intersex and trans
I wrote a filtered post in my LJ about it a couple of years ago, but i haven’t really made it public knowledge that i have an intersex condition. This may come as a surprise, but i don’t actually make it a habit to talk publicly about certain parts of my body. It was diagnosed at birth and i remember when i was eight attending a consultation with a surgeon who talked about ‘correcting’ it surgically.
Yes, i am intersex AND transgender. My secondary sex characteristics are pretty unambiguously male yet my identity is female. But the last couple of days i’ve been pondering the link between these two things.
All my life people have acted as though there is something off about me. Even before i began laser hair removal therapy, it was not uncommon for people i encountered on the street to gender me as female, even if i hadn’t shaved in a week. Then they’d look up at me or look again and ‘correct’ themselves or just look very confused. So, something about me sends ambiguous gender signals to people. I’ve long presumed that maybe i was giving off some kind of unconscious behavioral signal of my feminine gender identity. But what if it’s because i’m intersex?
The gestational estrogen exposure which caused my intersex condition was possibly responsible for the overall female shape of my face and body. People who meet me find it difficult to believe i’ve never taken hormone supplements. My height is about average for a woman, though i have a broad masculine upper body. It’s possible i smell female to myself and others, too; in this regard i’ve heard mixed accounts from different people close to me.
My voice, too, is ambiguous. I have been working with a voice training program my therapist gave me, and while i can speak in female registers without my voice straining or cracking, i have the vocal resonance of a man and comfortably sing tenor. Heck, i could write a long autobiographical post about my voice alone - i have never liked the sound of it and have tended to soften it to the point of whispering - but suffice it to say my voice has never helped convince anyone i was male or female.
I’m going to veer into controversial territory because i’ve been skating on the edge of it anyway. It’s one thing to wonder if my physical ambiguity is due to estrogen exposure during gestation, but quite another thing to wonder if that same exposure affects psychological ambiguity too.
There are those who advocate calling transsexualism an intersex condition. I’m iffy on this for two reasons. First, there is a wide variance in what brings people to where they will say they are transsexual; the desire or need to transition stems from many different things inside many different people, and i’m not comfortable supposing there is one single identifiable root cause.
Second, any proposed causality from biology to psychology is problematic. We can examine the brains of male and female cadavers and find statistical differences between them. But what causes those differences is unclear. Genes paint the shape of the brain in broad brushstrokes; beyond that the brain is shaped by experience. Without clear experimentation (which would be, to say the least, unethical) we don’t really know where to draw the line between nature and nurture.
But as my wife is fond of pointing out, when it comes to treating people with respect it shouldn’t matter whether these things are inborn or cultural. So i am not offering the question of, “Was i born this way?” in the spirit of then saying, “Because if i was born this way, then you should treat me fairly.” You should treat me fairly anyway, even if i have chosen something you don’t like. In the end it’s not scientific evidence that will end discrimination (the anti-gay right has been adjusting their religious argument to accommodate bio-psychological arguments) it is our account of what it is like to be us.
No, i’m just trying to understand why i am the way i am. 37 years of this and i don’t really think i’m any closer to understanding.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
“There are those who advocate calling transsexualism an intersex condition. I’m iffy on this for two reasons.”
i’m not iffy on this position at all. i’m totally against it. it reaks of biological essentialism and biological determinism - the very same line of “reasoning” that suggests that “men” should be excused for rape because being sexually aggressive, dominant, and violent are pre-ordained by their biology, and are not subject to variation. that there is no variation in the expression of biologically essential characteristics, and that all “men”, based soley on the “fact” that they are “men”, exhibit these traits, and cannot help but to exhibit these traits, and therefore, should be excused unequivocally for any sexually aggressive, dominant, or violent behavior. like rape. or spousal/child abuse. or murder.
“Without clear experimentation (which would be, to say the least, unethical) we don’t really know where to draw the line between nature and nurture.”
there is no “line” between nature and nurture. these two constructs are a false dichotomy, resulting from the human propensity to divide the world into binaries. it amounts to a short-cut in thinking, that helps us understand the world, but at the same time, over-simplifies it to a degree that it is no longer representative of the world’s reality. nature and nurture are hopelessly intertwined, endlessly influencing each other and the result, which is in constant and never-ending change.
and that’s not to mention the appropriation of the intersex condition.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
“i’m not iffy on this position at all. i’m totally against it.”
I’m not a believer in biological determinism, but you could characterize my views as “biological influentialism.” IOW we can’t help but be influenced by our biology.
I do object to the Ev Psych paradigm that looks at the brains of modern humans and concludes that the way we find them now is precisely the way they were guided to be by evolution. It’s very circular because so much of the way our brains are shaped are determined by our experience, or IOW by the way we are treated; and the way we are treated is often based on ideology.
“there is no “line” between nature and nurture. these two constructs are a false dichotomy, resulting from the human propensity to divide the world into binaries.”
For the record, i’m not a dualist; i’m using the ‘nature-nurture’ dichotomy to demonstrate my point, that we do not and cannot know where any such line is actually drawn. Which doesn’t contradict your point at all.