She is a mystic emissary from Planet Gender
Speaking of the agonies of female puberty – Glosswitch has an astonishing post on the subject titled The right way for women to disappear.
I am not at home in the body I have. I’ve never got over the desire to tell people, the first time I meet them, that this isn’t the real me. The real me is thin, breastless, narrow-hipped. This version of me is a poor compromise, a pathetic accommodation. I look like a woman but actually I identify as a human being.
I relate to that. I don’t experience it as sharply as Glossy does, but it fits nevertheless.
Womanhood, I had decided, was not for me. I sought to roll back puberty and remain stuck in time. The medical profession said no, you must go forward. And so I did, but it hurt because the world I went into remained one in which femaleness and personhood are not always permitted to co-exist.
And I relate to that. Puberty was just…not good. Alienating. Weird-feeling. And that’s despite having gone to a tiny all-girls’ school, so no taunting or leering from boys during the school day, which must make it so much worse.
This is one of the reasons why I am a feminist. I do not identify as a woman but it remains the social class into which, by virtue of having a female body, I have been shoved. I do not think I am the problem. I do not think my body is the problem. Still, as this body still confines me – as it is me – it remains a site of personal struggle.
It hadn’t been that for me until this business of “cis privilege” appeared over the horizon. Once that was on the table, the struggle was re-engaged.
For a long time I have felt a parallel can be made between eating disorders and gender confirmation surgery as forms of self-harming body modification. It’s not a comparison I make lightly, just for the hell of it. Indeed, every time I’ve made it, I’ve had to put up with the ritual public Shaming of the TERF, alongside the trivialisation of a condition which led to several long-term hospitalisations against the “realness” of true gender dysphoria. It’s been suggested to me that anorexia is an attempt to “express your feels” as opposed to the real suffering of “having a skin that metaphorically itches all the time” (as if anyone who’s ever had anorexia would not understand that!). A piece I wrote about theinappropriateness of positioning female body hatred within the context of “cis-ness” got me to Level 2 on the Blockbot. According to the official narrative, anorexia is at best mental illness, at worst vanity; transness, on the other hand, is politically radical, unquestionably authentic and quite incomprehensible to “the cis”.
The “politically radical” is the most absurd part. It’s the very opposite of politically radical – it’s reactionary. Just ask the mullahs in Iran.
A woman who starves puberty into remission is sick, so sick you can section her, decree her officially incapable of knowing what her own body needs. One who drugs puberty into remission is not sick; she is, on the contrary, a mystic emissary from Planet Gender.
Why? How did that happen? Who put what in the water supply?
Writing in the New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovey contends that “there’s a profound difference between a cisgender woman’s unease with traditional femininity and a trans man’s discomfort with having been assigned the wrong gender.”:
I have no wish to trivialize the body image (and reproduction-related, and sexual-violence-related) concerns that many cis women face. But all things being equal, it’s clear that the latter complaint is a bigger deal than the former.
No, it isn’t. Clear is just what it isn’t. That’s a shockingly glib dismissal of all of feminism (aka “a cisgender woman’s unease with traditional femininity”) just to win a round of the Oppression Olympics.
One person’s being assigned the wrong gender is another person’s being forced to occupy the wrong social construct. If I believed gender was purely a matter of inner identity, I would declare myself not to be a woman in a heartbeat. The fact that I don’t do this reveals nothing about my own personal discomfort. It is because I do not believe “reproduction-related and sexual-violence-related concerns” are mere “added extras” to the sexism cocktail. I see them as fundamental to how gender operates as a class system and on that basis, I couldn’t identify out of womanhood if I tried (because I have tried. I tried so hard it almost killed me).
It won’t work to tell all women to identify out of womanhood, so it would be great if people would stop belittling and waving away feminism.
Women like me are told that the political framing of our own dysphoria makes us dangerous and evil. Women who take a different tack are permitted to exit womanhood only if they leave their politics at the door.
That’s the crux, isn’t it. This isn’t a medical issue or a psychological issue, it’s a political one. It’s political all the way down.
It’s a bigger complaint cuz people with dicks say so, obviously.
Profound and true and a staggering insight.
No wonder that gender identity twaddle felt so bad and wrong and hostile. That’s because it IS.
@ 1 Blood Knight in Sour Armor
You get that the quote was of a cis woman talking about the complaints of trans men, right?
I’ve genuinely hated my body since I can remember and mistreated it for much of my adult life, at times almost ruining my life for the promise of finding my way out of this body. I’m much better now, largely thanks to finding feminism (radical feminism in particular) and finally being able to place myself into a cultural and family context that allowed me to feel okay in my corporeal home.
And I’ve been both perved on and treated like a disposable object by men specifically because of my body. It has brought me some fun and interesting times and some miserable times, but mostly the latter. And I think it is fare to attribute this to the fact that my body hatred problem is intertwined with my experience of femaleness within my own cultural and family context.
So I hope you’ll understand when I say how absolutely fucking infuriated I feel when a transwoman asks or says things that betray utter cluelessness of what it is to be a woman in a female (sorry, uterine-having) body, or utter disregard for women’s safety, privacy interests, or right to establish and enforce personal boundaries.
“…my body hatred problem is intertwined with my experience of femaleness within my own cultural and family context.”
I will sign my name to this letter.
I am so sick of having people dismiss anorexia as merely vanity or mental illness. Now even that has to be dismissed by trans activists, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of how wonderful cis women feel in their bodies.
I nearly died from body dysphoria, and it was NOT vanity. It was fear. It was sheer terror, and the lack of control over my own world because too many people felt that they should have control of both my body and my mind. And I found myself surrounded by people who were slightly overweight (by Hollywood standards) who told me “Honey, I wish I had your problem”. Hell no, you don’t! The only problem these women had is that the world expects every woman, even women in their early 60s, to look like Twiggy, and they had bought into the lie. Meanwhile, i was dying. I was killing myself, slowly, agonizingly, and having it dismissed as just vanity, and being envied by women who perceived themselves as all wrong. How anyone could look at my skeletal face, my shivering and shaking, my fainting, and think this was a good thing, I never figured out.
And now to have it diminished again because people need to believe that any dysphoria “cis” women feel is just a minor inconvenience or discomfort! I am shaking with rage.
Didn’t pick up on that… Might be extremely sleep deprived.
Yes, yes and more yes.
I’ve known trans people, I’ve nursed them, I’ve read their descriptions of what they feel about their bodies. The same is true for anorexics – more of them because, as is pointed out, anorexia is conceptually medicalised in a way trans is currently not. Then there are the huge number of young women I have met, both professionally and personally (including my daughter) who have turned to other self-harm activities – drugs, cutting etc. Far too often those self-harm activities are partially or wholly about rejecting the pressures of adult womanhood and failing to deal with the sometimes unbearable pain of teenage girlhood. In my experience there are similarities that cross these narratives, themes that become repeated over and over again.
I don’t deny that trans people with dysphoria suffer greatly. I believe them and I will fight for their right for appropriate treatment to enable them to deal with their feelings and live comfortably in their skin. I do believe that sex dysphoria exists and if the best way to treat that is to create a body that as closely resembles the female norm as possible then that should be freely available.
But I want something in return. I want acknowledgement that there is a burden to be found in the experience of the “cis” woman: that the very experience of being a biological female often causes dysphoria and – if we’re playing the oppression olympics – that this dysphoria is enough to cause self-harm to the point of suicide. That it is just as real, just as agonising and just as dangerous.
The long childhood, and disruptive puberty, of human beings is underconsidered. How many animals spend a decade growing into themselves, only to have that growth–their very structure–overthrown in the space of a few months?
Even without the external sexualization and commodifying, it is a lot to expect people to go through. When I first read the line about not ‘being at home’ in one’s body, I was ready to scoff. What other body do we have for comparison. But of course we DO have our previous bodies as a well-established standard.
This may be slightly off-topic, but the front page story of today’s “Thursday Styles” section of the NYT is this story.
John the Drunkard – I’m going to guess most large mammals, at the very least the non-grazing ones.
Some people aren’t at home in their body from the start (not necessarily for biological sex related issues). I’m guessing they realize other people do not share some of their unpleasant sensations, that some people enjoy the sheer experience of being alive the way they do not. Others learn this difference exists later in life and reinterpret their childhood experiences in light of their new understanding (as in ‘when everyone seemed inexplicably excited about X experience, I did not share the excitement because of this difference’).
OK, why would classifying an issue (whether being transgender or anorexic or anything else) as mental illness a reason to dismiss it? That makes absolutely no sense. If it is an illness of any kind (or part of an external manifestation of an illness), doesn’t that make it a more serious thing, a greater hardship for the individual, than if it is not?
Classifying it as a mental illness or a medical issue slathers another layer of stigma on. Such a classification thwarts the idea that the individual’s identity is self determined and instead paints them as a broken person in need of fixing.
Fact of the matter is though that sex dismorphia is treated medically. That’s what transitioning is: therapy.
It’s gender dysphoria, according to DSM-5. And yes, transitioning is treatment, though individuals vary in what kind and how much of transitioning they find most helpful.
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. It’s such a wrench.
I’m not completely sure how much of this I felt at the time and how much is what I feel looking back…but I’m pretty sure I felt at least some of it at the time. I know I wanted to be able to go on pretending, the way children are allowed to. I think I wanted to go on being a child – an older child but a child – for longer. I wasn’t ready for an adult-type body yet.