The First Gay or Transsexual Caveman??? WHUCK????

image is from here

This is one of those "how about that?" stories that makes the rounds on and offline. A gay caveman?? A transsexual caveman?? It appears, verbatim, on about two and half pages--at least--of Google links.

Let's do a little bit of cultural anthropological and social-political analysis, shall we? "Caveman" and "gay" and "homosexual" and "transsexual" are all VERY white, Western, Anglo-English terms and concepts. They exist in a time and a place that is more or less "now" and "here" if you live in places where English is a first language, a mother tongue. They are all anti-Indigenous, or woefully ignorant of Indigenous societies and traditions.

Those English-language terms have no meaning outside this Anglo world. None. At all. 

The whole story pretends that these terms transcend time and place, culture and worldview. Here's one bit of proof: it doesn't occur to those who are promoting this story to wonder if the remains of the person was Two-Spirit. Why? What about asexual? What about intersex? What about intergender? What about "none of the above"? 

It doesn't occur to the people promoting this story that heterosexuality didn't exist yet. Because in so many places, it didn't exist. That term and reality is also culture-bound and is contemporary. Whether or not males and females have sex, had sex, or will have sex, is not an indication of "sexual orientation". Nor is it an indication of anything else--certainly not of what any individual welcomed or wanted regarded "sex". 

"Gender orientation" is also a contemporary concept, bound by culture and time. "Transsexual" is a new phenomenon. So is "being Gay". There's no such thing as a transsexual or gay "caveman", folks. And "caveman" is not likely a term anyone used to describe himself, if there even were people who differentiated themselves by what we now call "gender". The term "third gender" assumes there were two in a given society. Guess what? In many there were none at all. And in many Western societies it was assumed there was one--yes, one--male/man, and that female/woman was simply an inverted and inferior version of the perfect HIM. (For much more on that, see the book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, by Thomas Laqueur.)

The whole story is really just another racist, anglo-centric essentialising effort by some contemporary people wanting some form of attention and acclaim to pretend they can appropriate the remains of past people, disrupting and invading and violating graves and sacred spaces, into the present white Western worldview that pretends how we are now is how we all have been, everywhere. Guess what? That's not even true about NOW. Even NOW there are many ways of being, roles, duties, and preferences that don't match up at all with any English-language terms that approximate gender or sex. In some societies you do what you do--childcare or warfare, and what you do is determined by social-economic-political realities, such as how many people are there to do what needs to get done; the issue isn't "identity" as Westerners think about that, at all; it's about getting shit done.

Here's something that's much more likely in 2900-2500BECD (Before the Era of Christian Domination):  

The way that the people of that region and era conceived of things like "sexuality" and "gender" are not knowable to us. Westerners and whites ought to stop violating sacred burial sites. Period. End of story.

What follows is all from the Telegraph, *here*.

How about that?

First homosexual caveman found

Archaeologists have unearthed the 5,000-year-old remains of what they believe may have been the world's oldest known gay caveman.

Archeologists believe they have discovered a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic Photo: ALAMY

10:00PM BST 06 Apr 2011

 

The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves.

"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova.

"Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual," she added.

According to Corded Ware culture which began in the late Stone Age and culminated in the Bronze Age, men were traditionally buried lying on their right side with their heads pointing towards the west, and women on their left sides with their heads pointing towards the east. Both sexes would be put into a crouching position.

The men would be buried alongside weapons, hammers and flint knives as well as several portions of food and drink to accompany them to the other side.

Women would be buried with necklaces made from teeth, pets, and copper earrings, as well as jugs and an egg-shaped pot placed near the feet.

"What we see here doesn't add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms. The grave in Terronska Street in Prague 6 is interred on its left side with the head facing the West. An oval, egg-shaped container usually associated with female burials was also found at the feet of the skeleton. None of the objects that usually accompany male burials  such as weapons, stone battle axes and flint knives  were found in the grave.

"We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic," archaeologist Katerina Semradova told a press conference on Tuesday.

She said that archeologists had uncovered an earlier case dating from the Mesolithic period where a female warrior was buried as a man.

She added that Siberian shamans, or latter-day witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories to appropriate to their elevated position in society.

"But this later discovery was neither of those, leading us to believe the man was probably homosexual or transsexual," Semeradova said.

The Corded Ware culture takes its name from the frequent use of decorative cord impressions found its pots and covered much of North, Central and Eastern Europe.

It is also known as a single-grave and battleaxe culture due to separate burials and the Mena s [sic] habit of being buried with stone axes.

The Best Self-love Story is Not My Own: A Struggle Towards Presence and Wholeness

photograph is from here

Many children and teens have needs for connection, for touch, for pleasure, and we are all easily coerced and can also be coercive (whether through force or pleading), to get our needs met at the expense of someone's humanity. This happened in my life. I engaged another person, a few years younger, in a sexual relationship when I was seventeen. He was my cousin.

"Love" didn't drive me to manipulate him. "Love" didn't drive him to want the acts to continue. Nor did basic respect and regard.

I abused him. And the dynamic, fully set in motion by me, shifted over a few months to the point that he was more interested in being sexual than I was. That's what I did to him: My interactions with him amped up his sexual desire for a form of sex with me that was not connected to care or concern for someone's human well-being. By me self-servingly instigating sexual contact with him, I was one of several males who showed him what he was worth.

Though my actions, he learned how to use others sexually, including me. In front of him and his therapist, I took full responsibility for getting that manipulative choreographed period of my abusiveness and selfishness going, for initiating and continuing actions designed to get my needs met at his spiritual expense. I was not being considerate of him. I was not concerned to know about his history of other abuse (of which I had no knowledge at the time). Concern about how he'd already been harmed might have interfered with me getting my needs met. I was not particularly interested in knowing how my actions might later impact his life. I sexually abused him. And I used him also.

[written by me; the source of this, in a slightly different form, is *here*, in the comments section.]

At nine, I was clear about a few things:

I knew the world I was in didn't welcome or want my feelings in their raw state. And, in order to hold them all inside, I had to create spaces in me for them to be put away. When people ask me how I am feeling, the most honest answer is this: "I don't know. I could take a few guesses though--if you'd like for me to."

I knew that there was something to do with race that was quite awful, tyrannical, evil. It had to do, in my world, with what whiteness was and how it was supposed to be expressed, as a ruling force. It had to do with people who were not white being considered less than human, while whites were considered something more than human: geniuses and saints, for example. White stories never told the whole truth about anything, I came to find out. And the stories of the most evil expressions of whiteness cannot be told without some whites shouting "It's a lie!! That never happened." Never mind the past; it is happening right now.

I also knew there was something going on with gender, although I didn't have that term when I was nine. I knew that the way society was organised meant that some kinds of boys--white, athletic ones--were highly valued, and other boys were not valued as much. Boys like me were not valued at all. And this put me in close proximity with girls, who were despised by boys for reasons I could only determine to be jealousy--jealousy that girls could express some range of emotion that boys didn't dare reveal (even while they felt all the same feelings as girls).

At nine, I began to consciously dis-identify with boys and identify with girls. But well before then, at age three and four, I was very sensitive and relational. I bonded strongly with one care-giver, who was related to me but was not my mother. My mother was ill. My feelings of sadness about my mother's life is a blanket not easily cast off. Her despair is a deep pit I can fall into with her. She's more of a sibling to me, really.

By the age of seventeen, I was feminist-identified. I also knew--well before then--that I was not heterosexual and that heterosexuality was not humane, really. It was presented as natural, but was so obviously maintained by forces quite unnatural, very social, very political. If heterosexuality were so very natural, it wouldn't need force to support it at all. And men who claim to be het wouldn't feel so very, very threatened at the mere suggestion they might not be. And they wouldn't have to prove their heterosexuality in such anti-loving ways against the bodies and minds of girls and women. I call that orientation many men have towards women, "haterosexuality". It's not love.

In my fondness for boys and later men, there was a kind of longing for connection that I couldn't explain. I wanted intimacy and closeness, but sex threw me back against myself. Sex was powerful, terrifying, and bleak. Sex was loaded up with nightmares that I didn't understand. But it was also filled with dreams as yet unrealised. One time, when sixteen, I had a lovely emotional-erotic relationship with a teenage boy. I was year older than him. We were in bed together, naked, and our lips met, open mouths, not kissing, but breathing each other's air. This felt like life to me. He was ripped away from me like a needed rehydration IV drip tube by a cruel doctor. The cruel doctor was his evil step-father. My first intense emotional connection with a boy ended with him being torn away and moved away.

I then made a go at heterosexual relationship with a young women I liked very much and enjoyed the company of. These feelings were mutual. I respected her a great deal. She had more romantic feelings for me, filled with hopes for feelings from me I couldn't feel for women because I wasn't heterosexual and also because I loved women too much to do to them what het routinely men do to women. (Turning them into objects, possessions, things to be controlled, manipulated, destroyed.) I had no desire to do this with or to women. I felt possessed by my feelings for boys and later men. Before she and I got involved, I had told my girlfriend this--of my relationship with the boy, for example; that I was not heterosexual. I'm thankful I did that. Because males betraying women is a common occurrence, and I wouldn't want the burden of feeling as though I had betrayed her.

My ex-boyfriend also got involved with a girl after we were separated by force. I think we both gave up on finding love with males. The damage of his evil step-father's disdain for him left permanent scars. The world would be cruel to such boys. That was clear. Almost as cruel as het boys were to girls or men were to girls and women. But not quite that cruel. Nothing is quite that cruel, really.

I later fancied myself a lesbian. I fancied myself a lesbian separatist. (A celibate one.) I longed for this option, which was completely impossible. Since I couldn't be with males in any emotionally real way, publicly, why bother?

A het male friend of mine--we've since parted company on good terms--told me last year of his choice to stop playing male-dominant romance games and sex games with women. And he spoke of his choice to be celibate. This was a choice I had already made, but not at all for the reasons he made it. He knew he needed to unlearn his mastery of seduction of women. He was too good at, which means there was too much dishonesty in it and too much betrayal of women's souls. And of his own. He knows he isn't here to be an oppressor. He is not white, by the way.

In his period of celibacy, he told me of a romantic, affectionate connection he had with a woman his age. They'd hold hands, publicly, and find a bench in their city and would sit, curled up in each other. Once they spent a whole night like that, outside. This was a new way of being for him. It was quite wonderful. It opened him to her and to himself. I was happy for him. But it also made me sad.

I asked him to imagine never being able to be affectionate with any woman publicly. To imagine a world that would threaten or enact violence if he dared show any woman any degree of romantic interest, affection, adoration, desire, sexual longing. Even, for example, sitting across a restaurant table from her, looking too long into her eyes without speaking. That if he even indicated this kind of interest or desire or affection, let alone demonstrating it publicly, overtly, he might be beaten to death, or, at least, there would be men who would desire to do this to him and to anyone he was with.

I told him, "That's my world." He thought about it seriously for a moment, and then banished the feelings he felt when the thought sunk into his body. He purged himself of the knowledge of that life. He couldn't bear it. I live it and he couldn't bear it, and so it made me wonder: How do I bear it? I bear it by denying myself any possibility of finding love with any man. I bear it by destroying the possibility of it. I bear it by being both celibate and asexual.

One of my most accomplished acts of self-destruction is something I've written about here before. But for those who missed that telling, I'll go over aspects of it for you now.

Ten years before turning forty-eight, just over a decade ago, I was with someone sexually in ways that I didn't think was emotionally possible for me. All my longing for intimacy and affection--even for mouths meeting--was cast aside because a man wanted sex with me, regularly, monthly, in motel rooms or in any place he happened to be living. I never let him into my place. I had learned by age thirteen that men can want sex from you in ways that result in them getting it, or taking it, or ripping it from you--they take far more, of course, and what they leave you with is horror and emptiness. I'd learned to think that the only reason any man would want me emotionally was to get at me sexually. This man wanted sex, and didn't know very much about affection or intimacy--most especially with and toward himself. He was lost to himself, especially since he was sexually assaulted by the same man who assaulted me when I was twelve.

The predator got to each of us probably within a couple of months of each other. Who knows how many other males he abused, or females. This shared history--a co-nightmare--was never spoken of between us, although I tried to speak with him of it in our adulthood. He couldn't do it. He still can't.

We didn't speak too much at all, actually. He'd call me. He'd let me know where he was. His call meant he wanted sex. He didn't have to ask for it and I didn't have to consent. That's good, in that I wouldn't have been able to consent, so it's good we by-passed that formality. He called and his want was my desire. I went to please him, and did so. However he wanted to be pleased, that's what I did. I didn't feel abused by him, only used. Except once when he bobbed my head up and down on his penis. Then I didn't feel human at all. But I was, more typically, regularly used, without any stated objections from me. This is how I know consent-based laws on rape and assault mean nothing. Women around the world have sex with their husbands because to not do so is to be beaten. So they willingly allow themselves to be used as things. There's no consent: he pulls her into a room and fucks her. Her will is not to have sex; her will is to not be beaten. That's their "sex life".

That's the sex life of too many married women--women married to men. No one, it seems, wants to fully acknowlege that reality and so men's voices flood in at this point noting how they don't treat women like that and never would. And women's voices flood in saying, "I like sex! I want it and I enjoy it and often I'm the initiator with my boyfriend/husband!" And I say, "That's good. I'm happy for you. Now, what about all the women for whom that isn't the case? Shall we be concerned about their happiness, or is that too much of a downer?" They don't wish to discuss it. Women turn away. Men scoff. And they need to tell me again how much they like sex, and welcome it, and how good it is for everyone on Earth, if only people would let go of their shame about it.

I know they like it. I believe them. But the people who step forth to say how much they adore their country don't, in any way, speak for those who are being destroyed by it. And that destruction causes shame and it creates vast expanses of silence. So when these people who love sex ask around for who doesn't love it as much as they do, there's lots of shame in people who are confused by what sex is for them. And the sex-lovers take the silence as consent that everyone loves it as much as they do.

With that man, in the motels, who was het to the world but not in his desires, I also felt "this is it; this is all you'll ever get from men". He was my cousin. (He still is.) I don't see him any more. I don't see him in part because if he wanted sex I can't say no. I've never said no to him. I value self-destruction too much for that. I have a hard time saying no to all forms of self-neglect at once. I've yet to figure that one out: how to love all of me at once. Or, how to love myself enough to stop being so self-neglectful. But I love myself enough to avoid him and to not take his calls, which fortunately have dwindled down to almost never occurring.

Self-love is what I want for women that I can't manage for myself. I love women in a way I can't love men. That's not something most het men or gay men understand in the least. I understand it. And I live it.

Happy Valentine's Day, to all the readers out there who are women and gay men. I hope you are not being abused today by anyone. I pray you are not married to a man who is a terrorist, or are with a callous user of your body. I hope you are not bonded to someone who cannot love you. I hope you know love, for your self most especially. If you do, let me know how you got there.

It's not true that if you cannot love yourself, you're incapable of loving others. It may be true that for wholeness and presence, both must happen simultaneously.

Here is a love letter I wrote to someone once:
To Andrea, With Love

Here is the best self-love story I've ever read:
First Love

Love to you, dear reader. Do something special for yourself today. And I'll do the same. Something that feels like love.

[This was slightly revised on 15 Feb. 2011.]

Calling All Intersex, Intergender, Asexual, Anti-binary Gender Radicals and Anti-Heteropatriarchy Activists

image for trans/gender activism is from here

I am wanting to organise support and empowerment to those of us who are not part of the binaries of sex and gender to gather in cyberspaces to discuss how to better support radical feminist activism and other radical women's activism who may not ever identify as "feminist". (It is, after all, an English word, and for most humans, English is not a first language. And many women do perceive "feminist" to be a specifically "Western" or "white" term, and that doesn't mean those activists aren't doing radical anti-patriarchal work.

The sex and gender binaries are set up patriarchally and oppressively in the West, and elsewhere--but not universally, with violence, with coercion, with harassment, with subordinating practices including bullying, beating, and rape. These forms of violence, as well as institutional discrimination and industrial strength degradation, disproportionately targets females, girls, "feminised" or "feminine" children and adults, and women. The violence and discrimination is disproportionately perpetrated by males, boys, and men, against girls and women, and also against male children and adults.

Class and race are gendered such that being dominant in any hierarchy adds "masculine" status and privileges, while being "on the bottom" of any hierarchy "feminises" the oppressed groups.

 Across class, race, region, and ethnicity, there are people who "don't fit" the binaries, because the binaries are not natural or inclusive of all humans. One strategy has been for gay men to claim to be "real men", which often has misogynistic implications and courses of political action. Another strategy has been for transgender and transsexual people to insist on being identified using the terms of the master which reinforce the oppressive/misogynistic/patriarchal binary.

I'm hoping to hear from people, by email, by comment, here, who support the group "woman" being identified as radical feminists identify that group: the people who are not male and not men who are oppressed by male supremacy and by men interpersonally and institutionally for being "girls" and "women".

I'm wanting to support the realities and existence of asexual people, who, for many reasons, opt out of hetero/sexual social rules and codes of conduct, including how we "do" relationships, and how we express affection and intimacy. I'm wanting to explore, here, how being sexual can be a form of acting out child sexual abuse or heteropatriarchal upbringing. I see heteropatriarchal upbringing as a form of spiritual and psychic harm, privileging some, punishing others. Some of us, like me, experience both privileging and punishment. As someone who is asexual, politically and personally, I reject hetero/patriarchal ways of being in relationship as inhumane and oppressive, misogynistic and often racist and classist too. I see my white gay class-privileged brothers not usually questioning and resisting CRAP, instead of confronting and working to end capitalist, racist heteropatriarchy.

I'm wanting to support the realities of lesbian existence, of women's existence, who do experience assaults against their female bodies because of the political meaning of them in patriarchal societies. I believe this experience of oppression, dehumanisation, degradation, violation, and subordination due to being a girl or a woman with a female body warrants respect and regard as we strategise resistance movements and political courses of action to challenge the ideologies and imperatives of white het male supremacy and to effectively compost CRAP.

I'm also calling on all WHITE WESTERN non-trans and trans activists who proclaim "transgender people" or "transsexuals" to be THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP ON EARTH to knock off the racist, Western privileged nonsense. It's an insult to all people of color, especially girls and women, who experience things you'll never even hear about, unless you go out of your way to do so. This isn't to minimise anyone's pain or suffering, but it is to note that you DO have white and Western privileges, and often non-ESL and non-Third and Fourth World privileges. And, in case you didn't notice, most non-trans women and girls do not.

Thoughts? Interest? I welcome hearing from people who basically are in agreement here, not from non-trans and trans activists who want to reinforce the gender binary by insisting that everyone is either "one [dominant, statused] gender" or "the opposite [subordinated, stigmatised] one". And from intersex people generally--those who were raised as girls or as boys, but who have had to find their own ways as intersex people, who had surgeries they didn't welcome or want, or who have had no surgeries and want to be fully statused as complete and whole human beings just as you are.

Gender Terms: An introduction to the lingo of gender in the Anglo-white West

image is from here

Increasingly, for now, I am wanting to analyse how dominant society presents information about "gender". My experience  within my own queer realms, is that in the last twenty years, there has been a concerted effort to de-politicise gender, presenting it instead as an ever-increasingly fluid and complex social reality, as if whte het male supremacy has effectively disappeared as an ideological and institutionalised force that determines a great deal about how gender is expressed, enforced, and sometimes survived.
 

From Below The Belt blog: 1.14.2010. Please click on the title just below to link back. My comment follows, along with a couple by another member of Below The Belt, who goes by the moniker aqueertheory.

Gender 101

My previous (and first post) dealt with the concept of femme gender and whether or not it needs to be legitimized. An excellent suggestion was made that I make myself clear on what I mean by gender and the terms that I’m using and that I do a little Gender 101.

Usually with a 101, we start with vocabulary so that we can understand the words being used. Here are some common terms that are used when talking about sex and gender:

Sex: A term used to describe a type of physical body, can be based on primary and secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and/or chromosomes.

Primary Sex Characteristics: Sex characteristics that are directly related to the reproductive system and encompass genitals

Secondary Sex Characteristics: Sex characteristics that are not directly part of reproductive organs and develop during puberty (such as breasts)

Genitals: External sex organs that are directly related to the reproductive system

Reproductive System: The organs of a body that allow a species to reproduce

Gender: A social and psychological identity

Gender Roles: Sets of behavior and assigned by society that are supposed to correspond to traditional ideas about gender

Male Sex: Usually assigned at birth based on primary sex characteristics, such as the presence of a penis, scrotum, and testicles. The assignment can be based on hormones, other primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes

Female Sex: Usually assigned at birth based on primary sex characteristics, such as the presence of a clitoris, vagina and vulva. The assignment can be based on hormones, other primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes

Man: A gender identity socially assigned to those who are assigned with the male sex at birth as well as a gender identity that one may come to through experiences and identification.

Woman: A gender identity socially assigned to those who are assigned with the female sex at birth as well as a gender identity that one may come to through experiences and identification.

Gender Fluid: A person whose gender identity and presentation fluctuates

Third Gender: A person whose gender identity and presentation does not fit within concepts of man or woman

Intersex: Intersex bodies are that do not fit within the concept of an exclusively male or female sexed body.

Biological Sex: A term used to describe the sex of the physical body – a controversial term

Cisgendered: A term used to describe those whose gender identity matches that of the sex they were assigned at birth

Transgender: An umbrella term to describe those whose gender identity falls outside of the normative assignment of male sex = male gender and masculine behavior and gender presentation, or of female sex = female gender and feminine behavior and gender presentation

Transsexual: A term originating in the medical field to describe one who has through medicine changed a part of their sex either through hormones or surgery

Feminine: Characteristics of a person that are associated with femaleness and female gender roles

Masculine: Characteristics of a person that are associated with maleness and male gender roles

Butch: Can be used to mean a masculine gender identity for a person assigned female at birth, or a masculine gender identity for a gay-identified man or a gender identity that encompasses some masculine or what is defined as butch characteristics originating in the lesbian community

Femme: Can be used to mean a feminine gender identity for a person assigned female at birth that identifies as a lesbian, or a feminine gender identity for a gay-identified man or a gender identity that encompasses some feminine or what is defined as Femme characteristics originating in the lesbian community

Boi: Usually a term for a young masculine or gender fluid identified person who was assigned female at birth, also commonly used among young gay-identified men

Boy: Used as a term for a young masculine or male-identified person, sometimes used by anyone with a young masculine gender identity

Girl: Used as a term for a young feminine or female-identified person

Grrl: A term originating among third-wave feminists to replace traditional ideas of young girls as tender and passive

Effeminate: Gender characteristics associated with the behavior of gay men
Normative: Follows cultural and social norms

We are usually taught that there are two sexes – male and female-and two corresponding genders to the two sexes – man and woman, in some circles, that is considered the end all and be all of sexed bodies and gender identities. In other circles it is acknowledged that there are more than two sexes, that there are those who are intersex, and that the range of sexed bodies is quite large with no clear demarcation between the two. Historically and currently in some areas, the concept that there are two sexes has been considered a simple fact of biology and that there are two corresponding genders a simple organizing principle of society.

Recent developments in gender studies, and findings in anthropology and sociology have challenged both viewpoints. Several theorists, namely Anne Fausto-Sterling have challenged the idea that sex as we know it is a biological fact. She points out that the range of sexed bodies is far larger than simply male or female and that historically and currently our concepts of what constitutes ‘male’ or ‘female’ hormones, the penis and/or the clitoris as well as secondary sex characteristics have been socially influenced for as long as the concepts have been around. Other challenges on Western concepts of gender can be found in comparative Anthropological gender studies show that many other cultures have a different gender structure, they may have more than two genders or entirely different characteristics assigned to the genders they have, even if they two follow the male=man and female=woman taxonomy.

However, one does not necessarily need to look to academia to understand and know that many people’s lived experience differs from what is considered normative in terms of sex and gender. Communities of differently sexed and differently gendered folks, and other sexual minorities such as the BDSM-Leather-Fetish and LGBT communities, have a wide variety of gender identities that are created, celebrated, contested and that move into other communities. The world at large includes a plethora of sexed bodies and gendered experiences and the ways in which I have experienced the world as someone who identifies as a Femme, but not necessarily a woman, and the experiences of others all across the sex and gender spectrum are the types of experiences I would like to examine, celebrate and delve into in my writing. This is just the tip of the iceberg – it is Gender 101 and I look forward to Gender 201 and beyond.

aqueertheory

Nice post! One of the best things about setting out a list of definitions is that they can then be played around with and the nuances in them can really be brought out. Just some things I would add: 

Sex: A term used to describe a type of physical body, can be based on primary and secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and/or chromosomes. Nevertheless, some people's assigned sex, usually given at birth, might not match the sex that they feel themselves to be. Hence, sex may also be a psychic, experiential and mental phenomenon. And others might not feel a belonging to any particular sex, preferring to identify as "genderqueer."

Gender Roles: Sets of behavior, life-style patterns, occupations (the list can go on...) assigned by society that are supposed to correspond to traditional ideas about gender

Third Gender (this could be agender, genderqueer, fourth, fifth gender etc...): A person whose gender identity and presentation does not fit within concepts of man or woman

Saturday, January 23, 2010, 9:42:03 AM

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aqueertheory
Cisgendered: A term used to describe those whose gender identity matches that of the sex they were assigned at birth. Perhaps we need to differentiate between sex and gender here, because there doesn't necessarily need to be a "match" between sex and gender. For instance, Julia Serano understands the terms "transsexual" and "cissexual" to refer more to people who identify and live as a sex that is different from the one they are assigned at birth: http://juliaserano.livejournal.com/14700.html
 
“Trans” means “across” or “on the opposite side of,” whereas “cis” means “on the same side of.” So if someone who was assigned one sex at birth, but comes to identify and live as a member of the other sex, is called a “transsexual” (because they have crossed from one sex to the other), then the someone who lives and identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth is called a “cissexual.”
 
One thing that we might reconsider, also, is defining primary sex characteristics and genitals in terms of reproductive function or the reproductive system. I think it might be better to emphasize that these organs function also for pleasure and relaxation, for bonding with a partner, for excretion etc... The argument that penises and vaginas' main function is reproductive is usually used by conservatives to claim privileges and superiority for heterosexuality and the two-parent heterosexual family. On the other hand, recognizing the multiple functions of these body parts might be essential to free us from the idea that the most legitimate sex is the kind that occurs for reproductive purposes. Actually, I would wager that most of the sex in the world does not occur with that goal in mind. 
 
In any case, really interesting post, looking forward to Gender 201 and to more discussion on these definitions!

Julian Real
I just want to add to the list:

Asexual: someone who doesn't desire or wish to participate in compulsory sexual cultures. Sometimes this term is used to describe people who have no identifiable "libido" or "sex drive" or sexual attraction and interest as that is generally understood to occur in the human population.

Intergender: an identity or experience of not feeling like either of the two enforced Western/non-Indigenous genders, and/or someone who feels like both of them.

And to add to this one:

Intersex: Intersex people are those whose bodies or physiologies don't match what dominant society says "a male person" or "a female person" are supposed to biologically be or physiologically look like. There are various conditions identified by the dominant medical establishment as "intersex conditions" of birth, some of which may become more noticeable during puberty.

Gender: in contemporary Western and non-Indigenist cultures, it is enforced as a binary, oppositional, hierarchical system of power relations, in which men oppress, dominate, and subordinate females, girls, women, and boys and men presumed to be gay or perceived to be "too feminine".

*          *          * 

For more information, see these webpages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual

From that site is this information:

Asexuals, while typically lacking in sexual desire for either sex, may engage in purely emotional romantic relationships. Terms concerning this:

• aromantic: lack of romantic attraction towards anyone of any gender
• biromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of either gender
• heteroromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of the opposite gender
• homoromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of the same gender
• panromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of any gender or lack of gender
• transromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of variant or ambiguous gender
• polyromantic: romantic attraction towards person(s) of more than one gender or sex but without implying, as biromantic does, that there are only two genders or sexes

Also, we ought to note that some people who are what has traditionally in the West been termed "bisexual" may identify instead as one of several other terms: pansexual, omnisexual, or ambisexual (think "ambidextrous":  someone who can write or do other activities with either hand).

Also completely left out of the Gender 101 discussion are Two-Spirit people. Two-Spirit, is a term used to describe various people in many different Indigenous ethnic groups. It is not exactly synonymous with being either "intersex", "bisexual", or "third gender", but may refer to each of those in some cases. As is the case with many non-anglo-origin terms, Two-Spirit doesn't translate neatly into Western-Anglo conceptions of gender and sex. Two-Spirit may refer to someone with a Third Gender, or it may refer to someone who is understood to possess what are traditionally seen as masculine and feminine traits of behaviors. How it is understood, and other terms for similar states of being, are varied among the many hundreds of Indigenous cultures, and we ought not assume one term, such as Two-Spirit, is adequate to mean all of those ways of being across cultures. In the non-Indigenous West, the term is sometimes, if rarely, included in the list of other queer terms, such as by stating that queer people includes those who are "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Two-Spirit."

Also left out in the Gender 101 list is this term:

Cissexual: [from Wikipedia] Cissexual is an adjective used in the context of gender issues to describe "people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their mental and physical sexes as being aligned". Julia Serano uses the term in her book "Whipping Girl" but does not claim to have coined it. Helen Boyd, author of "My Husband Betty" and "She's Not the Man I Married", has argued on her blog that "cissexual" is a less loaded term than "cisgender" and make fewer assumptions about the person's relationship to gender roles and the transgender community. Should not be confused with sissy.

Sara and Julian Discuss Trans/Feminist Issues, part 4: The Gender Binary, Medicine, Media, Capitalism, and other CRAP

image of three actors from Modern Family is from here

JR wrote:
"So, for me, this is part of the larger conversation about who defines as what, and why. Are the women who would have identified as trans now, but don't, because they came into radical non-trans lesbian feminist identity first, mean they are or are not transgender?"

Sara responded:
Technically, a butch woman, or basically anyone who has a presentation or behavior considered non-normative for their sex assigned at birth, is considered transgender. Wether they identify as such is something else.

Okay. I'm willing to go with that definition for the purposes of our conversation. And what that tells me is that there's virulent anti-feminist misogyny in transgender community, because that population of non-transsexual women: butch, lesbian, and gender non-conforming, are profoundly marginalised and stigmatised and silenced right now UNLESS they cater to a very individualistic and anti-radical ethic of "social change" and "accommodation and inclusivity of unexamined racist patriarchal practices" as the predominant value. I've been seeing this play out for decades, Sara: queer pro-"transgression" politic has been promoted by the least marginalised, most privileged queer people as a kind of "liberation", regardless of how regressive and anti-progressive it is, politically.

JR wrote:
"I've only recently even found out there WAS such a thing as "being intergender". I'd say I always was intergender, but I've only recently begun to identify as that. So what was I before I identified as intergender? Cis gender? I don't think so."

It depends if you give power to name yourself, or to society to do so. I say naming yourself retroactively isn't harmful. I could say I was always female. What does it hurt anyone? I'm not identifying that way for purposes of fraud or deceit, so no one.

I'm in agreement with retroactively naming ourselves. I think it is appropriate and accurate to say "I was always intergender", at least as soon as I socially registered what the politics of gender were. And I registered that consciously by the age of nine.

But, I'd like to add that I think it is a mistake to believe society doesn't also always name us, label us, and put us in boxes that are not easily escaped. As has been noted on some progressive blogs, the privileged believe we can name ourselves and ignore how society labels us, or, at least, "empower" ourselves to not pay attention to that labeling. Less privileged people do not have such an easy time of that, and if you know anyone who is not white, who is female, and who is poor, and ask them how successfully they can name themselves and cast off society's labels, I think you'll find that the less privileges we have, structurally, the more difficult it is to even find validation for who we know ourselves to be. That's why it is usually class-privileged, race-privileged, education-privileged, profession-privileged people who get to say "I am transsexual [or transgender] and I want you to call me by [this or that] pronoun." The Black non-transsexual women I know can't even get dominant society to acknowledge they are human, let alone consider calling them by a pronoun or name they prefer. The politics of accommodation and inclusivity needs to be carefully examined, as I see it, Sara. Because the politics are loaded up with white and male supremacist assumptions about who gets to be human and who doesn't.

I think our community has largely been negligent in addressing this issue. I'd be interested to know what you think about this.

JR wrote:
"This is very complicated stuff, and I see too many trans activists trying to pass off one way of experiencing being transgender or intergender--if and when that even gets mentioned, which it usually doesn't--as like every other trans/intergender person, and I think that's a kind of gross stereotyping and bigotry, or false unification around "what we present to the dominant society" that exists within our community that needs to be called out, interrogated, discussed, and hopefully resolved to some degree."

Sara responded:
I haven't seen this that much. Transsexual people are presented as THE standard, by the medico-legal establishment, not by transsexual people themselves. The experience of being transgender is widely acknowledged as varying extremely. Even the experience of being transsexual is presented this way more and more now, supplanting the medico-legal narrative that used to be necessary to secure treatment at clinics (pretend you're uber 1950s feminine straight, or you don't get hormones or surgery).

I agree with you about a very narrow segment of M2F transsexuals being presented by media to the general public as "the face" of transgender experience. From Renee Richards to the few guests on talk shows, we only get presented as being pro-femme, pro-heteropatriarchal M2F folks who want and say they need complete sex re-assignment surgery, but that's not the case with most transgender people I know. And the 1950s feminine straight model you mention being promoted by the medico-legal institutions are white and middle class without exception. I'm glad to know, from your experience, that the medical professionals are a bit less heteropatriarchal, but from what I can see, we still have a very long way to go!

JR wrote:
"I respect your opinion, Sara, as yours. But I simply do not agree that there is such a thing as "feminine body language" that is innate. At all. If we look at female children and girls across era and culture there is no aspect of "femininity" that shows up everywhere. Not one bodily characteristic, expressive aspect, or way of being. There's not even any agreement about what "feminine body language" is, cross-culturally and across era."

Sara responded:
Something becomes feminine because female people, on average, do it. So yes, it will vary across culture with "what's in" and "what's out". Wearing Victorian-style dresses is not too in right now, but it was 150 years ago. It was a sign of feminity then.

As for bodily characteristics? Well, in Haiti, women are considered more feminine if they have a plump derriere. In the US, not so much. Yet it's a norm of feminity for each of those cultures, independantly. Men used to have long hair, or at worst, simulate their having long hair, using wigs.

In the U.S., Black women's buttocks are highly fetishised and objectified! What do you mean "not so much"?! "Baby's Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot was but one popular example of how "thing-ified" Black women are in the U.S. in media. Do you see how violently Black women are abused in pornography, and how women across race are abused anally, raped repeatedly, in pornography and prostitution? Haiti is a culture that has been repeated ravaged by white het male supremacist imperialism and colonialism. It was a country liberated by slaves, after all. How do you conclude the values there are or can be entirely free of white Western cultural values?

Some of your other examples, especially things like wigs and dresses, have nothing whatsoever to do with "nature" as Victorian dresses and wigs don't occur in nature and there's no way we're biologically wired to "respond" erotically to things like dresses and wigs. Would you agree with that? I'm concerned that you're conflating biology and culture as somehow tied to each other in a "natural" way. There's little to no indication that's the case, and in fact there's tons of evidence that Western heteropatriarchal culture overrides (and demolishes) nature and other cultures at every turn. Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies have had nothing like what Western Civilisation has presented as "naturally occurring sex differences". Shaved legs and shaved armpits for women? What's "natural" about that? Nothing at all. It's entirely cultural and politically "designed" to make female human beings appear to be "opposite" to hairy male human beings, who, after all, are not always hairy.

Sara wrote:
Milton Diamond's theory of sex identity says that someone will identify like peers of the sex they feel they belong to. They will generally self-normalize, based on their sense of who they are the most like, in terms of something I couldn't even name – but rarely having to do with clothes or manners.

But always having to do with politics, Sara. I see it, anyway. Because cultural norms and social peer pressure are both expressions of any given dominant society's sexual (and racial) politics. Even when the politics are egalitarian and communal not domineering and authoritarian.

Sara wrote:
For example, if everyone dressed androgynously, I could still recognize my membership in the category female, without being told so (it would just happen later than it does for children now). Both parents and children are insecure about being viewed (or their children being viewed) as the other sex, starting at a certain age.

Only in societies that have a rigid gender binary. If the gender binary is at all natural (as you argue), why do you suppose is it that less industrialised societies have made more room for a third gender than have post-industrial ones?

Sara wrote:
That's why toddler and small child clothes are all so dichotomous (all pink and glittery, or all blue and with 0 frills), just go see a store for small children and see the colors. Now go see an adult women clothes store, and notice it's not so pink anymore – people then got secondary sex characteristics vouching for their sex.

Sara, I'm really perplexed by this. You seem to be discounting racist patriarchal capitalism as not having any influence on us at all. Children are made to wear pink and blue in societies where pink is associated with being a girl and blue with being a boy. That's far from universal, and it's a relatively recent occurrence in human cultural history. Capitalism sells binary bigotry. Capitalism sells the objectification and commodification of children, including of how children are gendered and raced. That's what advertising is in the business of doing, as well as selling us cardiovascular disease and diabetes-inducing edibles in place of healthy food and pornography in place of sex. CRAP profits mightily from doing it so well.

A great blog that exposes this CRAP regularly is "Sociological Images". Check it out, if you haven't yet, for an over-abundance of examples of exactly how racist heteropatriarchal capitalism does this. You seem to be putting forth a very social-psychological theory of why it is parents and children are insecure about children's "gender". One approach to answering that question would be to look to see who profits most from there being this kind of gendering of children at all. Commercial industries profit. Corporate pimps profit. Traffickers and slavers profit. To pretend that our very dominant society's pink-is-for-girls/blue-is-for-boys anti-ethic would exist beyond misogynistic-racist-heterosexist capitalism is untenable, to me. That's why so many radical queers are anti-capitalist. Are you familiar with BashBack? Let me know what you think of their work, if you don't mind.

If we weren't sold the gender binary, we wouldn't be buying it. Do you agree? The medical and psychiatric and pharmaceutical establishments also profits mightily from this fucked up notion of a rigid gender binary that is a hierarchy. That's why "androgyny" isn't marketed or promoted in pornography. Because industries need there to be something oppositional to package, to sell, to partly disguise the fact that it takes a great deal of brutality to produce a culture like the dominant one we live in. Have you read this book, which gets at aspects of this?

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568584377

He's someone who has been listening to radical feminists. And we are better off for it. Derrick Jensen is another person who has benefitted personally and politically from studying radical feminists. His work is terribly important. Do you know him? I recommend reading A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make-Believe, and Endgame, volume one and volume two. I don't see how we can be responsible to one another, globally, if we refuse to engage with the world of suffering and survival. Queer politics is often very myopic, very self-concerned. And self-regard is an important value, to be sure. But political activism requires coalition work. And those of us who are white and Global Northern/Western are morally obligated to know how our actions and inactions are impacting people in the Global South and East. I don't see liberals being willing to really engage with radical activists the world over. Why do you think that is? I think it's to protect our political position and status, our privileges, our entitlements, and our quality of life, built on the death and destruction of everyone and everything else.

Radical feminists have been "unpacking" this stuff for decades. If they are stigmatised as only being "unfriendly" or "unwelcoming" how are we to make use of their theories and insights? Do we hold male-men who are theorists to a standard of having to be accepting, accommodating, and friendly? Was Marx a friendly guy? Are pro-corporate capitalist theorists accommodating and accepting of genderqueer realities and people? Not the last time I checked.

Why do you believe there so little education in or ranks about what these radical feminists have been discussing for at least forty years? The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde gets deeply into the medical-industrial politics of manufacturing fake breasts. Why aren't we discussing that, do you think? Whose interests are served by promoting the idea that manufactured, mass-produced, bought-and-sold chest implants are authentically human? Lorde rejected the offer, the pressure to be fitted for a fake breast after having a mastectomy. Why should society refuse to deal with the reality that some women have one or no breasts due to cancer, among other things.

Sara wrote:
“In most societies where there is a hierarchical gender binary, it is usually, but not always the case that there are things called "feminine" and "masculine". Again, people tend to get really sloppy about this stuff. “

I think it's more intra-hierarchical than inter-hierarchical. That is, women have a hierarchy, men have a hierarchy. Those at the top of both hierarchies are considered the most attractive. Ordinary men are considered the least attractive.

I think there might be men vs women hierarchies in certain countries, maybe most, but I think Canada and the liberal non-religious US have mostly stabilized it to be more or less equivalent (even if not ideal). As in, having advantages and disadvantages on both sides that end up having value that's not completely out of whack with each other – though there are still many things to fix, there happens to be some on the men's side, too.

I feel right now like we are living in very different worlds. And maybe we are. In this country, unattractive older men are frequently paired up with media-appealing younger women. Take, for example, a current hit show, Modern Family. Do you see anything grossly racist, ageist, misogynistic, white male supremacist, and heterosexist about the image that opens this post? The woman on the left is the central man-figure's spouse. She's at least half his age. She's Latina. He's VERY white and not "attractive" as Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and pornographers define such things. Why do young women end up with men like HIM so often in dominant media productions? This is a fictional narrative after all. Do you think there's anything natural about that occurring? Surely he's not a good catch due to his gene pool.

How about all the women and girls Jack Nicholson gets to "date"? That's just Hollywood. How about the fact that unattractive men get to rent and purchase women and girls they "select" from around the world? How egalitarian is that? How does that reality, of 12 million sexual slaves, bring us even remotely close to anything humane or just in society? Do you see these as social problems that need to be addressed through sustained activism? What does your queer society offer as a way to end rape, trafficking, and slavery?

JR wrote:
“So while I'm eager to learn more about what you experienced as a child, and what you experience now, I'm not supporting any notion of something called "innate femininity". I don't see it. To even "mark" something as "feminine" is to engage in a very social-political act. There's nothing "inborn" about ascribing meaning and value to sets of behaviors, or to clustering them into one thing called "being feminine". That's all socially done, in the view of the blog. “

Sara responded:
It has to do with behaviors women already do, and an ideal that society as a whole (meaning men and women) set as 'better'. Same for masculine and men. Except that once something becomes acceptable for women, it becomes no way to prove one's masculinity, it becomes neutral. If the social climate had changed to set skirts, dresses and heels as unisex, the way it set shirts, pants and suits as unisex, people would have less ways to prove their membership into either sex (which makes people insecure). People in general don't wear gender-norm clothing just to be accepted as normal, they do so to be accepted as their sex, too.

I just feel like your analysis really leaves out so much, Sara. Like endemic rape, for example. Like sexual slavery, trafficking, and prostitution, all of which require these social standards to thrive. I feel like you're focusing in on one small aspect of gender at the exclusion of all the atrocities, almost pretending the atrocities don't exist. Do you know First Nations women who are being pimped right now on Vancouver streets? Does their experience register for you as human and worth paying attention to? What about the fact that one in three American Indian women will be raped in her lifetime, usually by a white man? What about battery of women by men? What about street harassment? What about marital rape and date rape?

To tune those realities out is to be left with the kind of analysis you offer here. That's how I see it. We can respectfully disagree, I guess, but I can't neglect to mention that there's a lot of social reality you're ignoring to come up with the theories you are proposing here.

Sara and Julian Discuss Trans/Feminist Issues, part 3: Transsexual, Intergender, and Transgender Definitions; Hormones and Biology; and Racist-Misogynist Lies about Second Wave Feminists

photo of Flo Kennedy's autobiography is from here

image of 1984 collection of second wave writings is from here

JR wrote: "I think saying anyone is raised as a "weird child" is a bit insulting, to be honest. "

Sara responded: I meant that they could be rejected by their family as well, for not conforming to behaviors requested of them. Much like Autistic and Asperger syndrome children are often considered "problem-children" that some parents lobby to have instutionalized or normalized at all costs (The Judge Rotenberg Center in the US is notable for its abuse, and yet the demand makes it remain open even after having been in courts for two decades about child abuse - contingent electric shock and starvation to make them obey, for example).

If trans children were considered okay, then Kenneth J Zucker would be unemployed. He uses behavioral modification to "make people not-trans", or more accurately, more gender-conforming.

Isn't that what the medical establishment and the psychiatric establishment exist to do, both to trans people and non-trans people: to get us all to be more gender conforming? If a psychiatrist and a surgeon require that someone "live as a woman" for a year, for example, before surgery is done, what does "living as a woman" mean if not conforming to heteropatriarchal standards of what a woman is? Can someone live as a butch lesbian for a year and be considered an appropriate candidate for surgery? This is a question about how oppressive those institutions are, not an indictment of anyone who wants the surgery. I think, or hope, I've already been clear that most people who obtain gender surgery are not trans people, by a long-shot. And I think targeting trans people for obtaining surgery--those very few transsexuals who can afford to do so--is misguided to some extent, depending on what the critique of the surgical procedures are. In my experience as an intergender person, I find it VERY difficult to find anyone in the medial world who even wants to understand what being intergender might mean, let alone respect it as a viable way of being. I'm wondering what your own experiences were with this.

Sara also responded with this:
Stuff like removing all feminine things, prevent the color pink from being drawn/worn, encouraging stereotypically masculine things, restricting drawings to male characters, for a "feminine" boy child. Parents wouldn't give him business if they weren't distressed by their feminine boy, or very masculine girl (the threshold is different for girls, you must be extreme to be considered more than a tomboy). Their children are probably not transsexual, or “pre-transsexual”, just simply gender-nonconforming.

I advocate for children being accepted as they are, biologically and emotionally. And wish that children were not "gendered" at all, as the West defines and enforces that process.

Part 3

Sara wrote: I'm not sure an Haitian person, raised in Haiti, would feel rejected by their own society (person of color in a culture of color). I also doubt all girls and women feel they are rejects of society. Or maybe its just all those I know, who seem to like being female and also what it entails in society, without having Stockholm syndrome or something like that. Not necessarily liking ALL that it entails...but I know of no people who think life is ONLY positive.

I wasn't talking about how children feel about being Black, or female-assigned at birth, or being girls. I was speaking about how society disenfranchises or oppresses or subordinates or stigmatises all those groups of children, and adults too. This isn't to say that any given person feels negatively about being whatever they are. Sorry for any confusion about that point.

JR wrote: "The identification of only trans children as "weird" or "considered rejects" by dominant society is simply inaccurate and overgeneralised."

Sara responded: I didn't say they were the only ones. I named Autistics and Aspies above (I'm Aspie myself). There's probably many more groups who feel they are alien, and who are treated as such also.

I hope your Asperger's doesn't hinder you too much. I've known a few folks with it and know it varies considerably from person to person, but I hope for you it hasn't caused you too much grief, particularly from others who love to bully those of us who are "different" as children. I hear you on there being lots of groups of folks who are stigmatised or put down in various ways, for various reasons.

Part 4

JR wrote: "Plenty of us who are trans/intergender didn't know what we were when we were growing up. We might have thought we were just "different" or maybe we didn't feel all that different in our earlier childhoods. There's no one experience, in childhood, of being trans or intergender, and the way some trans activists talk, there's this one kind of experience that all trans and intergender people share--of "knowing" that we weren't meant to be either girls or boys, or that our psyches didn't fit with our bodies, and so on. And I think that's a really gross stereotype about us, to be honest."

Sara responded: Transsexual people know, for sure. They might not know its THAT in childhood, but they know something serious is amiss, and often to do with genitals. It has little to nothing to do with how they are treated socially, gender roles or gender expression. I knew my genitals were wrong for certain, when I was 8. I didn't know why or how I knew it, I just did. I hadn't seen female genitals by then, and even now (at 28) I haven't seen more than surgical result pictures. I've never seen a FAAB vulva.

I get this sense too from the transsexual people I know and am only beginning to realise that "transsexual" isn't "the old passe term" for being transgender. For the purposes of our conversation, Sara, and for the readers too, I'd like for us to agree on what some of these terms mean, between us; I get that beyond the two of us other people may use the terms differently. So, let me know if this works for you. I identify as intergender, as you know. For me this means not really ever feeling like a boy or a girl or identifying, internally, as a boy or a girl; it also means, for me, that I never really understood why any children were or are asked and forced to be boys or girls; I only saw heteropatriarchy as a brutish, cruel, tyrannical system of harm and control, of enforced domination and submission, weaving together misogyny, homophobia, lesbophobia, and inter- and trans-gender phobia into an ugly oppressive society that combines in horrendous ways with racism, heterosexism, and capitalism.

As I understand you and the terms you are using, am I right to conclude that you identify as transsexual, more than as transgender. Would it be fair to say this: we're both transgender, but under that umbrella term, there are some folks with your experience, and some with mine, and some with other experiences too, such as being asexual, genderqueer, Two-Spirit, agendered, gender non-conforming, "socially/problematically" butch if female-girls or female-women (a problem for society, primarily, and secondarily for the individuals because they feel the rejection and shaming from society), feminine if male-boys and male-men (same as before, with the primary problem being society's, not the individual's)?

I would say there are elements of also being transsexual that are part of my experience. For me and for some other pro-radical feminist people I know who are gay or lesbian-identified, we agree amongst ourselves that were we raised now, in this social-political climate, we'd likely find ourselves identifying as transgender and/or transsexual, and possibly pursuing some forms of transsexual processes of transformation, such as by taking hormones and seeking surgery. Personally, I feel grateful I can up during a time when gender was so thoroughly critiqued as political, not as essentially biological. I find the medical establishment and the psychiatric community woefully ignorant on this perspective, and generally unwilling to recognise it as valid because they won't make money from us challenging heteropatriarchy to the roots, and demanding all institutions rid themselves of it.

That said, I think as individuals we must each find our own ways, hopefully with support and in some kind of caring community. And for some of us, some hormone treatments and surgical procedures may be what we need to feel a bit more like ourselves. But I think it is difficult if not impossible to know how "social" those feelings are, including what we feel about our own bodies. For example, because "breasts" and "penises" and "vaginas" are both physical features of human beings and also symbolic as well, we may be feeling alienated from the social meaning of our genitals/sex organs, in some cases. I don't get the sense that's the case with you, given how you felt at age eight. But for those of us who were sexually abused as children, there can be profound "dis-identification" with the parts of our bodies that were involved in the abuse. We can shut down or shut off those parts of us, hold trauma there, etc.

In my case there's little doubt that my non-identification with manhood has partly to do with seeing how boys-who-wanted-to-be-men behaved, and how some men behaved who valued being men, and knowing full well that's not for me. But, it is also the case that I never, ever felt heterosexual or "like a boy" in any significant, meaningful way. I mean I knew I was assigned to be a boy, and was treated like a boy in some ways, and was abused for being a not-masculine-enough boy. So in my own case I think I was intergender and non-het from the start, basically. And I suspect that may be true of a lot of folks, but many get coerced into believing they "are" girls or "are" boys, without really questioning what those terms mean. I think lots of people in my own family just grew up as the gender they were assigned, without question. And for the girls, that meant having babies early in life. And for the boys, that meant impregnating young women early in life, and not bothering to be that responsible about it, leaving the pregnant young women to bear the brunt of responsibility for the pregnancy and birthing and child-rearing. I think heteropatriarchal expectations and enforced ways of being were "acted out", basically. Rampant sexual abuse in my family also meant that there were other reasons for acting out sexually.

Part 5

JR wrote: "A lot of us grow up thinking we're queer/lesbian/gay. And we go with that for a while because trans and intergender experience isn't even identified as someone one can feel or be. And "what we are" and how we understand ourselves is a very social/interactive process, not a fixed biological one, in my view."

Sara responded: That's more in line with transgender identity. Something that has less to do with changing the body, but I can't theorize much on the causes or effects, only that they are probably different at least severely in degree (maybe not in kind), to what causes transsexual people to know their body itself is wrong.

Do you personally feel like your own transsexuality was or is "biological"--do you feel you were born transsexual?

Sara wrote: Intergender, if your sidebar definition is accurate, is explained by agender (no identity) and bigender (both) terms in the LGBTQIA community - especially the asexual (AVEN) and online trans communities, that I know of.

I think that's pretty much the case for the intergender people I know--one person feels like both genders, and I don't really feel like either one. But this gets complicated because of what "gender" is--it's a hierarchical dualism/binary in the dominant West. And if I grew up in a culture with eleven genders or sexualities, what would I be then? How would my experience be different? I can't say. I can only know how I am based on living in the society I've lived in. And I conclude that the amount of terrorism, sadism, violation, intimidation, coercion, manipulation, dishonesty, and inhumanity bound to "gender" as it is enforced in the West cannot be "irrelevant" in how any of us feel about ourselves with regard to gender and sex, at least. (But also with regard to race, ethnicity, and class, which are also so bound to gender and sex.)

Sara wrote: I know that testosterone was poisonous to my body, and that estrogen isn't. And I know that from experience. All testosterone did was make me suicidally depressed, and full of acne for over 8 years (until I cut the testosterone from my life). It didn't give me muscles, a libido, or a masculine-looking frame. It didn't make me hairy either, or make me feel aggressive. I was asexual until I started estrogen (at 24). Now I have what I'd say is a normal-low level of libido.

As someone who is asexual/low in "libido" I'd say that "being sexual" isn't a natural thing, exactly. I'm not sure how we'd know what non-patriarchal normal levels are. (I think all we have in the dominant West are patriarchally determined normal levels and seemingly abnormal levels), but I follow what I think you're saying. I think I am fairly low in testosterone, relative to many males I know. And I know some women who are high in testosterone. And that plays out in our bodies and psyches in various ways. I'm a bit unclear about the sources of your testosterone--don't most us--our bodies--produce all of the so-called sex hormones: androgen, testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen? Isn't it the case that it's the levels that vary, unless something happens to us in utero or after that results in us not producing some of those hormones? Such as when a FAAB woman gets a hysterectomy, which can throw off her hormone levels quite a bit? Or, if a male-bodied adult gets a vasectomy? Are you saying that until you had your own bodily production of testosterone shut down/shut off, that life was a particular kind of hell that ended when it got cut off and when you began to get externally introduced "female" hormones? That they all exist in most people leads many of us to wonder why they are called "female" and "male" at all. Having estrogen and progesterone is something that "normal" male-men have, right? Again, it's all determined to be "normal" or not based on amounts, levels, etc. Is that your sense too?

Part 6

"I know, for a fact, that some lesbian feminists and myself--a radical profeminist--would likely have identified as transgender early in our twenties if we grew up in some of the queer communities that exist now, that promote and welcome transgender experience while also denigrating and insulting radical lesbian feminist experience."

I found out about trans stuff online at 22, where radical feminist stuff wasn't even mentioned for the most. Only Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys would get passing mention if the topic was on that or the history of the trans movement. I never got into LGBT communities, even if I knew they existed, and lived in Montreal most of my life (2 million people city).

What I hear you saying is that you've had little to no exposure to radical feminism. Sara, my life would not be what it is without radical feminism. I don't know how people who question gender get to understanding it without exposure to various radical feminist writers and theorists. Have you read Sister Outsider?

This raises a question that I'm not sure you can answer; in other words I may be asking a question that is simply too hypothetical, and, as a rule, I don't like hypotheticals even though I do get sloppy and use them from time to time. But, what the hell, I'll ask it, and you can let me know if you can't or don't wish to answer it. What I'm wondering is if you had come of age, so to speak, during the period when I did, when there was tons of radical feminist material around, challenging every aspect of gendered being, allowing all kinds of questions to be asked and answered about how patriarchy, racism, capitalism, homophobia, misogyny, heterosexism, and more, shape us into "binarily" gendered beings, and shape us through force, aggression, shame, violation, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse through religious miseducation or molestation and rape by priests and preachers.

We were a generation--or two or more generations--that got to interrogate this stuff thorougly, if never completely--such as deep awareness of how incest impacts a person. For anyone I knew who had been sexually abused, including through "normal" socialisation into heteropatriarchy, radical feminism was invaluable--water in the dessert of male supremacist ignorance and arrogance. It was enormously helpful to me that I grew up in such a time. And, I'll add, I read only a tiny bit of Mary Daly, no Sheila Jeffreys AT ALL (until about four years ago), and no Janice Raymond AT ALL. No Robin Morgan. No Germaine Greer. No Susan Brownmiller. White women didn't equal "radical feminism" for me.

For me the 1970s second wavers were folks like Florynce Kennedy, Pat Parker, Pauli Murray, Alice Walker, Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chrystos, and Nawal El Saadawi. That's why it pisses me off when folks refer to "second wavers" as only Daly, Jeffreys, and Raymond. Those three women share many values, but they don't represent all of second wave radical feminism by a long-shot. They don't represent second wave radical lesbian feminism either. They are three voices among a chorus of other voices. And there were additional voices coming from slightly other perspectives, such as Angela Davis from a more anti-capitalist/class-critical direction than many white middle class feminists.

Daly and Jeffreys have done amazingly important work, invaluable work in analysing many aspects of patriarchal atrocity and oppression, but their work has been cut up into pieces, butchered, and misused by anti-feminists, some trans and some non-trans, some men and some women, to make it seem like all second wavers were anti-transgender, forgetting to note what Dworkin, another white lesbian radical feminist, said in Woman Hating on the subject. Have you read Woman Hating? In the preface she states that revolutionary feminism has its sheroes, and two of them are Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, neither of whom were activists in the 1970s. What is called "the Second Wave" is a generally racist and inaccurate term for a political analysis that is not stagnant and has been around for decades, at least. It lives on until this day, largely by-passing the liberalism and individualism of much of so-called "Third Wave" writings. Different approaches in feminism have usually co-existed; they don't follow each other in a linear fashion; the feminisms that flourished in the 1970s continue on to this very day; RAWA was formed in the 1970s and is still going strong, for example.

Why do you think there's so much systematically sloppy, overtly inaccurate, and blatantly racist and misogynistic re-telling of "what second wavers believed"? Have you read Backlash by Susan Faludi, cover to cover? If you do, you will understand the forces at work to effectively silence and blatantly distort the work of any radical feminist. Who benefits when the work Cheryl Clarke, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Susan Yung, Ana Oliveira, Rosie Alvarez, Mitsuye Yamada, Merle Woo, Alma Gomez, Jewelle Gomez, Leota Lone Dog, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Norma Ramos, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Frye, bell hooks and so many other U.S. and non-U.S. women of color and white women are erased from the ethnically rich herstory of second wave radical feminism?

JR wrote: "The queer community I've known most intimately purges the radical non-trans lesbian feminists while embracing the liberal feminist or non-feminist transgender people."

Sara responded: Much (but not all, for sure) writing from the radfem point of view is filled with snark and derision towards men, either through nature (inherently) or nurture (raised that way). You might pardon half the LGBT community, and a good portion of the trans community, of being wary of being considered unchangeably evil (can't change either your status at birth, or your childhood – at best you must prove, time and time again, your harmlessness and your lack of evil intent, a guilty until proven innocent).

This commentary to me demonstrates how little you know about radical feminism and second wave feminism. You just demonstrated how much you've bought what dominant culture says about it, including dominant queer culture. And it's just as stereotypical and biased as what you believe "second wavers" think about men and trans people. And about as wrong, too. It's really sad to see this sort of stereotyping going on, to be honest. Can you tell me who you've read of the authors I've named here in this post? What books? What poems? What plays? What novels? What essays? On what are you basing your really harsh judgments? The derision of people who also never read those many, many authors, or bothered to understood what they were reading when they did pick up a book?

Sara wrote: Liberal feminists were reluctant to accept trans people at first, but not totally closed to it, unlike much of the 1970s 2nd wave feminists (who were mainstream, not fringe, then).

I'm gonna ask once more, and I'd seriously appreciate an answer: who are you referring to when you write "1970s 2nd wave feminists"? Which ones? What are their names, please? What are the books you are referring to, please?

Sara wrote: The POV of liberal feminists seem to be mostly of unconditional acceptance of trans people, with some dissenting. The POV of radical feminists seem to be the reverse of that - most opposed to acceptance, with some dissenting (many in numbers, but a fraction of the movement).

What you're saying makes little to no sense of my own readings of international radical feminists like Malalai Joya and RAWA, Yanar Mohammed, Patricia Hill Collins, Catharine MacKinnon, Vandana Shiva, and Ruchira Gupta. At all. I don't know where you're getting these ideas from, but I do want to know where you read them or encountered them so we can, together, trace the lies back to their sources. This experience of hearing your really biased and incredibly narrow views of second wavers and radical feminists is like what I encounter when I speak with male-men who only know about feminism by having "consumed" what pornographer-pimps have said about them. It's very discouraging indeed. Very sad. Very disheartening. To see political views relegated to one decade, when they don't exist there alone, is also terribly sad and discouraging. It tells me a lot about how little most non-queer and queer folks know about the brilliant herstory of feminism--not just from what you say here, Sara, but from what I hear that sounds so much like this, from so many other pro-neoliberal queer folks, who don't care, it appears anyway, to question what is profoundly racist, genocidal, ecocidal, heterosexist, and misogynistic (gynocidal) about neoliberalism. A politic that ignores the world in which women live, struggle, resist, rebel, and die is a doomed one, in the view of this blog and blogger.

I need to stop writing for right now so I can regain my inspiration for this conversation. I seek connection with you, and mutual understanding, not alienation and insult. Please regard what I say about second wave feminism and feminists with an open heart and an open mind. I will work very hard to hear and listen to you with a similarly open mind and open heart. I'm going to post this and await your responses. It seems we both move into other terrain from this point on, so this seems like a good pausing point anyway. But honestly, my heart is heavy with grief right now.

I will post responses to your other comments, however. If many of them are organised around a theme or two, I'll likely make that into a separate post, as I have this one.