Vocabulary Dysphoria

[bcholmes]

Someone on one of the trans lists I read made this claim:

Technically, since I have had the surgery, I am no longer transsexual, as my body now is harmonized (anatomically) with my brain and gender identity.

This was buried in the middle of a lengthy post about proper use of term in the trans community. Feh.

Y'know, I really try to respect other people's labels. I really do. But sometimes... sometimes I think that certain claims are just dumb.

There's an increasingly vocal part of the trans community who have been arguing that the umbrella term "transgendered" is not an appropriate label for transsexauls. And I have great difficulty seeing that viewpoint.

I mean, my definition of transgendered has been this: someone is transgendered if their feelings about their gender put them into conflict with mainstream society's view of gender. By my definition, transsexuals are necessarily transgendered.

I've recently tried to get into the headspace of such "I'm transsexual, not transgendered"-types by likening the discussion to the claim that Canadians are also Americans because this is, after all, North America. (Yeah, I've heard people say that. And no Canadians that I know of are inclined to agree with that statement).

The problem seems to be that the brain perceives a category, and then tries to define it later. Teasing out just what the brain latched on to is a Hard Task.

Comments

[skylark-10.livejournal.com]

>someone is transgendered if their feelings about their gender put them into conflict with mainstream society's view of gender

the argument that is advanced by the kind of people you're talking about (sometimes self-referred to as WBTs), has 2 critical components:

1) that their *gender* (not their sex) was always internally consistent. thus, while from an uninformed pov it may at first seem that their behaviors are "transgendered", that is only an artifact of context.

2) that "transsexualism" is an identifiable and limitable biological syndrome... literally a "defect" which, once addressed at least on the somatic level, is irrelevant.

the problem is that it's almost impossible to rationally carry out these ideas... they break down in too many places, and their full atriculation violates parsimony. secondarily, their adherents tend to meet challenge or critique of the *thesis* (as opposed to their own identities) with shrill, heavy-handed rhetoric, and in the apparent "fight" to sustain their own identification, almost invariably erase those of many others.