Transgender question

RubyT

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Hi.

In my lurking around here I've gotten the impression that a number of our members are identifying as transgender, so I though this is a good place to ask this question:

Why are you transgender, or why do you want to switch gender?

It is not meant accusatory, I acknowledge the human right to one's own identity, there is no need for anybody to defend themselves. I just want to learn.
 

Jux

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Sep 2, 2012
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I think you'll find these resources helpful in your search of knowledge and understanding.

http://tranifesto.com/transgender-faqs-and-info/ten-things-not-to-say-to-a-trans-person/
http://tranifesto.com/transgender-faqs-and-info/trans-etiquette-for-non-trans-people/
http://www.glaad.org/transgender/allies
 

Sleepy Sol

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Part of the straight white male brigade, but I'll add a bit of input to this, though I cannot speak for anyone but myself.

As far as I can tell, the simplest way to explain transpeople wanting to switch to their preferred gender is simply that they don't feel comfortable keeping a body that completely clashes with their desired gender identity. Simply just imagine what it would be like if you absolutely had to be a woman/man and felt extremely uncomfortable in your male/female body. I'm sure the number of posters who are actually trans could explain such feelings magnitudes better than my extremely simplified version, though.

The science behind such feelings is not really completely exact yet, but apparently transpersons' brains do tend to exhibit more qualities of their preferred gender.

http://transascity.org/the-transgender-brain/

So there is at least a notable scientific basis in what causes transgender people to develop the feelings they do.
 

RubyT

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Jux said:
I think you'll find these resources helpful in your search of knowledge and understanding.

http://tranifesto.com/transgender-faqs-and-info/ten-things-not-to-say-to-a-trans-person/
http://tranifesto.com/transgender-faqs-and-info/trans-etiquette-for-non-trans-people/
http://www.glaad.org/transgender/allies
Those don't help me at all. Or is it some sort of hint that I'm being rude by asking? I mean, this is an anonymous forum and I'm asking into the room, it's not like I try to embarass or offend anyone personally.

I'm just wondering what the driving motivation behind switching genders is.
Not because I'm judging, simply because I don't understand.

Is it the desire to conform with the other gender's social norms? Is it a rejection of the role traditionally assigned to your sex?

Like, I'm a guy, but I'm not a man's man. I do a lot of things traditionally associated with women. But I don't want to be a woman. I'm not sure I explicitely want to be a man either.
And I'm not implying that I'm the norm. I'm just genuinely curious what triggers the desire to go the next step(s).

EDITED the bold part to emphasize where my question is actually coming from.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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OH! I saw the title and thought this would be a like a hypothetical question inside a rhetorical question's body!

To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind? I mean when an other-kin approaches a doctor and asks to be turned into a lama, why is that considered so crazy? Or what if a man was dead convinced he was Napoleon and cried discrimination when the French don't let him lead their armies?

I just feel there needs to be more oversight on who can get the surgeries and what their mental state is.

For example during my Psychology course we had a guest speaker, a man-to-woman transgendered woman. I asked when she first realized she was a she. Her response? At the funeral of her(then him) wife and three daughters, who all died in a car crash where he was the driver. And I was open mouthed shocked that no one he knew thought that maybe, just maybe, he had had a complete mental breakdown and that he hadn't been in the proper state of mind to make such a radical decision. And damn when I asked if his "realization" had been an emotional reaction to all the women in his life dying at once, you would have thought I kicked a puppy on live TV such was the dead silence in the room.
 

RubyT

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Silentpony said:
OH! I saw the title and thought this would be a like a hypothetical question inside a rhetorical question's body!

To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind? I mean when an other-kin approaches a doctor and asks to be turned into a lama, why is that considered so crazy? Or what if a man was dead convinced he was Napoleon and cried discrimination when the French don't let him lead their armies?

I just feel there needs to be more oversight on who can get the surgeries and what their mental state is...
No offense, but your post is exactly what I don't want to see here.

I don't care what baffles you or what you think a transgender's state of mind is. This thread was not supposed to be "straight dude who doesn't get it vents his crazy theories and analogies."

This was supposed to be "Straight dude who doesn't get it listens to transgender people explain so he may get it".
 

Terminal Blue

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Silentpony said:
To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind? I mean when an other-kin approaches a doctor and asks to be turned into a lama, why is that considered so crazy? Or what if a man was dead convinced he was Napoleon and cried discrimination when the French don't let him lead their armies?
I don't mean to be rude, but the reason you get bad responses is that this is an extremely facetious argument. It was facetious when South Park made it, it's facetious now.

In this case, we have to assume that person wanting to be a lama was already going around perfectly disguised as an alpaca, and noone who met them ever knew or suspected they weren't an alpaca. We have to assume that the Napoleon guy was already successfully disguising himself as the Duke of Wellington and has been leading British armies for years. Gender, in reality, has no "outside". Being gender normative or cisgendered is not being outside of gender, it's just being gender normative or cisgendered.

If you imagine what gender would look like to someone looking in from the "outside", you might start to realize why I use the above examples. The fact is, whether you are cisgendered or transgendered you get up every day and you disguise yourself, we all do. The issue is that the act of disguising yourself as a man is normatively associated with having male genitals, because male genitals are often (mis)taken as the ultimate signifier of being a man. This may, incidentally, provide a clue to help answer the question which baffles you. People want to change their bodies because your body is assigned a great deal of importance, in our culture at least, in determining "who you are".

Did you read much Freud on your psychology course? Pretty much the foundational principle of the psychology of gender is that it is always a response to trauma.
 

Gengisgame

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evilthecat said:
Silentpony said:
To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind? I mean when an other-kin approaches a doctor and asks to be turned into a lama, why is that considered so crazy? Or what if a man was dead convinced he was Napoleon and cried discrimination when the French don't let him lead their armies?
People want to change their bodies because your body is assigned a great deal of importance, in our culture at least, in determining "who you are".
WE cannot fully know for sure what it is like to be another sex, it may not always be who we are, it could be a case of what importance we place on something, given the multitude of reasons people do things you've almost certainly had people transition if they feel people will treat them better.

State the obvious and say that I don't always believe that to be the case but I am wary of how people react at the idea when someone suggests looking at the mental health of someone before irreversible changes.
 

cthulhuspawn82

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I think its pointless for people to try and label themselves. If you aren't in a situation where the rules discriminate based on sex/gender (e.g. bathrooms, sports teams, "ladies night") then it doesn't matter what you are and its pointless to waste time labeling yourself. If you do run across a "Women only" sign, then the person who hung the sign gets to dictate what that means and what you label yourself doesn't matter.

Either way, it seems pointless to make a big deal out of saying, "I am X."
 

Jux

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RubyT said:
Those don't help me at all. Or is it some sort of hint that I'm being rude by asking? I mean, this is an anonymous forum and I'm asking into the room, it's not like I try to embarass or offend anyone personally.
No, I wasn't trying to insinuate you were being rude. Had I felt that way, I would have just said that. I was simply responding to a very delicate question in the best way I knew how.

I'm just wondering what the driving motivation behind switching genders is.
Not because I'm judging, simply because I don't understand.
As Mars said, it isn't so much about 'switching' genders. An analogy I used once before (and I was told it was a decent one) was that if you think about the most common male body as a PC with Windows (male gender) and the most common female body as a Mac with OS X (female gender) then a transgender person might be described as a computer with an incompatible operating system. Now, this is a bit of a crude analogy, because as I understand it there are some people that don't identify as either gender, or both, and this example doesn't really cover that, but I would hope it gets the general point across.

Is it the desire to conform with the other gender's social norms? Is it a rejection of the role traditionally assigned to your sex?
I think the first step is recognizing that there is a difference between sex and gender.
 

Dizchu

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Silentpony said:
I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds.
The only mental therapy a transgender person can get to "accept" their biological sex is to just throw their sense of self out the window. You can't change a transgender person into a cisgender person the same way you can't change a gay person into a straight person. You can repress their feelings, force them into abstinence, but you cannot make a gay person sexually attracted to the opposite gender only. Similarly with transgender people, you can't convince them that their birth-assigned gender is the shit somehow. I have literally been told to "cheer up" because I can pee while standing. I mean listen, to how ridiculous that sounds.

A lot of people accuse transgender people of pretending to be another gender. This is incorrect, but pretending does happen. Society forces transgender people to pretend to be a gender they cannot identify with. I mostly present myself as male to cause less conflict, but that is soul-crushing.
 

Fieldy409_v1legacy

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MarsAtlas said:
RubyT said:
Why are you transgender
Nobody knows for sure, but there is evidence of sexual dimorphism in the brain being more similiar to that of a trans person's identifying gender than those of the cisgender counterpart of the gender that they were assigned at birth.

or why do you want to switch gender?
Your brain is who you are. Transgender people aren't "switching gender", they're switching presentation. Its ridiculous in the same vein as saying that somebody is "becoming gay" because they come out of the closet.

I'm short on time, so I'll leave this little comic strip here that does a lot to explain...

I don't like that comic at all, calling someone transphobic because they aren't familiar with the technically correct way to say things is too much. Transphobics are people who want to oppress and hurt transsexuals, not some guy who got the words sex and gender confused but didn't have any malicious intent.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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MarsAtlas said:
Okay, I think I understand. But from my understanding, your sex is the biological way you were born(male/female) and gender is your social perception(masculine/feminine). Assuming that's the correct terminology, your biological sex can't be changed, correct? We can't implant ovaries or testicles that would allow for the production of eggs/sperm, respectively. So if a person says they are female when they are provably male(as in DNA), why are they not just...wrong? As in they hold an incorrect opinion?

On the same note, as male/female has no real bearing on masculine or feminine, why do we use the phrase transgender? If someone says they're feminine....then okay, right? We can have feminine males and masculine females and any mix thereof. If the gender is how you identify personally, where does the trans part come in? Surely they're just gender...aware, for lack of a better term.

And I don't think we can use the term transsexual, as we can't really change that. Someone who had the operation wouldn't be trans anything, as they'd just be I dunno, a more masculine female. Not a male, but a more masculine female. They haven't really transcended their sex, correct? They've simply had a cosmetic surgery to comport their physical appearance with their gender. They're male/female DNA is still fully intact.
 

Jux

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Silentpony said:
Okay, I think I understand. But from my understanding, your sex is the biological way you were born(male/female) and gender is your social perception(masculine/feminine). Assuming that's the correct terminology, your biological sex can't be changed, correct? We can't implant ovaries or testicles that would allow for the production of eggs/sperm, respectively. So if a person says they are female when they are provably male(as in DNA), why are they not just...wrong? As in they hold an incorrect opinion?

On the same note, as male/female has no real bearing on masculine or feminine, why do we use the phrase transgender? If someone says they're feminine....then okay, right? We can have feminine males and masculine females and any mix thereof. If the gender is how you identify personally, where does the trans part come in? Surely they're just gender...aware, for lack of a better term.

And I don't think we can use the term transsexual, as we can't really change that. Someone who had the operation wouldn't be trans anything, as they'd just be I dunno, a more masculine female. Not a male, but a more masculine female. They haven't really transcended their sex, correct? They've simply had a cosmetic surgery to comport their physical appearance with their gender. They're male/female DNA is still fully intact.
I think it gets sticky when you start defining men and women solely by their sex organs. What about women born without ovaries? What about men born without testicles? What about people born with both sets of organs? And defining people by chromosomal arangement isn't any better, as there are quite a number of possibilities aside from XX and XY.
 

Silvanus

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Silentpony said:
To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind?
Here [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105355/] is a pretty useful paper from the National Library of Medicine. The evidence indicates that therapy is not generally successful alone, and that surgery is usually the most effective method available.

Out of the Shadows: It is time to mainstream treatment for Transgender patients said:
The least invasive intervention would be counseling such patients to accept the circumstance. As already noted, however, no available data support the success of such therapy [...] Although current transgender treatment is relatively invasive and does not address the problem completely, it is the most successful intervention available.
There're a number of other scientific sources I gathered here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.870351-your-child-is-transgendered?page=3#21808035], supporting the consensus that reassignment surgery is the most effective method by a number of different measures.
 

RubyT

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MarsAtlas said:
Gender roles have nothing to do with it. I'm trans woman who is a butch dyke who fancies pugilism along other contact sports, hates dresses, is a domme to men.
Fascinating.
No offense, I don't consider you a freak or some such. I just think people like you give us new insights into the human condition.

I always assumed all "roles" or "identities" were man-made, cultural, societal. You were raised as a male, I suppose, but changed to the correct gender later on, female in your case, despite apparently being comfortable with most of the male gender role.

So what makes you female?

Again, not an accusatorial question, you don't have to defend your femininity to me (or anybody).
It's a philosophical question. You (probably) have a physically male body and seem to enjoy lots of the male role, so how did the wish to be female manifest?

Is there a "sex identity" underneath all the cultural roles imposed on us (including man and woman). And if so, what is it like?

Again, I'm short on time, my apologies. Family is visiting.
No problem. Maybe you'll have more time later on.
 

Vault101

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Silentpony said:
OH! I saw the title and thought this would be a like a hypothetical question inside a rhetorical question's body!

To the question, it honestly baffles me. I'm not against transgenders by any means, I'm just utterly at a loss for why they'd rather change their body than their minds. I know that sounds harsh, but what is therapy if not changing your mind? I mean when an other-kin approaches a doctor and asks to be turned into a lama, why is that considered so crazy? Or what if a man was dead convinced he was Napoleon and cried discrimination when the French don't let him lead their armies?
for fucks sake can we not keep comparing otherkin to being transgender? its disrespectful and the existance of otherkin doesn't invalidate the identities of trans people