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Wheldrake -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/16/2010 1:42:45 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CallaFirestormBW
WHY does it matter what gender this person once was? I can sort of understand the people who would have problems with a pre-op trans person who, although mentally and emotionally living as the gender to which xhe identifies, and presenting as the gender to which xhe identifies, still has external sexual characteristics of the former gender. I can see how this would be problematic for some folks, and how it might cause worlds to rock a bit if things weren't explained and people given the opportunity to choose whether to continue the involvement... but once the change is complete, and the individual is, in all relevant ways, existing as the gender to which xhe identifies, why should it matter that xhe was once a -different- gender, as there is NO reason that I can think of why it would make any difference whatsoever.
I thought about it long and hard last night, and realized that, if I knew someone, and cared about hir, even if I were to find out that xhe was, at one point, a different gender, and even if we were -intimate-, I think that isn't even a question I'd worry about -asking-. If xhe was a pre-op, I might want to know, just because of needing to plan for the dichotomy, and I'd want to know how xhe felt about different practices that might show up the discrepancy during our... recreation... but other than that, why care?
I guess I'll take a stab at this, at the risk of ruffling some feathers because my views clash with some that have been, shall we say, forcefully expressed earlier in this thread.
All the xhes and hirs sort of do my head in, so (being a heterosexual man) I'll assume that I've formed an intimate relationship with a terrific woman who, one day, announces that she was born male. I wouldn't be horrified by this disclosure, and I wouldn't necessarily end the relationship, but it would matter to me for two basic reasons.
First, I just don't believe that a person who was born male (in an anatomical and hormonal sense, since some people on this thread seem to have a problem with the word "biological") could ever quite become a woman "in all relevant ways". In a lot of relevant ways, sure. But she'll have spent at least the first couple of decades of her life developing physically as a male and being treated as a male by those around her. Am I really to believe that all those years of maleness wouldn't have left some kind of mark, however subtle, on both her physique and her world view? Accordingly, I'd have trouble accepting her as fully female in the conventional sense of the word, although I'll concede that she could be pretty close.
Second, the experience of years of perceived gender conflict followed by gender reassignment must be intense to say the least. I can't even imagine what it be would like to feel that I was really in some sense a woman, despite my male body - in fact, I have trouble wrapping my head around what that might mean, although of course I can accept that some people do feel this way. So when my hypothetical woman made her sudden disclosure, I would probably see myself as having been kept in the dark about an aspect of her past that was not just important, but crucial and formative. It would leave me wondering how well I really knew her, and having to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about her personality and attitudes to take into account this new, huge piece of the puzzle. I suppose I would feel something similar if someone I had thought was a militant skeptic and atheist announced that she had once spent ten years in an ashram trying to awaken Kundalini - in other words, it would be sort of disorientating.
Just my personal, subjective thoughts, obviously. Thanks for asking an interesting question.
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