's a good summation of a lot of her ideas.

I have been putting off reading Butler bcz everyone I've ever talked to about it says it is written in the most inaccessible English :(

That's what I think. I brought this up in one class, and was met with little sympathy, only explanations that the ideas were so foreign that they defied plain language. Which on one hand is true in that terminology had to be invented and regular usage wouldn't always work, but really most of the time it read more as obfuscation, maybe to discourage debate by simpletons.

lolacademicelitism

That article I linked to is written in a less dense style, outside of that, though...

With Butler (and I guess this goes for a lot of people), once you wrap your head around her style/terminology, it makes a lot more sense and can be very rewarding.

That sort of deliberate inaccessibility in academic writing is annoying to me in general, but moreso in regard to queer theory b/c this is stuff that, were it more readable, could make a difference in ordinary people's thinking. I guess it's the sort of thing that gets filtered down from the ivory tower? But I haven't seen much of the result of the trickle-down effect.

xp

stevie i doubt ud actually have a problem w/ butler bc i know ur familiar w/ a lot of the kinds of arguments shes making and her terminology anyway. I think ppl are just put off by the once removed logic of postmodernist discourse or w/e tho.

"logic"

i thought this question was totally bizarre until i remembered that the U of M still does half of the gender reassignment surgeries in the country (iirc) so this prob isnt as common in other areas. Still, the idea of never having known or at least met a transgender person is just kinda shocking to me.

My friend Jimbo is becoming a woman. I haven't seen him in years but know him through Facebook now. Takes big balls to undergo reassignment when you're a lawyer in Galveston.

also the cars

wt

would transition?

Nice to see the PZB love on this thread, Poppy is an old friend.

"i think you can be okay with people's right to choose their gender and still believe that sex is biologically determined. i do at least. if nothing is biologically determined that why would a transgender individual need to 'trans' their gender? they would just be what they always were."

I agree. People who are skeptical about transgender folks always like to say "sex is biological, it's based on whether you have a penis/vagina" and "you can't just pick a gender at random"... but "biology" isn't just the physical aspects of your genitals and body shape that people can see, it also includes the workings of your brain and your internal sense of what your gender could be. Since people *can't* just be raised to take on whatever gender identity society wants them to have (although many anti-essentialist gender theorists have assumed they can), this suggests that elements of the way we perceive our gender are innate, and are just as "biological" as our bodies.

For most of us, our "internal" gender and external sex traits match up, for a minority of people they don't. IIRC, some transgender theorists have suggested that being trans could be thought of as a kind of intersex condition -- your internal sense of self is aligned one way, your physical shape/hormones another.

"The surgical part is most commonly called *sex* reassignment surgery, and governments consider the person's sex to have been changed. Is there some standard for saying whether a person has changed their sex v. their gender?"
In my knowledge (I'm far from an expert), the definition of "transgender" is a person who has some desire to change the sex they were assigned at birth, whether they've taken steps toward that or not. It's a more inclusive category. A "transsexual" has changed their physical sex in some way -- the most commonly accepted place to draw the line would probs be whether they've started taking hormones. The hormone therapy creates the biggest biological change, & for some trans people, it's the only medical intervention they need. If you're looking for a way to refer to such people that avoids all these complications, you can just call them "trans men" and "trans women."

I'd highly recommend Julie Serrano's "Whipping Girl" for anyone who wants to learn more about the subject. It delves into the author's personal experiences as well as gender theory stuff, it's clear and accessible, and it debunks a lot of assumptions/misconceptions.

idk i think the relationship b/w sex/gender/sexuality etc. is far too messy to just "schematise" and the way ppl try to seems part of some project of pathologisation of trans ppl as part of a project of othering to preserve normativity yadda yadda yadda

I'm not writing cogently ATM, so I will stop trying to discuss my previous question. But I will ask, How in the fuck is it that federal law - which still denies the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and has still can't pass ENDA after 14 years - accepts that a transsexual as their new post-reassignment sex?? It seems far more difficult to accept that a person can change their sex than that two people of the same sex (of the very clear, biological, since-birth variety) can get married, yet a FTM trans person's marriage to a woman only becomes federally sanctioned once she undergoes the change to being M.

Did the religious right forget to discriminate in this one area? Have there been Defense of Gender Norms bills?

pathologising/medicalising is a way of making queers like car-crash victims and therefore acceptable as a medical condition

xpost-

I was talking about this issue just the other day with a lawyer friend of mine whose thesis was on the legal status of transsexuals- she was saying that there is no clearcut federal policy about their status, and so what you have is a state-specific, deeply conflicted and inconsistent nest of rulings about things like changing the sex listed on ID cards, access/use of gendered bathrooms, the ability to marry, etc. The law is a grey area here, and so small town judges can tip things one way or the other (for or against granting the newly transitioned person the capacity to legally assert their new identity as a change of legally recognized "sex") and it suddenly ripples out onto everybody in that area of jurisdiction. I wonder if, in the next few generations, something is going to come before the Supreme Court and/or surface nationally in a major way to direct people's attention towards this. But I don't know.

As to the biology of it, my understanding is that current research seems to show that there are 3 different ways which set somebody's gender:

* DNA
* Developmental hormones in the womb
* Brain structures

Most people are lucky enough to have all three line up, but some people don't, hence (for example) people who completely look like, have all the bodily structures of, and identify, without ever suspecting otherwise, as women, but who actually have male DNA (and only discover this when they go for fertility tests)--from the womb on, they got all the female hormones for some reason, and so turned out female. Before DNA testing, none of these people would ever have suspected that they were born male, in some sense.

And plenty of people have a brain structure that better matches the opposite gender to their own bodily form, and these people often end up changing their bodies to suit their minds.

xp Jesse: Gender reassignment surgery has been around for sixty-odd years; plenty of time to get laws passed.

Christine, that's why I'm surprised there hasn't been some legislation denying trans people's rights. I'm surprised that DOMA doesn't have provisions in it defining "man" and "woman" in its definition of the marriage of one of each, for example. It seems like a major oversight.

yeah, this is the weird risk if there was a sudden, nation-wide attention grabbing Supreme Court case- it might lead to some really lame decision being handed down across the entire country- or, a more lefty/liberatory ruling might trigger a backlash of amendments and fire up the family values crowd. The weird lack of a position puts trans folk at risk, but it also might be better than a DOMA style initiative- at least in some states, if you transition, your new sex can be your stated sex on ID, and, apparently (going by what my friend told me) the same is the case with marriages in some states- trans people who pass just slip under the radar.

When I worked at the Times, Donna Cartwright sometimes came and did overtime shifts in my department, so I got to know her a little. Well enough to say hi in the cafeteria and so forth. Other than that, I worked at another newspaper where a reporter (big burly guy in his mid-50s) announced he was going to have a sex change, but I wasn't there while it happened. The management was surprisingly supportive, given that it was a fairly conservative paper in a fairly conservative city.

yeah i feel like if you have ever worked in a job where you deal w/ lots of members of the public, you will have met a good few.

"this is the weird risk if there was a sudden, nation-wide attention grabbing Supreme Court case- it might lead to some really lame decision being handed down across the entire country"

I get the feeling there are enough tactical reasons for both sides on DOMAs to leave this alone. Like if they screened all the wives of Republican congressmen and found one with androgen insensitivity or something, it would be game over.

some big thing just happened in canada i think, im not really reading the paper these days too lazy

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Yeah. The House of Commons here passed a bill that would protect trans rights by a narrow majority (But one that included members of all four parties, including the currently governing Conservative Party.) Unfortunately, our charming unelected Senate, stacked with appointees by the Conservative Prime Minister is 100% likely to vote against the bill. This sort of thing was up until recently unheard of - the Senate might return legislation to the HoC for further editing, etc., but outright blocking of Private Member's Bills that go against the (minority) government's agenda is galling.

Details here: Globe and Mail but be prepared for blatant transphobic fear-mongering on the part of random politicians and Charles McVety (our equivalent of Focus on the Family) being interviewed like a legitimate source for a newspaper article.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Hard to keep up with this story:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/07/entertainment/bruce-jenner-car-accident/index.html?sr=fb020715JennerAccident5pStoryGallink

ah this is where that legendary san te post is

Since I'm on here, I may as well update my "not to my knowledge" post from four years ago; I may have played golf with a transgendered woman last summer. (Is that the right phrase? I generally avoid these threads, because I'm afraid I'll say something in slightly the wrong way, at which point twelve people will surround me and shame me off the face of the earth.) My playing partner thought so for sure; I was missing it until he said something, but then I thought probably yes.

In high school, when I was a drama geek, there was a young woman who liked to help build the sets, rather than acting on the stage. She was pictured in the yearbook, smiling, wearing denim overalls and holding a hammer. As I have heard, she made the surgical leap to become officially male a couple of decade ago. He was always well-liked by his classmates.

xxpost that accident was horrific. TMZ, for whatever reason, decided to post a frame by frame shot of Jenner's SUV hitting the car in front of them, especially creepy since she was subsequently pushed into the intersection and hit head on, dying horrifically.

This thread is a wiiiild ass time capsule.

Is a bit.

I thought this had been revived as the singer in The Jags ("I gotcha number, written on the back of my hand") was on 24 hours in A&E

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years (also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

I know two. Actually three now that I think about it, one of them is a child who was quite insistent on her gender switch from an extremely young age. Parents were at first startled and a little uncomfortable and by now are 100% comfortable with it.

The other two worked for me at my last job. They were both great guys, and oddly both of them worked on the same project, overlapping only slightly. One has transitioned very easily in the years since, and other has had an extremely rough time, as it's been compounded by some serious medical problems (MS) and what sounds to me like a really unsupportive family. To make matters worse she was fired by my shit former boss the week after I quit my job in an extremely clear case of wrongful termination on two counts (disability as well as gender identity; she was the best developer we had there). I've tried to convince her to sue them but she's been unwilling to do so.

This thread is a wiiiild ass time capsule.

JFC it really is.

one of my friends from high school transitioned in 2011. i had a lingering crush on him and we talked on facebook a lot and our conversations inevitably spilled over into trans stuff. he was struggling a lot, more than i ever have tbh, so when he disappeared briefly from facebook i was v worried. then he reappeared with a different name and had started transitioning and we talked a lot about his experiences on the other side of it. it was the first time i ever really learned that there was a language for the parallel experience i was having. (albeit mine was occurring at a much more delayed rate.) then he disappeared from facebook again and i haven't been able to find him online anywhere since but i hope he's doing well and living exactly the life he wants because i love him and i'm so glad i knew him

i have two trans students, accidentally misgendered one for the second time yesterday, still kicking myself abt it 24 hrs later

i was curious so i just looked in my old facebook messages and found all of our correspondence and started crying again xp

the messages we exchanged are SO LONG that they feel like they come from a different internet

sorry y'all lol

I wonder if, in the next few generations, something is going to come before the Supreme Court and/or surface nationally in a major way to direct people's attention towards this. But I don't know.

Bwa-ha-ha! It all did bubble up a lot faster than anybody anticipated.

I haven't met any new transgendered people irl since this thread was started, but my social circles are very small and suburban. A few online acquaintances (here and elsewhere) have transitioned in the interim, but not even like, any old high school friends on Facebook or whatever.

kind of a depressing thread for me because all the "wild ass time capsule" reactions are mostly the reactions i'm trying to deal with now :(

I am a college instructor and genuinely want to refer to people by their preferred pronouns, but I'm having a tough time remembering. I have 35 students and four who responded to my request to tell me about preference. That seems easy in retrospect but I've already slipped up. I find it's easier to just use their name even if it's a occasionally grammatically awkward.

It's much easier, effortless really, with the (few) trans ppl I know personally.

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years (also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, February 12, 2019 4:54 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are not kidding

xp i've found something similar to be the case. i've only recently started having trans or genderqueer students who cared enough about how they were identified that it was worth it for them to say anything about it (i suppose i might have had some genderqueer students in the past for whom it wasn't an issue, or it was but they didn't say anything, for whatever reason), and it seems obvious that they're encouraged by recent shifts in institutional practices (like pronoun preferences being included in the biographical data from the registrar for instructors). but some have cared but did not say anything about it, trusting to the institutional stuff (on my end) or leaving it to how they would be identified in context by their peers from their presentation and what they actually said about whatever - even to the point of talking about trans issues, obviously from personal experience and stakes, with classmates but leaving some less sophisticated classmates ignorant of how to refer properly to them. i was worried about making a mistake, mainly in front of a class when i would most normally have cause to refer to a student with a pronoun - i found that with students with gender presentations that were more ambiguous than their stated identifications, i would sometimes slip a little mentally toward choosing a pronoun depending on (the wrong gender aspect of) their presentation before thinking of their identification. my experience in the moment as a speaker was that it was not too different from the challenge of remembering everybody's name (and preferred nickname) in a group full of new people, but still a bit more prone to forgetfulness or lapsing, i guess because linguistic gender markers are something you usually manage more lazily from your perceptions in context. mostly i did like you said - used names (which i would say predominate over pronouns in a classroom context anyway - so only rarely did i deliberately avoid constructing sentences that i might have used pronouns in).

(for a while through the early days or weeks of a course it's totally permissible in context to ask a student's name right before you refer to them by it, since being the one person responsible for knowing everyone's name gets you a pass. more so if you can come off as the addled/aloof/busy type of instructor. it would be very convenient if you could do the same with their preferred pronouns etc., but given current practice it kind of seems like you could not do so without substantial risk of giving offense.)

i have been tasked with giving a presentation about pronouns to my fellow faculty members because my school is very behind/ooooold school in that regard. i have known a number of trans people, including but not limited to students.

I find it's easier to just use their name even if it's a occasionally grammatically awkward.

It's much easier, effortless really, with the (few) trans ppl I know personally.

this is good thinking, i think

here is an excerpt from benjamin dreyer's interview with terry gross where he talks about his awokening wrt pronouns. i think it might be useful itt

DREYER: This ultimately was the intersection of my perspective as a copy editor and my perspective as a - simply as a human being. I remember reading a few years ago an article in The New York Times that was all about a person who did not identify as male or female. And I made my way through the article, which was extremely well-written, and toward the end of the article, there was a quotation.

There was a description of this person by this person's father or mother that referred to the person as they and then added - was added parenthetically using a pronoun that The Times does not use. And I then went back, and I read the entire article and realized that the writer of the article had managed to write the entire article about this person without ever resorting to a pronoun. And it was done seamlessly and eloquently.

And I was sort of - I mean, on the one hand, I was sort of impressed by the effort, while, at the same time, I was also beginning to contemplate the necessity of this avoidance. And then, what happened subsequently is that I gained a colleague whose pronoun of choice is they. And when I was first introduced to this colleague, I found myself for months doing anything I could in writing or even in speech to avoid applying a pronoun. I'd refer to the colleague as the colleague. I mean, can you hear how dreadfully stilted I'm becoming?

GROSS: (Laughter) Yes.

DREYER: And I would refer to the colleague by name. And at one point, even I began to realize how ridiculous I was. And the word they popped out of my mouth, and I thought, oh, be done with it already (laughter). You know, like, just honor your colleague, honor this person that you work with, honor this person you actually like a lot and and honor the pronoun choice.

And it shouldn't have to take something personal, you know, a one-on-one encounter with another human being. It shouldn't necessarily have to take that sort of thing to make you evolve properly. You should - you know, maybe you should be a better person, and you should be able to do it in the abstract. But sometimes it does take a personal encounter to get you to change how you see things.

GROSS: Well, I - you know, I think, like, if you're gender queer, if there's a lot of, like, rights that you're going to have trouble getting because of discrimination in our society, one of the things you should not be deprived of is, like, the right to have a pronoun (laughter).

DREYER: Right.

GROSS: Like, that shouldn't be something that you have to go to the Supreme Court for, to have a pronoun to use to describe yourself.

DREYER: Yeah. And the last thing that I want to do is to pass myself off as some sort of ferocious gatekeeper who, in some sort of argument about the purity and the wonder of the English language and how it must be preserved, is simply being unkind and cruel to other human beings. You know, if I've learned anything in my increasing years, it's that just being kind, you know, being respectful is more important than how I feel about pronouns.

that's interesting, but i'm not 100% clear how it's useful

because a fundamental change in the way we use language affects everyone differently and i thought dreyer's experience as a copy chief/arbiter of "taste" illustrates how people might approach the issue of respecting someone's pronouns in spite of resistance, even if that resistance is born of style and linguistic "elegance" (whatever that means). i guess i thought it was interesting and therefore useful?

i agree, it’s useful in reaffirming the moral principle behind respecting people’s pronoun choices

i’m just really uncomfortable w making pronoun mistakes

i think it's natural to make mistakes at first -- this is all very new. imho an indication that you are trying and doing your best still counts in the early stages. again, this is all very new! a language shift like this may happen once in a lifetime, if ever. function words don't change much even though we invent new words and usages all the time.

we are struggling with Latinx at my school, and we are like ~90% Spanish-speaking Latinx-identifying people, it's hard. give yourself a break for making an error. i know i have made some!

I had a hard time with 'they' (actually i know no one who insists on this but mentally I have a hard time with it) until I realized that in some circumstances I've always said 'they' for a singular person anyway.

xp i appreciate that

it’s hard for me because i have gotten to be good friends with the advisor for our school’s TRUTH program (chapter?) and i hear a lot about these students’ private social traumas. i think some of my colleagues are sort of oblivious about it ... nobody (adult wise) is resistant to using preferred pronouns at our school but i think some people have a simple “oops my bad” reaction w/r/t social awkwardness and don’t give it much of a second thought

i think what is frustrating for me is that my classroom is the one social space where i can exercise (extremely limited, possibly illusory) control over how people socialize ... so i want to make it as safe a space as possible ... and it’s upsetting to be the person that undermines that sense of safety

i'm not too worried about being disrespectful, it's more that i have no job security and don't expect to be given the benefit of the doubt should i ever inadvertently give any offense

i suspect that establishing pronouns as a discretionary rather than compulsory linguistic item in a way that people can master (i.e. become able to use routinely without any risk of giving offense or losing face) really calls for a change in the ways that people introduce themselves and one another, sociologically/ritually speaking - which would be a lot more marked a change than just swapping in a singular 'they'. which is why schools have been a vanguard for the change; they are places where authorities can exercise control over how people socialize, and places where there can be a certain formality to linguistic practices of introduction and address and reference, without it seeming like an absurdity or a nicety or an optional convenience.

there's a countercultural type restaurant around here that had lots of staff with (declared—i think on their nametags?) non-standard pronoun preferences, some of whom became increasingly uncomfortable when they found that they were nevertheless being misgendered by customers who did not know how to call for them where they would normally say 'sir' or 'miss'. at the time their idea was that they might conduct more detailed introductions where they supplied not just pronouns but preferred forms of address, as well as names ('i'm conor, and i'll be your server'). i don't know how that went over.

ideally i would like to manage this dimension of my classroom without talking about it, so that it can't become a thing for students who have any problems with it, and students who care can see it work without a lot of overt ritual showing of respect (or heavy-handed intervention from the person who can exercise control over how people socialize).

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years

It's amazing and wonderful because one of the biggest things Santorum types were crying about in the fight for marriage equality has come true and every normal person is just like "oh, cool, good for them."

remember back in the mid-90s in my first co-worker is trans experience. there was a lot of pushback on bathroom issues
weirdly unaware of individuals in current large corp, although there was a recent internal intranet discussion about neutral bathrooms and lack thereof

the interesting thing to me about pronoun anxiety is the way it fundamentally represents a linguistic failure - the inability of users of the english language to agree on a consensus set of gender-neutral pronouns - and the way we're working through the effects of that failure. we may wind up just abandoning third-person pronouns entirely, at least for a time. it's also interesting to compare it to a successful attempt to address an inadequacy of the english language some decades earlier, namely the way women's honorifics were predicated on marital status.

i wonder if any larger conclusions can be drawn by comparing and contrasting these cases. probably not.

spending time w/ younger ppl via activisty things over the last couple years has been tremendously helpful in meeting more trans and nb ppl. it's amazing the gap btwn even older and younger millenials, let alone gen-zers or whatever we're calling them

it's also interesting to compare it to a successful attempt to address an inadequacy of the english language some decades earlier, namely the way women's honorifics were predicated on marital status.

I don’t think it has been entirely successful. Yes, there’s another choice in the drop-down but I feel uncomfortable about assumptions being made about me whenever I use Ms. I still prefer it to the alternatives though. And sometimes I *still* haven’t had a choice - I had a run in with The Palace who insisted a member of the royal household would call me Miss when they met me. In the event, I was introduced to them with my first and surname only, and it wasn’t an issue. But purlease!

(Sorry to derail, this conversation is not about me ect ect)

tbf they have an individual they refer to as *the* Queen which seems disrespectful in many ways but it's nice they're into queens

i dunno madchen, i think there's a similar potential with pronouns.

i was surprised to read in the nyt that amy klobuchar was a 'ms'. i don't know why, i guess i was familiar with their practice, which officially is to default to ms for married women like political figures/political figures' wives unless that person chooses to be known as 'mrs'. i realized that the usage made me feel more uncertain who or why the title was being used, who chose it, whether it had to do with her last name (being retained after starting a career despite a marital name, etc.), or what.

a pronoun practice that paralleled the use of ms as a social title might settle on a default to be used before one knows a stated preference. i wonder if married women, or unmarried women, had any tendency to bristle at being called 'ms' when that usage started making what headway it did.

i've always been all in for Ms -- didn't realize people still felt weird about it today?

(XP) For me it was the second time somebody assumed I was divorced — after I’d adopted Ms precisely because I don’t want to be judged in terms of my relationship to somebody else. Is Ms =
Divorced a particularly British assumption?

But yeah, I agree that in time there will probably be a transition wrt pronouns, whether or not that means everyone using ‘they/them’ by default. And it’ll be interesting to see what other languages do wrt m/f nouns, matching adjectives etc.

i think ms = divorced is not an american thing, i have never even thought about it!

I just wanna know if Jaq did great in her new job and left her husband

Also, my answer to the poll question now is "I have had trans friends for decades but in 2011 I would have said I had never met a trans person"

Yeah, to echo what everyone says, I thought more acceptance was coming but had no idea it would be this fast - it's pretty awesome.

I didn't know Ms was the way forwards, my angry feminist friends tend to use Mx for the reasons sketched above.

I know a married couple who are both trans (one is m2f, one f2m) and I feel stupid that their specific union makes me so happy because they're just two (really lovely) people making it work but part of me can't help but project hope for the future onto them.

sorry for the digression but hello Madchen, I haven't seen your name on ILX in many many years; but maybe it's just the threads I've been on.

Hello! I’ve never gone away but tend to stick to threads I’ve bookmarked. Which it seems I did with this one back in 2011 :)

I use Ms and never intend to change but a lot of women I know who aren’t married prefer Miss?

Wrt they, I always use singular ‘they’ when I don’t know the person I’m referring to (like if I’m waiting for someone I’ve never spoken to to get in touch) and I also agree that English lacks in this regard. Personally singular “they” feels a lot more natural/everyday to me than using the same word for second person singular and plural.

I’ve seen Mx on a lot more official forms and places recently.

I knew one M -> F trans who was a good friend growing up. One thing I always noticed - we played a lot of D&D in middle school and he would always choose to play a female character. And always Peach in Mario Kart & Smash Bros. I never thought much of it, all us dorks had quirks like that, but after a particularly lengthy Facebook post about making radical life changes and fear of being accepted I figured it out. We had some really good conversations about it, I never knew anything about how inaccessible hormone therapy is to a retail worker nor about the apparent hell that is gender dysphoria.

I wound up seeing her a couple times after that, presenting publicly as a woman (something she was terrified to do, especially around people who had known her as male for 15+ years), she seemed comfortable at a glance but I didn't know what to say. On one hand I wanted to say I was proud of her for having the courage to go through with it but on the other I figured she just wanted to be a regular woman for once so I just didn't say anything, probably making her feel awkward as well.

Unfortunately the election of Trump had a pretty big effect on her psyche and she wound up deleting all her social media. I don't know where she is or what she's doing...I don't really hang out in that circle anymore and she never really showed up to any social events so I guess I'll be left wondering forever.

Several when I think about it

1) family friend who i also used to work with later transitioned to female. Never remotely saw it coming, maybe in part because as a man he was completely bald on top and had a relatively deep voice.

2) Family friend’s daughter who I haven’t seen since the transition to female.

3) kid I went to middle school with who already presented borderline female. We kind of all *knew* before we actually knew what that was.

4) friends stepchild is non-binary - not sure if that counts

5) my wife’s friend is f to m. She only knew the friend post transition.

It is remarkable how much has changed—for good and bad—in eight years. OTOH, In 2011 I knew one trans girl (AFAIK) and most of the trans people I was even aware of were performers of some kind. Eight years later, I know/have known a half dozen or more trans people who are friendly drinking acquaintances, people in my local scene, etc., and the dozens or more that I stay aware of are novelists, game designers, scientists, journalists, musicians, artists ... OTOH, I'm much more frightened for my trans friends now than I could've imagined being in 2011.

(Also, in 2011 I thought of Linehan as a mildly amusing TV writer, not a manically obsessive spittle-flecked transphobe.)

(also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

wow, you know a lot of people!