At the Kottankulangara Devi Temple in Kollam in India, there is a special festival where cis men and male to female transgender and nonbinary people dress up as women and take part in a beautiful lamp ceremony celebrating the Hindu goddess of Bhagavathy.
Parents dress up their sons, family members dress up the men of the family, and there are make-up artists and beauticians to help the rest.
The Washington Post has presented the transgender or non-binary muxes of Mexico.
(I am using the term transgender in its broad, umbrella, sense here, referring to the diversity of gender variant people).
In Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca (southern Mexico), a muxe (also spelled muxhe) is a male assigned person, who dresses or behaves like a woman. Some see them as a third gender. The word muxe is thought to derive from the Spanish word for “woman”, mujer.
When she became aware of the muxes, photographer Nuria López Torres went to southern Mexico to meet them. Torres was interested in how the muxes fit into the Zapotec society found in the area. In particular, she was interested to see how the muxes interacted with their families and how they were welcomed into society.
Representation matters. Struck by the lack of pictures of trans and non-binary people doing
normal things, artist-activist Zackary Drucker created a database of
free-access images. The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images
of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés.
Drucker told The Guardian:
“There are so few images of trans and gender non-conforming people in
stock imagery. Typing transgender into a search engine yields results
that are generic – a white trans woman in front of a trans flag, and
that’s pretty much it,” says Drucker.
“We were interested in revealing
trans and non-binary people in everyday life: falling in love, taking
selfies, gossiping, going to school, waiting for a bus. Our identities
are so often sensationalised, but we navigate the world and are embedded
in society in ordinary ways.”
Ok, my story (earlier I sent 2 asks but they were incomplete/incoherent). When I was 16-17 yo I thought I was trans guy but I dissmised it since it didn't feel right. Right now, when I'm 19, I'm questioning myself again. I feel barely connected to my female identification. I don't want to have breasts but I don't feel uncomfortable with them. I don't like it when I'm looking feminine. It's makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes i think I'm cis girl and later I think I'm demigirl and I'm confused.
crossdreamers answered
What am I? A trans guy? A demigirl? A crossdreamer?
Anonymous has also sent me the following questions:
I don’t have gender dysphoria but I feel off with my gender. I mean, I think I’m barely connected to my gender identification, sometimes I’m not sure if I even have gender identity. I don’t want to have breasts but I’m comfortable with them. Sometimes I want to have a penis but sometimes not. I think terms graygender or demigirl fits me best. But I still fear that I’m just cis girl trying to be “special snowflake” or something. Sorry for my English.
and
A little correction of my previous ask: I think I can be crossdreamer and demigirl since my connection to female identity and sex is little. But I still fear that I’m just cis girl.
And here’s my answer (to the best of my ability):
I understand perfectly well how you feel. It took me several years to come to that find out who I am, partly because I had repressed my gender variance, refusing to think about it, and – to the extent I did think about it – it scared me. There was a lot of confusion, for sure.
We are all afraid of social exclusion and losing our loved ones, and even if there has been a lot of LGBTQA progress, there are still transphobes out there.
So the first challenge is, as I see it, to embrace the transgender journey. For most transgender people, this journey takes time. And in spite of what the newspapers may tell you, only a minority of nonbinary and transgender people are 100 percent certain about who they are from the age of four. So it is OK to question everything. And there is not one “correct” goal for this journey.
The second challenge is to get beyond the restrictions of human thinking. We use language to understand the world around us. We have to, but there is no one to one relationship between the concepts we use and the world “out there”.
Our words are, at best, approximations, and people also use words to control what people think and do. This is, for instance, why transphobes are attacking the word “gender” and would like to force us reduce gender to biological sex. The word “gender” makes it possible for us to think about gender identity as something independent of biological sex or assigned gender. It helps people like us, but offends the kind of people who are scared of diversity, tolerance, compassion and progress.
Unfortunately there are also trans people who would like to use language in this way, insisting – for instance – that you need to have gender dysphoria to be transgender. This is – frankly – nonsense. Transgender is an umbrella term covering all types of gender variance. (Documentation on the meaning of the word trans here, and the argument for why you do not need gender dysphoria to be trans here.)
The third challenge is to get beyond the binaries. The bigots like binaries, because they can use them to force people into one of two neat boxes, defined by them, making it easier to control them. But neither sexual orientation nor gender identity are clear cut binaries.
We know now that gender identity may vary from clear cut woman to undeniably male. Yet, as far as i understand it, there exist no persons in the world who are exclusively female or exclusively male – if you look at their personalities, abilities, interests, gender expressions as well as their sexual characteristics.
But even if most people are a mix of pink and blue (to use the colors of the stereotypes) most people feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. They are cisgender, not transgender.
As soon as you feel uncomfortable about being classified as your assigned gender, you are – as I see it – some shade of transgender. That does not mean that you have to transition, or that you have to take hormones, but it means that you have to reflect carefully on who you are.
If you fear that you are cis girl (in a world were so many people insists that you have to be cis to be socially acceptable) I would say that you are not a cis girl.
In spite of what transphobic TERFs and religious extremists may tell you, questioning your own gender is not a modern “snowflake” trend or fashion. We have documentation of gender variance all the way back to antiquity. Most experts in the field (doctors, psychologists and trans activists) agree that gender variance is a real thing. The feelings are real. The identities are real. The journey is real.
Several of the terms you are referring to reflect the need for a language that captures the diversity of gender as well as the transgender journey.
Nonbinary is a word that can be of help to those who are uncertain about their gender, and those who feel that their gender lies between or beyond the two traditional genders. “Demigirl” is but a variant of nonbinary or genderqueer.
Use the words that feel meaningful to you right now, and change your vocabulary if you find new words that are more on target. Ultimately you are the only one who can know who you truly are. No one else has the right to define your identity for you.
During @HouseJudiciary today, I shared why the #EqualityAct is so personal to me and my family. My child is finally free to be who they are. With that freedom comes a responsibility, for us as legislators, to legislate with love and not fear.
The Equality Act, introduced to the House on March 13 and co-sponsored by Jayapal, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal laws to ensure LGBTQ people are treated as a protected class under federal law.
Jayapal said:
My beautiful, now-22 year old child told me last year that they were gender non-conforming. And over the last year, I have come to understand from a deeply personal mother’s perspective…I came to understand what their newfound freedom—it is the only way I can describe what has happened to my beautiful child—what their newfound freedom to wear a dress, to rid themselves of some conformist stereotype of who they are, to be able to express who they are at their real core…
Since this deeply impactful moment last year, my child’s embracing of their non-conforming gender identity and all it allows in their brilliance, their self-expression, the only thought I wake up with every day is, ‘My child is free. My child is free to be who they are.’ And in that freedom comes a responsibility for us as legislators to protect that freedom to be who they are.
The Romans found the fact that both Celts and Germanic tribes seemed to have female warriors disturbing. After all, women were weak and vulnerable and not supposed to be able to fight like that.
This is how gender stereotypes survive: Proof of them being wrong is presented as an outlier, or – better yet – something only the perverted barbarians may practice.
Even Scandinavian historians have doubted the existence of Viking female warriors. Remains found in warrior graves were defined as male, given that only males could be warriors.
This confirms what we have been told in the Viking sagas: That women could be “shieldmaidens” fighting alongside their men. The Birka grave also tells us that they could be warrior leaders.
This means that the depictions of shieldmaidens (skjoldmøy or skjaldmær) in the TV series Vikings may be more realistic than many have believed.
As a Norwegian I am reminded of discussions I have had with American friends on the concepts of masculinity and femininity. Some of them stick to the idea that “real women” are feminine and “real men” are masculine. Still, I grew up in Viking country with women who by those standards were masculine, with short hair and practical clothing. It is hard to drag the boats on land with a lifted little finger. The idea that women can fight was never alien to me.
Rippon has analysed the data on sex differences in the brain. She admits that she, like many others, initially sought out these differences. But she couldn’t find any beyond the negligible, and other research was also starting to question the very existence of such differences. For example, once any differences in brain size were accounted for, “well-known” sex differences in key structures disappeared.
Which is when the penny dropped: perhaps it was time to abandon the age-old search for the differences between brains from men and brains from women. Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”.
She also draws attention to the fact that the brain is “plastic”, in the sense that it changes throughout life according to use, means that any data documenting differences in abilities, personalities, interests and so on are most likely caused by upbringing.
Neural plasticity throws the nature/nurture polarity out of the lab window. “Nature is entangled with nature,” says Rippon. Added to this, “being part of a social cooperative group is one of the prime drives of our brain.”
The brain is also predictive and forward-thinking in a way we had never previously realised. Like a satnav, it follows rules, is hungry for them.
“The brain is a rule scavenger,” explains Rippon, “and it picks up its rules from the outside world. The rules will change how the brain works and how someone behaves.” The upshot of gendered rules? “The ‘gender gap’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Transgender identities
I guess some would say that if there are no typical male or female brains, transgender identities must be fake. I think not. Being transgender is not about following gender stereotypes, it is about feeling that you were meant to navigate the world as another gender. You are compelled – to a larger or smaller degree – to navigate the world as that gender, regardless of what that world says about proper masculinity or femininity. I believe most cis people feel the same.
That urge to express oneself as a specific gender may be inborn, even if the gender stereotypes are not, and even if it isn’t, it does not matter, because they kind of diversity Rippon describes leaves room for us all.
Illustration: sasha2538
Gina Rippon. Photograph: Jonathan Cherry/The Observer
World leading gender philosopher and radical feminist Judith Butler attacks homophpbes and transphobes in an new article in the New Statesman.
She points to Conservative – and in particular Catholic – attacks on the so-called “gender theory” where they argue that the gender binary is God given (or defined by chromosomes, if we are to believe TERFs):
Butler says:
But if one considers gender theory carefully, it is neither destructive nor indoctrinating. In fact, it simply seeks a form of political freedom to live in a more equitable and livable world.
In The Second Sex (1949), the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” This claim created space for the idea that sex is not the same as gender. And in the simplest formulation of this notion, sex is seen as a biological given, gender the cultural interpretation of sex. One may be born as female in the biological sense, but then one has to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to live as a woman – or another gender – in one’s cultural situation.
Crucially for Beauvoir, “sex” is from the very start part of one’s historical situation. “Sex” is not denied, but its meaning is disputed: nothing about being assigned female at birth determines what kind of life a woman will lead and what the meaning of being a woman might be. Indeed, many trans people are assigned one sex at birth, only to claim another one in the course of their lives. And if we build on the logic of Beauvoir’s “existentialist” account of social construction, then one may be born a female, but become a man.
Lisa T Mullin makes some important observations regarding a letter from British and Irish researchers.
Note the following:
Transphobic researchers and TERF activists mix data about children with data about youth. These are dissimilar groups.
Secondly: They confuse data about gender variant kids and youth (which is a broad category that includes both gender nonconforming kids and gender dysphoric kids) with data about those who suffer from gender dysphoria. The fact that many gender nonconforming kids do not chose to transition when they get older, should come as no surprise. This does not mean that the same is true for gender dysphoric kinds. We know that it isn’t!
