Category: Feelings

Feelings, beliefs and actions IV

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In almost thirty years of participating in transgender communities, I’ve noticed a common theme: trying to figure out who’s trans and who isn’t. Within and around the category of transgender, there’s also a quest to decide who’s nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, gender non-conforming and more. People talk a lot about whether other people are trans, but the biggest question is probably “am I trans?”

Categorizing people is problematic

It’s pretty clear where this comes from. For decades, laws around the world have empowered medical practitioners to determine who is and isn’t entitled to purchase hormones, undergo surgery and change their names and gender markers on legal documents. The main criterion they’ve used is whether or not that person has a specific diagnosis. That diagnosis is ostensibly a description of the person’s mental state, but it has always been connected to named categories for the people with that diagnosis: in years past it was “transsexual” and now it’s “transgender.”

This medical criterion meant that the category of “transgender” has also been a key to membership in gender categories. One of the first transgender category fights I remember was in the alt.transgendered newsgroup in 1993, over whether someone who was assigned male at birth and “transgendered” (that’s the word we all used at the time) was entitled to be called a woman. Several members of the newsgroup felt that only people who were “transsexual” were women.

There are other benefits to being in one of these categories. Many support and affinity groups are restricted to members of particular categories. It’s also often preferred for someone who represents members of a category to belong to the category themselves, whether that representation involves speaking on their behalf, portraying them as an actor or being included as a token.

The problem is that categorizing people is notoriously problematic. Humans are complex systems of complex systems. As Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes. The rise of nonbinary identities and genderfluid practices is an illustration of how difficult it is to capture a person’s gender in a single category.

Let’s step back a bit and remember why we started categorizing people as transgender (or transsexual, or whatever) in the first place: because people were acting in ways that transgressed social gender norms (for example, wearing the “wrong” clothing), or expressing beliefs that ran counter to social conventions (for example, a belief that they are a different gender than they were assigned at birth), or reporting distressing feelings (for example, discomfort with particular social gender norms) and wanted help dealing with them.

I’ve found that it’s much easier to understand, identify and categorize these transgender feelings, beliefs and actions than it is to categorize people as a whole. In my personal experience, focusing on my feelings, beliefs and actions instead of trying to categorize myself is much more helpful in deciding what steps to take next in my life. Other people in my local trans support group and beyond have said that they also find it a more productive way to think about things.

Examples of feelings, beliefs and actions

So what are transgender feelings? They’re strong feelings that are brought on by gender-related experiences: gender dysphoria is a feeling of unhappiness or discomfort connected to currently assigned gender roles, and body dysphoria is unhappiness or discomfort connected to awareness of the current state of our bodies, often in comparison with a body image derived from societal expectations. Transgender desire is desire or longing connected to thoughts about particular genders, and gender fog is excitement connected to an anticipated or recent gender-related event.

Transgender beliefs are beliefs about our own gender that transgress some societal gender norm, like the classic “I am a man (even though I was assigned female at birth).” They can be beliefs about being bigender, agender or third-gender, or about having a “female brain” or “the soul of a man” or a “strong feminine side.” Any belief about gender that conflicts with gender norms and is not based directly on observation is a transgender belief.

Transgender actions are any actions that transgress societal gender norms: wearing clothes, taking jobs, practicing hobbies, speaking, dancing or even walking, claiming gender-restricted roles, identities and memberships, entering gender-restricted spaces in conflict with the gender identity that we have been assigned. Modifying our bodies to obtain or accentuate gendered features that conflict with our assigned gender identities is a transgender action; this can include hormones and surgery to produce, remove or modify secondary sex characteristics like breasts and facial features. We can also do long-term “soft body mods” (as Helen Boyd called them) like piercings, hairstyles, shaving, nail polish and bodybuilding. There are actions that we can take with the aim of preventing certain biological processes from happening, such as taking hormone blockers and using electrolysis or lasers to prevent hair growth. Sexual activities with partners whose gender is considered inappropriate under societal gender norms are also transgender actions.

How it helps to think in terms of feelings, beliefs and actions

As you can see, it’s a lot easier to identify transgender feelings, beliefs and actions than to decide whether an entire person fits one definition of transgender or another. Many of these feelings are felt, these beliefs are had, and these actions are taken by people who would not be considered transgender under any of the current definitions.

It’s also easier to think about how to deal with transgender problems when we separate them out like this. Feelings problems are when transgender feelings interfere with our lives. Belief problems occur when our beliefs are not welcomed by society, or when the world does not fit with the way we believe it should be. Action problems are when actions we take are resisted by other people, or when those actions cause problems for us, or when they are difficult in other ways.

This is an essay that I’ve rewritten multiple times – this version is more or less the fourth one. Here are the first, second and third versions.

Dysphoria, misgendering and semantic frames

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Part of the Frame Description of a Hotel Room

Body dysphoria is a feeling that there is something wrong with the configuration of the body, apart from any documented physical conditions. It is often contrasted with simple gender dysphoria, but some people instead portray gender dysphoria as a symptom of the same underlying condition. As I wrote a few years ago, there is an argument that body dysphoria is an innate “medical condition” deserving special protection. In that post I discussed multiple cases of body dysphoria appearing in adulthood, which contradict the idea that it is always innate.

So if not everyone with body dysphoria is born with it, how did those people get it? There is an alternative explanation for body dysphoria, based on the theory of semantic frames, that body dysphoria arises when gender dysphoria and transgender desire interact with the world. There is no reason to believe any of them are innate.

I also want to note that body dysphoria seems to be frequently triggered by the presence of others, or at least by people imagining how others would see them. The symptoms of body dysphoria – shock and distress – bear a strong resemblance to the feelings that many people feel when they are misgendered – classified by gender in a way that contradicts their intentions. The explanation that I give for body dysphoria also explains the reactions to misgendering. In fact, they are the same reaction, only with different triggers.

The way I’ve presented the concept in the past is that body dysphoria is a feeling of discomfort with the body, specifically the idea that there is something wrong with the body, that the way it appears is not the way it truly is or should be. By contrast, I’ve defined gender dysphoria as a discomfort with gendered expectations imposed by other people. I’ve also tried to separate gender dysphoria from transgender desire, the desire to be seen and accepted as a member of a different gender. Many people experience all three feelings, but some people only experience one.

Continue reading “Dysphoria, misgendering and semantic frames”

Envy, glamour and not transitioning

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Vee is the spouse of a non-transitioning trans person and a long time reader and commenter of this blog. She writes, “Dealing with feelings of love and commitment to each other yet trying to cope with the envy and enticement of transition. But not wanting to give up our life which we have invested in. How do you cope with envy? Thoughts?”

That is such a good question, Vee, that I felt it deserved its own post. I definitely feel that kind of envy when I see pretty young transitioners all dressed up, dating and having fun, while I get older with bigger shoulders, thicker facial hair and a bigger belly.

As you acknowledge, the first principle of trans stuff is that Nobody Knows What’s Going On. I can’t tell you what will work for your husband. But with that in mind, here are some things that have helped with me.

When I feel this envy, it’s not just garden-variety envy. If I see someone with a fancy new phone, I’ll feel motivated to save up to buy that phone. If I see someone casually picking up heavy things the way I used to do before I hurt my back, I’ll feel wistful. Neither of those are really anything like what I feel when I see a fully-lasered trans woman with long flowing hair giggling with celebrities on television. What I feel at that point is the glamour longing, as described by Virginia Postrel:

By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It makes us feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more. We recognize glamour by its emotional effect—a sense of projection and longing—and by the elements from which that effect arises: mystery, grace, and the promise of escape and transformation.

The glamour longing is at its heart a symptom of the desire to escape – to escape from something in our lives which is almost unbearable. It is triggered by these other trans people, who seem to have escaped. But just as a red car is rarely an escape from a dead-end job, a mistress with blond hair is rarely an escape from a loveless marriage, and a bigger house is rarely an escape from feelings of inadequacy instilled by prejudice, transition is very rarely an actual escape from whatever it is that traps us.

One thing that has helped me a bit is to actually live that fantasy for brief periods. I’ve walked through the streets of Manhattan and had people (men and women) say admiring things as I went past. It got me high for a while, but even at the time I was aware of how uncomfortable it was wearing falsies, Spanx, high heels and a ton of makeup. Most women don’t get dressed up like that every day.

After I came down (and boy was it important to come down after that, and it took almost two weeks. Remember to spread out your significant gender events!) I realized that presenting as a woman in public hadn’t really changed anything in my life. I was still married to the same woman, with the same kid, the same apartment and the same job. I’m generally happy in my marriage, but even if I had been looking for someone else, none of the people who showed interest in me were very promising as long-term partners. In a lot of ways, the whole exercise felt like a waste of time.

Another thing that helps is to get to know the people you’re feeling envious of, or to read what they write about their day-to-day lives. These cute, younger trans women are people too. Some of them are doing okay, some are frustrated, some are downright miserable. None of them seem to be having all that much better a time than I am. Transition didn’t magically solve any of their problems.

But you don’t have to go out in public, or even meet anyone else, to deal with this envy. Here’s a key piece that I’ve observed in my own glamour longing: it gets stronger when things are going badly in my life, and it’s weaker when things are going well. This has been particularly true with my romantic life: my interest in being a woman disappeared for several months after the first time I kissed a girl, and the same thing happened after I moved in with my wife.

I’ve heard similar stories from many other trans people, and it makes sense if the envy is really a longing to escape. So here’s my top recommendation for your husband, Vee, and anyone else who’s feeling this way:

Try to change things that make you feel trapped or hopeless.

It could be your job, your parents, your marriage, or anything. It may mean you need a new job or a new spouse, but it doesn’t have to. My wife and I spent years working through issues that had nothing to do with my gender expression. It didn’t make my transgender feelings go away, but it did reduce their intensity.

And to reassure you, Vee, it also doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem is coming from the spouse or the employer or the landlord. It could be the way that the trans person approaches those relationships, and most likely everyone shares some of the blame. The important thing is to figure out what feels hopeless and change it to get the hope back.

This is a part of my recommendation to invest in your masculine identity. If your husband has chosen to live the rest of his life as a man, Vee, he needs to make that a life worth living. It sounds like he has a good partner for that in you.

I wish you the best of luck, and to all the other non-transitioners and partners out there struggling with this. Other non-transitioners and partners reading this: what’s worked for you? What hasn’t?

Identity stress and nonbinary identities

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In 2009 I wrote about identity stress, which Norah Vincent captured so strikingly in her book Self-Made man, and Robin Williams dramatized in the over-the-top climactic scenes in Mrs. Doubtfire. Identity stress refers to the difficulty of maintaining two distinct identities, each with its own appearance, voice, movement, name, pronouns, documents, and social relationships. It can be the factor that finally pushes people to transition, even if they decided long ago not to.

It has not escaped my attention that having two separate identities is only one way to deal with conflicting gender feelings. Many people have pointed out that this is one of the approaches that minimize confrontation with the gender binary.

A lot of people I’ve met choose to push back on gender norms and adopt a single nonbinary identity. That can mean either a narrow range of gender presentations focused on traits that are not strongly marked for either gender, or a broad range from high femme one day to extreme butch the next. The key is that the person generally retains the same name, pronouns, voice and gestures regardless of what they’re wearing.

The people I know who adopt nonbinary approaches tell me that there’s a lot of stress involved there as well. They meet a lot of people who have trouble with unfamiliar pronouns or relatively new uses of pronouns. It is common in our society to compliment people by pointing out how well they fit in one gender or another. Some people feel very threatened if they can’t classify a person by gender, just as some feel threatened by people who change gender presentations.

Even with that stress, a single nonbinary identity is probably a lot less stressful and more sustainable than investing a lot of time and energy in two separate identities. I’m glad it works for some people, but it doesn’t fit well with my particular mix of feelings. My desire is not to be a feminine man, but to be a feminine woman.

My solution is to invest most of my time and energy in my masculine identity, while allowing myself to be as feminine as I feel in that identity, and to devote just enough time and energy to my feminine identity to keep myself from feeling resentful and rebelling. So far it seems to be working for me.

As far as I can tell, this is also what other non-transitioning feminine-spectrum trans people have done, like RuPaul and Eddie Izzard. I’ll talk about the implications of that in a future post.

Degrees of sexuality

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Every kind of sexuality exists on a continuum of intensity. Partnered straight sex does not go immediately from sexless formality to orgasm, and neither does gay or lesbian sex. In between there is fantasy, provocation, flirting, dating, touching, kissing and foreplay.

The progression is not necessarily linear or inevitable. People may feel conflicted or ambivalent, or simply not have a clear idea of what they want. They may change their minds, or feel differently when circumstances change. Fantasies go unfulfilled. People flirt and nothing comes of it. They kiss and don’t call. They have sex but want to go back to flirting.

There is also ambiguity and formality in sexuality. People go through the motions to please a partner. They kiss because they’re lonely. They fool around even if they don’t feel like it, because they got all dressed up and don’t want that effort to go to waste. They wear revealing clothing to feel admired or to be cool on a hot day, or because their other nice shirt was in the wash, or because it’s part of the dress code, official or unofficial.

If you read some writings all the nuances go out of the window. In these portrayals there is a linear progression from provocative dressing to flirting to kissing to foreplay to intercourse. People either want intercourse or they don’t, and their feelings never change. If they want it everything else is simply a series of hoops to jump through on the way.

There are two kinds of discourse that erase all the nuances. The first is erotica, because all that stuff about ambiguity and ambivalence can be a huge turn-off. We want a little bit of a story, but not so much it distracts us. We also want to be flattered, and too much nuance can muddy the picture.

People also ignore these nuances when disapproving of other people’s sexuality. It’s okay for Us to affirm our sexuality with all its nonlinearity, ambivalence, ambiguity and formality, but the Others, whether they be gay men or lesbians, straight unmarried couples, straight masturbators or BDSM fetishists, are not allowed this level of humanity. They are single-minded sex maniacs, monsters prepared to put their gratification before all else.

I can testify to this from experience. When I was a teenager I read and heard things about gay men that made me think of their sexuality as single-strength, either on or off, and I judged them accordingly. As I grew up and my gay male friends came out to me, I saw the humanity of their sexual feelings and stopped judging. (I also stopped judging other people in general, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.)

This isn’t to say that there aren’t sexualities that come with their own problems. When people feel desire for children, or nonhuman animals, or people that they have power over, there is a real danger of abuse. When people get obsessed with objects, or objectify other people or their body parts, that presents a barrier to the formation of true relationships. When sexuality is connected to violence, there is the danger of that violence getting out of hand. But we can’t simply say that everything and everyone associated with these problematic sexualities is automatically bad, or even criminal. We need to treat them realistically, acknowledging their complexities and finding solutions to the problems they pose.

I’m also not saying there aren’t bad actors out there. There absolutely are, but they’re represented in all sexualities, and they’re a minority of all sexualities. We need to keep this in mind, and remember that everyone deserves safety and compassion.

Sunk costs and the slippery slope

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This is the sixth in a series of posts discussing the Slippery Slope, how it works, and how you might be able to avoid sliding down it if you don’t want to. You can read the first installment here. I have already written the entire article in long form, if you want to read the whole thing right away.

On the slippery slope, a trans woman’s feelings, actions and identity all work together in a ratchet mechanism. One part of the mechanism is sunk costs. Just an average woman’s wardrobe and grooming supplies can cost a lot of money. Even if we don’t buy a complete wardrobe the expense is in addition to our men’s wardrobe. If we are in the closet at all, we may pay to rent a separate place to store our clothing and change into it, or to join a club for that purpose. Any specialized makeup, wigs or padding is additional, and training is on top of that.

These can cost a lot; we tend to think of them as investments and want to get value from them. I spent sixty dollars on a pair of boots last winter, and I was pretty happy once I found a chance to wear them.

Time is another sunk cost. We spend time on voice training, time practicing wearing clothes and shoes and walking in them. Women on average spend more time than men on grooming; trans women often have to spend even more time on things like shaving and make-up.

To save time, we may spend even more money on what Helen calls “soft body mods” like shaving or electrolysis. We may try to avoid growing big muscles. If we have a full head of hair, we may grow it long. We may forego beards or mustaches because we don’t want to look conspicuous after we shave them off.

Further down the slope, some of us get more dramatic body modifications, even if we don’t intend to transition. Some people get facial surgery, others take “a low dose” of hormones to get small breasts.

All of that money, all of that time, all the opportunities we’ve passed up are sunk costs. They all whisper to us, “Shouldn’t we be doing more with this? Nobody’s seen my legs yet this summer. Those boots are just sitting in the closet. I spent an hour getting my makeup and now I’m going to take a few selfies and wipe it off?”

This concludes the sixth installment of the Slippery Slope. You can read the next installment, or read on in the full article.

Dysphoria, gender fog and significant events

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This is the fifth in a series of posts discussing the Slippery Slope, how it works, and how you might be able to avoid sliding down it if you don’t want to. You can read the first installment here. I have already written the entire article in long form, if you want to read the whole thing right away.

In my observation, when a trans woman experiences one of the significant gender events I discussed in the last part, it can bring up a lot of feelings. This can have a major impact on our gender dysphoria: each significant gender event produces strong feelings of anticipation, gratification and disappointment. Each of these feelings by itself can produce peaks of dysphoria, and they are accompanied by an intense focus on the event that increases the baseline of dysphoria for that period.

These events can be so significant that we get excited. Very excited, as in unable to sleep for nights beforehand. We can spend a lot of time thinking about the event: what to wear, where to go, what precautions to take. We can feel frustrations with make-up, clothing, padding, wigs. We can feel impatient with the lead time, and want to get it over with so that the event can start. These frustrations, this impatience, feeds gender dysphoria.

The events themselves can sometimes be disappointing. The disappointment can come from interactions with other people, who may treat us like men, disrespect us, discriminate against us, harass us or even attack us – or simply not find us attractive. Or it can come from not liking what we see in the mirror or a photograph, or how our clothes fit. These disappointments feed dysphoria.

The events can be gratifying: we can have our femininity, our status as women, our attractiveness confirmed. We can simply have a good time. But even that gratification can feed dysphoria, because we often want more. If we have success, we want to build on that success. The event can be a high, and then we can experience withdrawal afterwards.

Whatever happens before, during and after the significant gender event, we spend a large part of that time focused on the event, thinking about what will happen, what is happening, what has happened. Just the fact of thinking so much about gender and about our own gender presentation can increase the chance that we will feel dysphoria.

Finally, this intense focus on the event can impair our judgment. This is widely recognized by trans people, and I call it “gender fog.” When we are in the gender fog, we often make decisions that we would not have made at other times, decisions that we sometimes regret later.

This state of intense focus can begin up to a week before the significant gender event, and last for up to two weeks afterwards. This means that for just one event we can spend as much as three weeks focused on gender expression, increasing our dysphoria, and with potentially impaired judgment. If we have these significant gender events less than three weeks apart, we may be constantly in this gender fog.

This concludes the fifth installment of the Slippery Slope. You can read the next installment, or read on in the full article.

Owning Ed Gein

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You may remember that Jos Truitt wrote a post about reclaiming the character of Buffalo Bill, the villain of Silence of the Lambs, as trans. AntBreach responded, “If you want to reduce stigma against trans people, why would you insist one of cinema’s most gruesome horror villains was trans all along?” As I said in my previous post, Buffalo Bill may not have been transsexual, but that just means he was a transvestite, which is still a way of being transgender. And because the character was a caricature of transgender desire, I said on Twitter that he was trans the same way Amos and Andy were black. The same is true for Doctor Elliot in Dressed to Kill.

I still don’t like the idea of “reclaiming” Buffalo Bill or treating him as any kind of hero, even to the extent he reflects any kind of transgender reality. But I do think we should own the very real trans person he was based on, Ed Gein.

Ed Gein confessed in 1957 to killing two women and making (or attempting to make) suits and masks out of their skin, as well as skin taken from corpses buried near his mother in the local cemetery. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and died in an asylum in 1984. His story is not only the basis for Buffalo Bill, but for Norman Bates in Psycho and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We get three fictional serial killers for the price of one real killer.

It needs to be said that Gein committed horrific crimes and is not a suitable hero or role model for anyone, anywhere, ever. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t transgender. He was, everyone knows he was, and we look like fools for pretending he wasn’t.

AntBreach’s question speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of how stigma works, one that is unfortunately all too common. When confronted with a negative association, one response is to simply reject the association. “Trans murderer? Well, no, that person wasn’t really trans!” This is bullshit. It doesn’t work when cyclists, or Jews, or members of any other group try to whitewash themselves and pretend that they don’t have any murderers, or rapists, or bad people. Everyone knows deep down that it is well-nigh impossible to have a group that big with no murderers, and on some level they see through the bullshit. It’s the same thing with transgender murderers, rapists and plain old mean people.

The case of Ed Gein (and the caricatures based on him) is particularly challenging because he wasn’t just a trans person who killed. His crimes were colored by his transgender feelings. They are transgender grave robberies and transgender murders. But there are a lot of killers whose crimes are colored by their gender experiences and their sexualities. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy committed gay murders. Gary Ridgway’s and Ted Bundy’s backgrounds as straight men colored their crimes. Female serial killers tend to kill husbands, children or elderly people in their care.

Gein’s transgender actions do not mean that the rest of us trans people are likely to commit those kinds of crimes. Gein was also diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychopathy, and those of us who don’t have either of those are a lot safer to be around. There is no evidence that murderers are any more common among the trans population than they are among the general population, and I haven’t heard of anyone else who has done what he did with corpses.

The way to deal with stigma is not to deny negative associations, but to acknowledge them and move on, and drown them out with positive and neutral associations. Why yes there are transgender murderers and rapists, but there are also brilliant transgender comedians, artists, composers, authors, film directors, computer programmers, scientists, teachers, athletes – and on and on. And there are trans people who are not particularly monstrous or particularly brilliant, but are just people like Joe down the block who goes out once a month in a wig and heels, and Liz at the coffee shop who likes to wear neckties all the time. There are trans people with enough love in them to drown out all the hate that people like Gein bring.

So yes, Ed Gein was trans. So are lots of people who aren’t murderers. Let’s see some more movies about them. Maybe some day we can even have a horror movie where the killer’s crimes aren’t colored by any transgender feelings – but our pretty, spunky heroine is a transvestite.

Repression, resentment and rebellion

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I’ve written before about how being in the closet makes us insecure and undermines our political power. There’s another aspect to it: we resent it, and we rebel. When we rebel, we can wind up hurting ourselves or innocent bystanders.

When I was younger, my parents didn’t want to help or support my feminine self-expression, and I got clear messages that the establishment – the universities I attended, the government, the local street gangs, didn’t either. Even the famous LGBT Center of New York told me in 1995 and again in 2000 that they had nothing to offer me if I wasn’t going to transition.

As a result I kept my transgender feelings and actions a secret throughout my teenage and college years. Coming out was a huge help, but even then I avoided directly telling anyone I didn’t trust. I repressed my desires, and the more I repressed, the more resentful I felt.

I didn’t really blame my family members who told me not to let anyone see me in a skirt, not to even talk about my desires. At times I agreed with them; sometimes I still do. But at other times it was easier to say to myself that they were wrong, and that they were holding me back.

The more that resentment built up, the more tempted I was to rebel. I felt alone and misunderstood, and powerless to fight even the LGBT Center, much less a gang, a college or the government. So my rebellion took childish forms, along the lines of, “You said I couldn’t do it, but I’m going to do it anyway! I don’t care if I get hurt. And I don’t care if you get hurt!”

I was lucky. I didn’t get hurt, and I didn’t really hurt anyone around me. Eventually, I began to grow out of this childish rebellion. After being out online for years and still getting work, I came to the conclusion that there are plenty of people who just want the job done and don’t care if I’m trans. I made connections with some people who were helpful, and the general cultural climate for trans people has improved.

Today I still have restrictions on my gender expression, and I still sometimes feel a desire to rebel against them. It helps to remind myself that they are my restrictions. I have thought through the pros and cons and made the decision to place these restrictions where they are, and I own them.

Unfortunately, those reminders are not always enough. This is why I need to manage my gender expression and avoid feeling like I’m restricting myself too much. Because restrictions and repression lead to resentment, and resentment leads to rebelliousness.