“I’ve always wanted to be somewhere in the middle”
James is transgender, genderfluid:
“Iwas just borne this way. This is just who I am. I’ve always been like this. I know I look like a woman, but I sound like a man. I’ve always wanted to be somewhere in the middle.”
“I’ve always wanted to have both energies - masculine and feminine. So I thought I shoudln’t just have one. I didn’t like the world as it was, so I created my own.”
This video is part of a campaign for Magnum Ice cream. There are three short portraits like this: James (above), Gregory and Blake (both picktured below).
I love these three portraits and think they show the importance and beauty of authenticity.
There is also a presentation of the campaign and of course the ad. These two are also nice, but maybe they over play the erotic side of ice cream and transgender both?
Among the thousands of people who marched in New York’s Pride March on
Sunday was this little 8-year-old boy, who dazzled everyone with his
fierce and fabulous strut. His mother writes:
“He
has always been very gender fluid when it came to toys and his
development. He preferred fashion dolls to action figures. I looked at
both in the store and figured that the action figure was as much a doll
as a Barbie, so if he wanted the one marketed to girls, that was fine
with me.
“He
also likes to play with trains, especially wooden subway trains. He
never wanted to play sports and likes to draw pictures and do word
searches. He goes to ballet class and loves to dance. He loves drag
queens and thinks that it is fantastic that boys can play dress up and
become beautiful girls, even after they grow up. He, himself, likes to
play dress up in skirts and dresses, but most days he looks like any
other ‘boy.’
“He
is a shy boy who is self-conscious about his missing teeth when he
smiles and very intelligent. He doesn’t like school because he gets
bullied, but he does well academically. We do our best to stop the
bullying and involve the LGBT services at his school. We keep him
involved in the LGBT community because we believe that by speaking to
other people who were like him when they were his age reinforces that he
is of value and that his life as he wants to live it is okay.
“He
is 8 years old and is starting to get crushes on boys. That is pretty
much the extent of what he knows about sexuality. I do my job as a
parent and censor things in his life that may not be appropriate…
“He
is old enough and smart enough to know he would be marching in the
Pride parade in front of thousands of people and did all of it
willingly. In fact, I thought he would stop after 10 blocks of walking,
but he felt so good about being dressed up and being who he is that he
vogued and danced the entire two miles. We collaborated on the outfit
and this is how he wanted to look today.
“This
was his Pride today. He felt it. He loved it. He was it. These children
will be our future. Embrace who they are. All they are asking for is
the same love, respect, and acceptance of themselves as any child would.”
Beyond the Gender Binary
I found this illustration over at the web site for the forthcoming gender-fluid/transgender movie Limina, where the film makers use it to explain the concept of gender variance.
They write:
Gender is not a binary (oppositional poles of identification as the only option).
Gender is more of a spectrum and children often realize this organically at a young age.
An article written by Carrie Kilman entitled “The Gender Spectrum” in the Teaching Tolerance encapsulates this best in relation to the topic of gender-fluid/gender-noncomforming/gender-creative kids. Kilman notes the two myths about gender:
1) Gender is binary, offering only two options 2) Gender and sex are conflated and the same thing
So, the majority of people believe that “every person is either male or female, and the distinction is based on that person’s anatomy.” However, gender is more of a spectrum rather than the narrow notion of man/male/masculine and woman/female/feminine.
The filmmakers want to create a movie that make this clear to both children, youth and adults.
Limina is an indie dramatic short film about a curious gender-fluid (and maybe even transgender) child who embarks on a path of kindness.
The movie makers write:
A magical gender-fluid child named Alessandra who, led by innocence and intuition, is so curious about the lives of the inhabitants of a small picturesque town that they decide to play an active part in an unknown woman’s mourning process.
The movie is in planning and the makers are looking for donations to make it real.
Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart over at Slate has published an interesting article on those who refuse to be boxed in by the gender binary.
Genderqueer, along with the somewhat newer and less politicized term nonbinary, are umbrella terms intended to encompass individuals who feel that terms like man and woman or male and female are insufficient to describe the way they feel about their gender and/or the way they outwardly present it.
The term genderqueer was originally coined in the 1990s to describe those who “queered” gender by defying oppressive gender norms in the course of their binary-defying activism.
Members of the genderqueer community differentiate themselves from people who are transgender (itself originally intended as an umbrella term), because that word has come to refer primarily to people who identify with the binary gender different from the one they were assigned in infancy.
There is a shift in attitude towards gender among younger people, at least in the “Western” part of the world. This has implications for crossdreamers and transgender people.
“Dr Claire Ainsworth, a developmental biologist, has argued advances in research mean the traditional two-sex ‘male’ and 'female’ notion is outdated, and that chromosomes, anatomy, cells and hormones often don’t all conform. […]
While it was once thought that one in 2000 babies are born intersex, this could be a vast underestimation. […]
John Achermann, who studies sex development at UCL, told Nature: 'I think there’s much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can’t easily define themselves within the binary structure.’
Ainsworth’s research has concluded the idea that men are made of XY and women are made of XX is an outdated concept.”
When people ask me about the best book written about transgender people ever, I always answer Magnus Hirschfeld’s book from 1910. He called it The Transvestites, but by the way he used the term, it is clear that he meant transgender, in the current umbrella sense of the word.
“Hirschfeld canvassed and classified the rich diversity of people he encountered, not for the mere sake of accruing scientific data or accentuating that which separated certain groups of people from others, but rather to uncover the fundamental similarities between all people irrespective of their sexual orientation, identity, or ethnic and racial provenance. He did not establish hierarchies of qualities such as physical traits and characteristics or sexual practices. This gave his work a distinctive flavor in that it became not only an ethnographic recording of difference, but implicitly, a celebration of that difference as well."
Photo of Magnus Hirschfeld and friends. Magnus is the one on the right, with the glasses. Top photo: Male to female transgender at the Eldorado Club, Berlin, 1933.
Isn’t it fascinating to see how many superheroes are presented as outsiders in comics? The X-Men are mutants – by many considered dangerous deviants who have to be forced back into hiding. Many TV-series follow the same pattern: Alphas, Mutant X, Misfits, Heroes. These heroes are all specially gifted women and men who are feared (and sometimes admired) for their ability to act outside the norms.
Transgender and genderqueer people are also outsiders, people who are able to cross the divide between male and female. This makes them able to see things others find hard to comprehend. They have developed gender X-ray vision, and can see behind the facade of male and female. They often have super-sensitivity, and can feel the pain of others who are excluded. No wonder some cultures make them shamans, magical beings who are able to travel the spirit world in ways the others cannot.
But this is obviously also why so many people fear them, and want to force them back into the traditional patterns of masculine and feminine (whatever these are where they live). People fear them because their very existence forces them to question their own sense of self, their identity and sexuality.
It is only when everyone is taught to embrace the diversity of sex and gender that this fear, and the violence that follows, will disappear.
The Clue Fairy – a well meaning spirit that repeatedly attempts to hit trans people living in denial over the head with a giant hammer, representing the repressed truth about themselves, until they finally start getting some of the clues through their thick skulls and coming out to themselves. Why do you take the extra time to peeing sitting down? Wham! Why do you insist on calling yourself a housewife? Wham! Is that gender dysphoria you feel when you look in a mirror? Wham! Why do you always pick female characters when playing video games? Wham! Your examples may vary.
