(no subject)

[the_fantastic_ms_fox]

More Naval-Gazing feom GDST 200

(the class is on gender, but the below extends to all manner of things)

When is one’s gender and its history someone else’s business? Colman is upset to discover that his father is biofemale. Chatroom clients are perturbed by the idea that Kate Bornstein may not share zir persona’s gender. After the newspaper outed Brandon teena, two men raped him, then later later killed him, his girlfriend and one of his friends.

Whose business is one’s gender identity? If one has a right to one’s own gender expression, and if one’s gender expression is socially validated, then one has a right to do what is necessary to feel legitimated, and this can extend to being acknowledged as a member of one’s preferred gender. If obfuscating (or lying about) one’s past is the only way to do this, is it then fair? Is it wise?

One constructs one’s identity in large part through gendered relations, some with strong ties to the act of reproduction: father and son; wife and husband. Colman presumes that he is the biological male adopted (and therefore non-biological) child of a biological man and a heterosexual woman who have been up front with him about his origins – with the exception of his father’s ancestry. He defines himself by these points and when they are called into question, so is Colman’s identity. Is it then fair to him that his parents overlook his father’s biological sex? If it’s unfair, is it then laudable that Colman knows about his adopted status? Consider how different Trumpet would have been had Colman grew up assuming that Millie and Joss were his biological parents, only to have his father’s death prove that this impossible. Consider also an alternate Trumpet where only Millie ever knew.

            Should Millie and/or Joss then have told Colman about Joss’ biological sex? If so, when? The younger Colman is when he finds out, the less shocked he’d be, but the more likely it is that he’d let it slip, causing harm to his father, his mother, and even himself. If not, then what information do we owe to which relations?

If we divulge our sexual history solely as a hedge against infection, then chatrooms need no pre-briefing. Given that gender carries no risk of infection, is it then not our lover’s business? And if it’s not our lover’s business, is it anyone else’s at all? Or is gender actually inherently safe? If there’s a physical, social, or psychological risk attached to getting involved with someone of a certain gender present or past, then maybe others have a right to know – or a right to never know. If finding out that one’s parent, friend or lover has always been trans causes psychological harm, should the trans person mitigate this harm by coming out early? Alternatively, if being the child, lover or friend of a trans person is dangerous, then does the transgendered person have an obligation to carry their secret to the grave?

Comments

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that people may not have a right to know, but I'd lean towards disclosure in intimate relationships.

Why?

Because one's experience of gender and/or sex shapes who one is: how you are treated, how you expect to be treated, the rituals and knowledge you were indoctrinated in as a child, your relationship to your body and other's....Basically, I think the desire to be complete and honest with another, to have integrity (in many senses of the word) requires a certain amount of disclosure.

Basically, my curmudgeony self is offended at the idea that you can change your past and your experiences with hormones and surgery, and unless you're comfortable and happy lying to your loved ones, and honestly believe they won't be at all hurt that you have (and this kind of relationship, personally, drives me insane. literally) you should let them know.

[hundun.livejournal.com]

Very much with you - the questions I ask are there largely because we're told that we have to ask questions in the paper.

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

What? you didn't post specifically to hear MY take on gender protocol?

I'd be offended, if I could pay attention that long ;)

[osmie]

I've always found it extremely spooky that in order to change one's gender (at least in BC), one of the legally required steps is to gather up all of the old copies of one's birth certificate and destroy them. Or at least to sign a statement that you've done so. It's a bizarre negation of the past -- and for all that I know it's predicated on a legal desire to keep too many birth certificates from floating around & inciting identify theft, it sure feels like a bureaucratic demand to reject one's entire history.

For similar reasons, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the common trans custom of declaring one's surgery day a second birthday -- or in extreme cases, a brand new birthday which replaces the first one. It's one thing (and often a very useful thing) to reinterpret one's past, but this is downright revisionism.

Now, there are pieces of my past which I regret with my whole being. There are hours & days which I would give an enormous amount to be able to take back, to live over, to do right. I don't like to talk or even to think often about these times ... but I will not deny that they happened. To do so would not only be inviting such errors to happen again, but it would also be cruel to the people I've hurt: it would be like refusing an apology on the grounds that their injury wasn't important enough to warrant one.

Which is all a bit of a digression from the main point that you can't change your past or your experiences. They're what made you; you are your journey. Isn't life supposed to be lived in the direction of becoming more like yourself, not less?

Contemporary usage tends to overemphasize the notion of "rights," and to de-emphasize the notion of "responsibilities." No one has a right to know anything about me -- anything at all. It's not an issue of rights, and trying to make it one can only lead to grief and fuzzy thinking. It's me who has the responsibility to disclose information about myself to the other people in my life: the closer the relationship, the more detailed the information. And if I fail in that responsibility, I'm the one who will have to live with the consequences.

[osmie]

Posit: the only reasons to lie about one's gender are (a) to fit better into society, or (b) to screw with people's heads. The latter reason can be fun to do to strangers, but is completely dysfunctional to do to friends; I will dismiss it for the moment. As for the former reason, it can be perceived as necessary only by projecting onto society a classification system of gender which excludes one's sense of self.

This is an idea which, the first time it occurred to me, nearly made me leap up from where I was sitting and run to the nearest university admissions office. A necessary precondition of genderbending within society is to construct, from the same cultural cues, two disjoint subjective maps of what "gender" means. It's that middle clause which particularly excited me. There are only so many cultural cues available to any one person: what are the implications of using the same cues to create two disjoint maps of the social world?