Note, I started this about two months ago and only posting now, hence “yesterday”.
Yesterday I read that the National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument no longer references transgenderism or queerness and any references LGBT+ only reference LGB.
This is erasure plain and simple. Trans-women such as Marsha P. Johnson were a big part of the Stonewall riots.
In any case, this erasure is a good lead-in to a topic I’ve been wanting to blog about for awhile: sexual and gender identity
I’m going to touch on sexual identity first. This is in some ways the easiest to address from a purely factual point of view. There are plenty of posts elsewhere, such on Facebook that cover it, so I’ll keep this short. What you were taught in high school biology about sex being binary was a gross oversimplification. The whole XX=Female and XY=Male is not that simple.
The key words used here in a scientific sense are genotype and phenotype. Genotype is basically what genes you have, and phenotype is what you “see”. A classic example is eye color. If you have brown eyes, you may have both genes for brown eyes, or one each of the genes for brown and blue eyes. Brown “wins out” here. It’s the dominant gene. But if you have blue eyes, except in some very edge cases, both your genes for eye color will be blue. So if you see someone with brown eyes (phenotype) they could have both genes for brown eyes or one gene for brown eyes and one for blue eyes (genotype). There’s no way to tell without actually looking at their genes.
In a similar fashion, sexual characteristics have both a genotype and phenotype. Typically if you have XX chromosomes, as an adult, you will develop breasts, have a uterus, have gametes in the form of eggs and be capable of carrying a fetus. And if you have XY chromosomes as you mature, you will tend to grow more body hair, produce sperm gametes and not be able of carrying a fetus.
But Mother Nature is never that simple. It’s fully possible to develop characteristics where one appears to be male, but have only XX chromosomes. Or appear to be female and have XY chromosomes. Things can get very complex very quickly, including XO (no second sex chromosome) XXY, XYY, and more. (the only combination that doesn’t work is YO. There’s simply too many genes on the X chromosome that are required).
Anyway, the point is, sex is NOT binary and short of looking at someone’s genotype (which most of us will never do) it’s basically impossible to say what’s going on at the chromosomal level.
Ok, enough about sex. There’s plenty of better posts on the topic.
Now I want to talk about gender, or at least gender identity.
I’ll start with saying that the scientific consensus on this is a bit less clear-cut. And for that reason and others I’m not really going to go down a deep hole based on facts. Rather I want to take a different approach.
I’m going to start by saying I identify as a cis-male. Some people seem to think that cis is meant as an insult. It’s not. In the field of science, cis and trans basically mean “on this side” and “on the opposite side” or “across”. Think about terms like “trans-Atlantic flight. It simply means flying across the Atlantic or to the opposite side. You don’t hear the prefix cis used as much, but one example in recent memory would be the term cislunar flight, from the Apollo missions. Often times in science one might skip using the prefix cis and assume that as the default and only use trans to highlight something that’s not cis.
So I could say simply “I identify as male” and that would be accurate, but adding the prefix cis makes it a bit more accurate. In this case my gender identity matches my phenotypical (and as far as I know genotypical) sex.
That said, if you still think that transgender isn’t a thing, or it’s somehow “wrong” or “evil” or “sick” I want you to do a thought experiment with me. I’m going to start with the assumption if you feel that way, you do not identify as trans. As started above that makes you cis.
Since I’m male I’m going to center this on male identify, but the exercise can work as well for a female.
“What makes me male?” It’s really a simple question. Right? I mean I could answer, “well I have XY chromosomes. But as illustrated above, that MIGHT not be true. (Though given the fact that I’m a biological father to both a man and woman tends to suggest it’s very likely to be true.) So let’s go a bit beyond that.
Why do *I* think I’m male. The more I think about it, the harder it is to answer.
Is it because I have a penis? Perhaps. But let’s say I was in a tragic accident and I lost that? Would I stop being male?
Is it because I grow hair on my chest? Perhaps. But if I shave it, do I somehow stop being male? Or if I lose it due to cancer or some other disease do I stop being male? Perhaps it’s fact that I don’t have breasts? Perhaps it’s muscle mass? But the truth is, as I’m growing older, I’m losing muscle mass. Does that mean I’m losing my maleness? What if I meet a woman who is similar in age to me and she has more muscle mass? Is she somehow more male than I am?
Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this. I can’t rely on any specific physical appearance to unequivocally state that I’m male.
Perhaps on certain actions? Long hair? Women in general are more likely then men to grow their hair longer. But that’s strictly cultural. And as someone who spotted a rat-tail or pony-tail or some sort of long hair for well over a decade, I don’t think that made me feel less male or somehow more female.
Perhaps it’s makeup? Well in some cultures, men very commonly wear make up (ancient Egypt for example).
Or is it shoes? I mean I’ll admit a woman in heels will make my head turn. But again, heel wearing is strictly cultural and in fact some of the earliest heels were worn by men, not women.
Many of the outward appearance we attribute to men or women are strictly cultural, not some innate part of the gender.
So, a few years ago, after giving this a lot of thought, I realized I couldn’t come up with a good set of criteria that clearly defined me as male. Now it’s possible I’m simply not creative enough to come up with a set of unambiguous criteria, but from talking to many others and giving it a lot of thought, I’m pretty convinced there’s no such list.
Ultimately like like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote about porn “I know it when I see it” I know I’m a man.
Just you as a reader probably deep down simply know, that you’re a man or a woman. You might not be able to articulate exactly why you know that, but you simply know that.
Now I want you to put yourself in a place of a transgender woman or transgender man. Deep down, just as strongly as you feel about your gender identity, they feel the same about theirs. The main difference is that their phenotype (appearance) simply doesn’t match what the feel deep down.
That’s really what it comes down to. It’s not a desire to sneak into a bathroom and perv on others. It’s not a desire to “mutilate” anyone. It’s simply (well partly not entirely simple) a desire to be able to express outwardly what one feels internally.
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