I apologise for not posting as much. There’s been a few reasons, I’ll touch on a few. Summer has started in my neck of the woods, bringing warmer, dryer, weather. Predictably, that mean…
It’s also Pride season. This intentionally raises awareness, but it does so in uneven ways. There’s a lot more acceptance for cis people to be in same-sex relationships, than there is for trans and non-binary people to socially or medically transition. Feminist Appropriating Radical Transphobes are a prime example of this.
Another facet of Pride that can be difficult on queer trans people is the dominant messaging around cisnormative body image.It’s a difficult time of the year for a number of my loved ones, between the increase in violence, and those struggling with increased suicide ideation.
I would love a public health campaign on how we all need to dress appropriately for the weather to not suffer heat stroke. And we all deserve to do so free from violence.
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us--that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other. But we can put our finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across our differences.
Hopefully, we can learn form the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies' work by destroying each other.
"Learning from the 60s," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence.
We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem. Historically, difference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we were reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally defined as Blackness. In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity--Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal.
"Learning from the 60s," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
My heart hurts as I lay here crying next to my sleeping partner knowing this latest episode of "Horizontal Hostility: Duluth" is going to be awaiting him when he wakes up and I fucking loathe how much he's had to endure from thankless, unity-seeking respectability politics spewing cis panderers who would rather make in-group conflict an interpersonal issue than be restorative. For now I'll let him sleep.
I could have continued answering, with such points as:
Doctors don't practice based on general public understanding. If a doctor doesn't feel they know enough about a condition, they ought to find out and/or refer to someone who does. Think of everyone with conditions as rare or far rarer than dysphoria, such as EDS, Becker disease, etc.
Most pregnant people are dealing with, at one point or another: morning sickness, hot flashes, water retention causing swollen joints esp in their feet, to say nothing of birth giving itself. Pregnancy comes with more than its fair share of discomfort; it isn’t only dysphoric people who suffer. I can’t believe someone argues pregnancy doesn’t imply suffering.
It’s not enough to own up that someone “seems” but does not in fact impede your life to not be an asshole if you continue right on putting them down and arguing they impede your life in some fashion.
I don’t care to argue with someone capable of labeling their behavour as “asshole” while defending it.
In short, if you saw that reply and were like “well he sure showed you,” facts are not on your side; all his arguments are fallacies.
If you saw it and worried he might be right, which distresses you because you’re transgender or support trans people: trans(gender) people are not the enemy or a problem to those of us who required medical interventions.
What do people who get pregnant the old fashion way, are followed by a midwife and give birth in a birthing pool at home take away from those who got pregnant via IVF, were followed by a OB/GYN and gave birth via a cesarean? What do people who see an optician and wear glasses or contacts take away from people who went to an ophthalmologist to have laser eye surgery?
My dysphoria was an especially awful anxiety. But it was systemic cisnormativity and societal transphobia that caused the lion share of my depression. That’s why I was much less dysphoric when I got to choose who knew what about my medical history, and was actively making progress in working towards medical interventions. I’m confident that my parents legally disowning me, being denied jobs prior to completing legal transition, repeated social rejection and surviving “corrective” assaults because of my then visible or known medical history caused the majority of my former depression rather than my dysphoria.
When I became confident in my maleness, felt justified in needing to reconstruct certain parts of my body, and understood the systemic barriers in my access to medical care, I stopped wincing at trans people who don’t experience dysphoria. People who don’t need medical interventions didn’t set up the barriers dysphoric people encounter nor get in the way of those advocating for medically necessary insurance coverage. People who don’t need medical interventions don’t get on the ever growing wait lists for them. If there’s a sex marker on ID, I want mine to be M, but if there’s none or someone can opt out of having one, great. I don’t need sex to be on ID; it doesn’t provide medically meaningful information. I don’t need cancer screening for my non-existent gonads and prostate anymore than an ethical medical provider will be fraudulently charging for me to have a pap smear. If you can’t support diversity within our experiences, consider live and let live.
Biological sex isn't determined by appearance of external parts of reproductive systems. (see: female spotted hyenas*) It's determined by size of gonads. The members with the biggest gonads are female, the ones with smaller gonads are male, in species that are considered to have 2 sexes (aka dioecious or gonochorism). The threshold for a polymorphic variance to cross, according to established norms in biology, is 5%. If a variance occurs less often than that it's not considered a "true" variance within a specie (aka why biologists don’t consider intersex people to challenge the notion that human beings are dioecious as they occur in less than 5% of the population.) In the absence of a 2nd (or additional) sex(es) all members of such species are considered female. Some unicellular organisms have up to 7 sexes (e.g. Tetrahymena).
The threshold of 5% is arbitrary; sex is a social construction. There are reasons 5% was chosen as a threshold, someone better in biology/biostatistics/statistics than me could explain it, but none the less it is something fabricated by human beings.
I don't experience dysphoria anymore. Whenever I see proponents that dysphoria is necessary to be trans, I'm sad that as a community we continue to undermine ourselves. Certainly, in the past I experienced crushing amounts of dysphoria, I can't downplay how dysfunctional I became, it was horrific. Whenever people wonder how I could "endure" all my scars, the pain and recovery time required for surgeries, etc I think "you're coming at this from the perspective of someone who's never been dysphoric." Yes, it was nice not to have any numbness across my skin, no scars inciting some people to ask privacy invasive questions, etc. But my alternative wasn't "same body, fewer scars" it was "same body, fewer scars, dysfunctional". The fact that I've largely addressed and/or managed the different triggers of dysphoria I had doesn't erase my medical history. I'm trans. And I'm not dysphoric.
If you think it's arrogantly asshole-ish of me to "rub it in your face" that some of us have the resources and opportunities to address our dysphoria, I assure you there's more to this story than the reductive ways cisnormativity has us framing our lives. Insisting dysphoria is required to be trans has better odds of backfiring on you than not. The dominant narrative imposed on trans people claims that once we "look the part" we are to "blend into the background" and live just like "anyone else". I'm not here to advocate for trans people to disclose at all times nor to never disclose again. I'm saying it's seldom that straight forward, and the denial that one can be trans without dysphoria erases trans people who've dealt with their dysphoria as much as it erases trans people who don't experience much, if any, dysphoria in the first place.
I'm a decade+ into hormone therapy, by most people's account I'm "post-transition". But this simplification, often time imposing a strict narrative of trans men as fully clothed asexual beings (ergo lower surgery is largely removed from consideration, along with any other case scenarios in which one is likely to find themselves less than fully clothed) denies a few realities that will be true for the rest of my life. I don’t have faith stem cell research will provide me with a testosterone producing testicle in my lifetime; I’m dependent on hormone therapy. My penile and scrotal implants will need to be replaced. At best I can see 3D printing or stem cells perhaps providing me with better looking skin to replace my skin graft but I’ll still be missing tactile sensation from when the nerve was cut, I’ll still have scar tissue underneath it. There will always be medical realities about my body due to my transition (which is fine by me but also why I don’t have a strictly social construction take on my body/sex.)
I'll never have a prostate. I'm grateful I'm not dysphoric about my inability to ejaculate sperm, I know trans guys who are. But know who else I know who is dysphoric about it? My cis elderly father. When he found out he had an enlarged prostate and showed signs of cancer, I was stunned to learn he was prepared to undergo chemotherapy, radiation and more, decades after he was done wanting more kids rather than have it removed (which was his surgeon's top recommendation for least invasive, highest success rate) just so he might maintain the ability to ejaculate sperm. The mere possibility that he could lose his ejaculate production (not sperm, in and of itself) was enough to render him dysfunctional.
I know many cis women who need chest reconstruction following mastectomies and others who don't want it. While the DSM diagnosis is exclusive to trans people, the experience of dysphoria regarding one's sex and/or gender isn't.
But regardless of commonalities some of us may or may not have across medical history backgrounds, when transness is reduced to the questioning of gender and the start of transition (whatever transition looks like for any individual), it erases trans folks like me. It erased those that came before me, that would have helped me to feel far less isolated with the unexpected "future" I find myself in. Because dysphoria is not the make or break of transness.
That's not to endorse the "identity model". That is rife with so much class and race privilege. In Ontario, there are legal definitions for who qualifies as a francophone and can ergo send their kids to French language schools for example. The would-be pupil must preferably have a parent, in some cases a sibling will do, that attended schooling in French for 7 or more years. Some immigrants can go blue to the face requesting their children go to school in French because of the 2 languages public education is provided in, it’s the one they speak better/fluently, if they don’t have the pre-requisite educational background, there is a chance they will have their request denied. There are no requirements to meet to attend English language schools, no legal definition of an anglophone, so newcomer children are defaulted to the English language school system. It’s not just newcomers, I found out my tax money was going to the English “secular” school system by default the 1st time I went to vote for in the French “secular” school board trustee election in my riding. This is a comparatively benign example next to several others both historical and contemporary such as the 1-drop rule. If you have the luxury to have your self-identified gender recognised and respected, that is really nice. But people with certain mental health histories, from intellectual dis/abilities through personality dis/orders to Alzheimer, aren’t afforded that luxury even if the authorities in their lives genuinely believe the person is secure in their trans related conviction.
Those of us who experience(d) dysphoria didn't all experience the same triggers of it nor do we all manage the same. And yet many of us have a consolidated sense of self as men regardless of the appearance of our secondary sexual characteristics or our biological history.
Many trans people who need surgeries are often stunned when I don’t furiously defend the so-called “transmedicalist” stance. (Formerly/still occasionally known as TS; ultimately it’s the medical model of care.) I defend the social model of transness (aka TG) for its merits when fully understood, not when a skewed understanding of it would have you believe there’s no place for health professionals in delivery of care.
For a period of time, pregnancy used to be pathologised to the point that midwives were outlawed (more so for racist reasons than misogynistic ones.) It was around the 80s in the global North/West that midwifery as practiced by white women re-entered care models and pregnant people began having options about how they were followed during their pregnancy and during birth giving. Some people get pregnant “the old fashion way”, others require IVF or other types of fertility treatments. The net result: pregnancy, is not more real or better whether one made use of medical professionals to get there or not. Some pregnancies end in miscarriage, some are aborted, some end with a vaginal/frontal hole birth, some end with a c-section. Sometimes the pregnant person chose, sometimes they didn’t. No ending is more real whether or not a medical professional was involved. The re-introduction of midwifery, doulas, and so on has not compromised access to a medical based model of care starting and ending with an OB/GYN for those who either need or prefer it over a social model of care.
Partial vision loss is primarily dealt with in a social model of care. By and large, those who have partial vision loss wear corrective lens (glasses and/or contacts) but leave their eyeballs themselves alone. Some go to a medical model of care, e.g. get laser eye surgery. Again, neither models of care impedes access to the other.
In other words, I’m almost certainly rolling my eyes whenever I come across some iteration of the TG/TS debate whichever side someone takes on it (because many who think they’re endorsing a social model are advocating for a distorted take on it that presumed there’s some sort of zero sum game at play when there isn’t.) Literal and figurative blood, sweat and tears have been spilt over it. The social model does not suggest no one needs medical care. But besides medical care, I need(ed), pending where I live, human rights legislation, anti-sexual harassment policies, hair cuts, to update what sort of underwear I wore, etc etc I don’t benefit from being systemically pathologised. It would have been nice if I hadn’t been assigned a sex at birth, sparing me needing to legally change it, but in the case scenario where this occurs, surgery should not be a requirement to change one’s gender marker and gender markers should not impact which care one can access. Because someone without a uterus will not scam a health system into getting regular pap smears or a hysterectomy. I will never bend over and cough for my non-existent prostate. Medical professionals can deal with doing their jobs properly, they don’t need a letter on my health card to determine which tests may or may not be appropriate to administer to me. When you think about it, all of the methods I suggested as ways to manage dysphoria prior and in between surgeries were social model suggestions. They have their merits in certain times and place.
*Some wording in the articles are problematic but the biology, as I understand it, is accurate.
