PG, a long-time blog friend of mine (and someone I nearly got to meet in person this summer, but we passed like ships in the night on the DC metro) is someone whose opinions I value and intellect I admire. She blogs at both at DeNovo and Half the Sins of Mankind.
Although I said I was done with this topic (and, indeed, despite the excellence of Amp's post and now of PG's I find myself tiring of it in the extreme) I find it necessary to ask a basic question that seems to me to underlie many of the discussions people have about transsexuality, but which I have seen little or no discussion (perhaps I'm simply too late to the party?).
Inevitably, people (courts, bloggers, medical professionals, and others) discuss something called "biological sex". My question is: what is that? Is it reducible to genitals and chromosomes? PG phrases it thusly:
I'm not clear on how being trans is an "inborn characteristic," given that gender is a social construct. You are born with a set of genitalia that give you a physical sex, but the set of characteristics accepted as "masculine" or "feminine" is socially taught. If we had a gender neutral society in which everyone wore skirts, no one wore makeup or had shaved legs, and the genitalia of people you found attractive was no one else's business, there would be no such thing as "transgender."
I don't know that I disagree with her. Indeed, I've made the same basic argument because it seems to me to be logically coherent based upon what I have been taught to believe about biology and the social construction of gender. See, for example, my own recent post about whether or not trans people should have surgery, as well as this post entitled "How do you know?". [Also, see my post "Am I a Woman" which talks in some detail about my experiences with gender]
However, something nags at the back of my consciousness. Perhaps that something is nothing more than my unwillingness to deny the truth of my own experience; I can't say for certain that it's not. But, what if there were such a thing as "brain sex"? What if "biological (or physical) sex" were more than chromosomes and genitals? I don't know that it is, although there is some evidence that it may be (see, for example, this brief which asserts in part: "Thus, although sex assignment at birth by the criterion of the external genitalia is statistically reliable, in people experiencing transsexualism it is not: they are exceptions to the statistical rule. Further, the attached extract from Nature entitled ’A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality’ concerns a study which has been carried out of a region in the hypothalamus of the brain which is smaller in women than in men. Strikingly, the region was of female size or smaller in six male-to-female transsexuals, regardless of hormone treatment. This research indicates quite clearly that, medically, the sex of an individual must be regarded as being decided by the construction of the brain: it is not an issue of ’psychological sex’ but of physiological differentiation.") Regardless, it seems to me that we assert many things are inborn without an external manifestation. PG in her post even acknowledges that sexual orientation is inborn. Why can't gender identity be so? I'm not suggesting that the desire to wear lipstick or high heels or spit on the sidewalk is inborn, merely the personal experience of one's gender or sexual identity.
It seems to me that the logic that underlies the theory of gender as 100% social construct is the same theory that underlay Dr. John Money's conversion of Bruce into Brenda. Later, of course, he discovered the truth, changed his name to David (Reimer) and, eventually killed himself. If it were pure social construct, why didn't the experiment work? Despite being socialized as a girl from infancy and even given female hormones as he matured to ensure his "normal" female development, David had an innate (inborn) sense that he was not female. The intersex also seem to belie the connection between biology as defined merely by genitalia and chromosomes -- to which gender do they belong? Many pick the gender assigned to them, while many more choose a different one.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to argue that gender is NOT socially constructed. Clearly, for the most part, it is. I'm just curious if there is something else at work here, that we don't know about, or choose to ignore.
Finally, I have to say that PG's position is infinitely more palatable to me (as a transwoman, of course) than the vitriol we've seen over the past few weeks. She at least shows respect for the decisions that people who live in a gendered culture make in order to live their lives. But like all of us, she generalizes sometimes. To wit, she says:
That is, I don't find transsexual people at all threatening in themselves, but I am a little troubled by the necessity of literally reifying the sex-gender connection by altering one's genitalia, taking hormones, etc. This enaction of the oppressive social rule that XY = masculinity and XX = femininity on the body seems like something that shouldn't have to happen, even though it's obviously something people can do if they want.
Shortly after this, she quotes from Winter's post:
You know, perhaps transgender people offer an even more radical proposition, not only in proposing that gender can be cut loose from the biological body, but that gender can be something other than a source of oppression. Should we only be viewing gender as something to be destroyed, or should we be listening to transsexual people and considering the possibility that it's time to radically rethink our feminist ideas about gender in the light of what they have to tell us.
I don't know if she sees the contradiction in this or not, but I see one. We, as transgender people, do not necessarily reify the sex-gender connection merely by our transitioning. We can offer a completely different perspective -- i.e. that gender can be cut loose from the "biological body" (again, as constrained by chromosomes and genitals).
Every trans person I know has spent some amount of time thinking about this issue and has come to some sort of peace with it. Some of us simply say "It's too big a question for me right now. I have to live my life and this is where I'm happy." Others, continue to search and question. Some find a theory (provable or not) that works for them, in their life. Personally, I bounce around between all of them. For now, I'm just bored with it.
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