I am a big fan of Steam Powered Giraffe.
And I was moderately upset to see that another fan couldn’t quite handle the fact that Bunny Bennet is a girl. Said fan has since deleted their blog, so I can’t tell if they’re a troll or not. But I figure it’s high time I gave the beleaguered transfolks a break and educate some people.
People who already know about trans* issues, feel free to correct me when I get things wrong. I might yet do so, but I am honestly trying to get things right. I have actually done more than passing amounts of homework on this.
People who don’t know about trans* issues, please do some fucking research before lending me your opinion. Thanks.
Long rant ahead.
TL;DR: Nobody has any right to enforce methods of self-expression on any other individual. Everyone has the right to do whatever they want to their own body, so long as they are not hurting themselves. If you don’t like it, find somewhere else to be.
Baby Version: Some people are born with the wrong meat suit. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s up to those people to get their own levels of comfort with that. None of which is any of your business.
Sympathetic Version: Let’s go to imagine-land and pretend you have the wrong meat suit. You still identify as your original gender, but the exterior is the wrong one.
Picture what it might be like to go out and relate to people who can’t seem to get their heads around the idea that your OS doesn’t match your case art.
Now imagine the vast number of people who want you to die.
And picture trying to live every day, trying to get comfortable with yourself, in the face of that constant ire.
Yeah. No wonder that genuine transfolk get tetchy about your demands to educate you. No wonder they get angry when you misgender them. No wonder they get upset when you call them a slur. Please stop that nonsense, now.
Science Version(with icky pictures): Y'all have probably seen that picture of the human nervous system shorn clean of the muscles and bones that are its interface. If you haven’t, here it is:
This is the operating system for our meat suits. As you can see, it’s kinda difficult to tell if that was once a boy or a girl or any kind of person in-between. This is us… underneath.
This is not an excuse for a “we all bleed red” pseudo rant for equality. I’m not going to go there. Because we also have a society that pulls fuckshit on a regular basis. Back to the gender game.
Everything that makes me a me and not you works from this core system. Everything that makes you a you and not me does likewise. This does not, ironically, make us all the same in the end.
This operating system is so darned important that it gets its own set of hormones during the build stage (aka: gestation/pregnancy).
And that’s where things get complicated.
Transexuallity happens when the foetus changes in utero. We all start as girls. Girls are the ‘blank slate’. And then, around the second trimester, hormones flood the foetus to change certain aspects. These hormones happen in two groups. One for the brain and nervous system, and one set for the body. When one of those sets doesn’t arrive(or when one set arrives, counter to instructions), you get a baby transsexual person.
The leading cause for this “print error” is usually excessive stress in the mother. Most often, sadly, associated with abuse.
[I am deliberately not covering intersex folks as thoroughly, because I am not certain of the science. My apologies to you all]
Now… your baby transsexual person has no gender identity when they’re born. Another wonderful poster said that babies are asexual and agender and they’re right. Your average baby’s priorities are (a) sleep, (b) comfort and © milk.
Sex doesn’t -and shouldn’t- come into the picture.
As we learn social interaction, society comes into play. Baby learns that, according to the rules, boys are one thing and girls are another.
And society confuses the issue by taking a look at Baby’s genitals and enforcing set behaviours based solely on the meat suit that’s visible.
That’s kind of messed up.
And it has lead us to such acronyms as DMAB, AMAB, DFAB and AFAB. The FABs and MABs stand for Female At Birth and Male At Birth, respectively. The leading D and A stand for Designated and Assigned, respectively.
Intersex folks tend to use AFAB and AMAB more often, because their genitals are forcibly reconfigured shortly after their birth, and the surgeons and parents basically flip a coin or choose according to their own wants. As you may be able to guess by now, this is messed up.
Designated gender means that an attending physician has made a premature diagnosis based solely on visual evidence. This is just bad science.
Society tells us that DFAB people need to do X things, and DMAB people have to do Y. Why? Because apparently your genitals are THE MOST IMPORTANT DECIDING FACTOR THAT EVER WAS.
That’s real messed up.
Just think for a second about the number of things you do on a daily basis that you actually need your genitals to be able to do.
…yeah. Not many.
Now take a while to ponder how many “male” occupations or “female” occupations similarly require the use of genitals.
That number is almost zero.
So why is it that we value male writers more than female ones? Or that male teachers are instantly treated with more suspicion than a female teacher?
It is because of the Victorian Era. This was the time when white heterosexuality went forth to teach the world that everything everyone else was doing was naughty and should be covered up and never mentioned again. We have the Victorians to blame for hyper-sexualisation, pregnancy taboos, homophobia, transphobia, and anything messed up that is also associated with the phrase “sex sells”.
Sexism is older than dirt, alas, and stems around the idea that a cis woman’s uterus has to be controlled by controlling the cis woman surrounding it.
BUT - the Puritans and the Victorians both had a lot to do with how messed up our society is, today.
And guess what?
By attempting to enforce your own standards on someone else’s body, you too are contributing to those levels of seriously-messed-up-edness.
Trans and intersex people have enough shit to deal with without having to dodge low-flying and unwanted opinions from strangers about their own bodies.
What’s in our collective pants is the LEAST important thing about us. How anyone has sex should only matter to the involved parties.
What we do for others, what we say, how we act towards our fellow humans? That is.
I hope everyone’s GD educated, now.
