If You Could Be...

So I was casting about for a topic to blog on. (I don't usually have difficulty coming up with something, but given that I try to pump these things out once a week I guess it's inevitable that sooner or later I'd have nothing in particular in mind when the time came, right?) I mentioned this to my partner and she joked that I could borrow a page from those silly corporate exercises and ask my readers "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?".

Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.

If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?

The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.

Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.

I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman

I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.



What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.

What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...

[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general

[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine

[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female

[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women

[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do

[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc

[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature

[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy

[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life

[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life


To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.

Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.

But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".

I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:


[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already

[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want

[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you

[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually

[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too

[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important

[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts

[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those

[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually

[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had


———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts