Again we see how our concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity are not obvious or given, and that they may vary from culture to culture and from epoch to epoch.
That does not necessarily mean that gender identities are “socially constructed”, but it does mean that gender variation is filtered through the language and mores of the local culture.
Illustration: Samurai kiss (Wikimedia) Young kabuki actors who played female roles were known as onnagata or kagema and doubled as sex workers.
Joan Roughgarden on sexual diversity in nature
Joan Roughgarden (previously known as Jonathan Roughgarden) is a respected evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, She argues that there are not only two sexes in nature (male and female), but a great range with many variations.
Clare Flourish, trans woman and trans blogger, looks at what Julia Serano has called female embodiment fantasies:
When I fantasise about doing something, or having something done to me, I fantasise about my body, and I fantasised about my body being female or being made to appear female from my mid teens. The fantasy aroused me sexually.
Now I have attained my female body, with my breasts and vagina, expressing myself feminine, I have fewer such fantasies. Because I am attracted to women, I am more likely to fantasise about women’s bodies sexually- my own, or my fantasy partner’s- than androphilic trans women.
When trans women have sexual fantasies they have to imagine themselves as women. What else could they possibly do?
For more on the topic of female embodiment fantasies and crossdreaming (sometimes referred to as “autogynephilia” – a toxic and transphobic term to be avoided) see the Crossdreamer blog.
New science reveals that old research on sex and gender in the animal kingdom is very much colored by the sexist stereotypes of Western society.
The researchers project their prejudices onto nature and find only what they have been taught to see: Brute promiscuous males chasing passive and chaste females.
Now the researchers find proactive females, males who care for their young, birds with more than two gender, fish that change sex, female bears with “penises” and so on and so forth.
Indeed, the tribes of our closest relative in the animal kingdom, the bonobo, is run by females. All bonobos are some shade of bisexual and prefer to use sex for problem-solving rather than violence.
The next time someone tells you that sexual and gender variation is unnatural, ask them to read this article from the BBC!
Dr. Jaimie Veale is looking for students and researchers who would be interested in studying transgender issues.
Dr. Jaimie Veale (who is transgender herself) has done some extremely important research in transgender people, documenting, for instance, a diversity and a complexity that goes far beyond the traditional dichotomies between two types of male to female transgender people.
In this context she has delivered compelling evidence that undermines the so-called “autogynephilia” theory of Dr. Ray Blanchard of Toronto, a theory that effectively reduces transgender identities to paraphilias.
I have presented some of her research here and here, and you can find more material over at her own web site.
In time Jaimie hopes to be able to build up a team of researchers interested in everything transgender (crossdreaming included). If you are interested in this kind of research, and would even like to contribute yourself, do not hesitate to contact her. She may even supervise students from a distance.
Jack Molay
“People definitely do not have sex to procreate,” Nicole Prause explains in this TED talk. The main reason cited by people is pleasure. But note that it is not the orgasm that brings this pleasure, but the feeling of arousal.
Nicole Prause is a sexual psychophysiologist trained at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
This article looks at how some trans men experience a change in sexual orientation after transitioning.
“Prior to my transition, I definitely considered myself a lesbian for sure,” says 33-year-old Will Krisanda. “I was primarily attracted to women, but now it’s completely shifted. I’m finding myself more attracted to men. After about a year [on testosterone], I started to accept my sexuality as a bisexual. That took me by surprise, because I’ve always been more comfortable with women. Testosterone is a powerful thing that’s going into your body and it has some very interesting and permanent changes.”
Some argue that their shift is caused by the increase in testosterone caused by the hormone replacement therapy, while others argue that it caused by the fact that by coming out they can now allow themselves to be themselves. In other words: A repressed sexual orientation comes to the surface.
Shifts in sexual orientation is also quite common among transitioning transgender women, especially among those that have been attracted to women, but who now finds themselves drawn to men as well.
The researcher and trans woman Jaimie Veale has argued that many trans women have suppressed their original desire for men because of a mix of internalised transphobia and homophobia. Trans people raised as men may be more vulnerable to this kind of bigotry.
Back in the 1950s there was a researcher named Alfred Kinsey who shocked Americans with trues story about their own sexuality. Instead of the black and white of the gender and sex stereotypes, he told the story about diversity and change. People were, for example, rarely strictly heterosexual or exclusively homosexual.
In addition to the two dimensions of the Kinsey scale (heterosexual vs. homosexual), he has added the dimension asexual vs. extremely sexual.
This gives us a grid that can be used to describe a person’s sexuality more precisely.
I should warn you, though, that this is not all there is to sex and gender, even if we restrict ourselves to people’s sex life. Here are some other axes to take into consideration:
Practice: Opposite sex vs. same sex (a man may, for instance, have sex with a man, even if his basic sexual attraction is towards women)
Gender expression: Masculine vs. feminine gender expressions (like in “butch” vs “femme”, all according to cultural norms)
Initiative: Whether you are predominantly proactive or reactive (like in “top” vs. “bottom”)
Self confidence: Whether you experience yourself as attractive and desirable in a sexual context.
Gender identity: The experience of being a woman, a man or being beyond the binary.
And note that for all these dimension, this is not only about finding a point on a scale. People may move from one part of the scale to another, depending on mood or where they are in their life journey.
There are two major strands in modern sexology, both going back to the late 19th century. One is binary, gender conservative and interprets gender variation as mental illness; the other is liberal, trans-positive and understands sex and gender as complex continuums.
I have read a lot of transgender history. Too much, probably. This also applies to the science of transgender and the philosophy of transgender.
There is one important lesson I have learned from all of this: Every single original idea had been presented before 1915.
The binary, pathologizing, tradition
100 years ago you would find it all:
The binary theory of two completely separate sexes, male and female, was already there. So was the idea that gender variations are perversions threatening society’s “evolutionary fitness”.
As now, many researchers argued that transgender conditions was caused by variations in the presence of hormones in the womb. This applied to sexual orientation too; many researchers had some difficulty keeping the two apart, then as now.
Others argued that it had to do with bad upbringings, blaming – for instance – strong mothers and weak fathers. Feminists, homosexuals and “primitive”, non-white, people could also be blamed for spreading these “diseases”.
Then, as now, the main fear was of the feminization of boys. Society needed strong, masculine, rational boys to fight wars, colonize the world and govern society, and because of this the emotional, feminine sissies – gay or trans – were a threat to the system.
(Tomboys and FTM transgender were also a problem, but did not constitute the same threat to the social order. After all, the fact that women wanted to be men made sense; the MTFs, on the other hand, had to be mad to desire the life of a woman.)
This binary tradition can be traced from Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and his book Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. via the Freudian psychoanalysts and John Money of the 20th century, up to the current autogynephilia theory of Ray Blanchard.
What unifies this tradition is not the explanation for what causes gender dysphoria or gender identity conflicts. The researchers will blame it on inherited degeneracy, hormones or feminist mothers, all depending on the researcher’s natural inclinations and cultural context. What unites them is the need to present gender variation as something unnatural and unacceptable.
Visit transcendmovement.com for some very interesting and provocative articles and podcasts on transgender, crossdressing, crossdreaming, sex, gender and sexuality.
