Quote from: Foxglove on October 22, 2014, 02:11:20 PM
I think this is a very good post.
You can't read people's minds and so it's impossible to know what they're really thinking unless you ask them--and a lot of them couldn't give you an answer if you did. But from what I've seen of cispeople's responses to TGism, it seems to me that the key to their thinking is basically simple: they link the notion of gender to the genitalia alone. That is, they don't make the distinction we make between "gender" (which is psychological) and "sex" (which is physiological).
We know that there is a psychological dimension to gender (and some unfortunate cispeople like David Reimer also discover that fact), but I think that most cispeople are either unaware of that dimension or they don't realize the importance of it or they simply don't think about it much because they don't have to. After all, given that their bodies match their minds, their bodies give them all the data they need. The body is immediate, pressing, visible, tangible. It tells them all they need to know so why look further?
Over and over and over (ad nauseam) you will hear them assert that if you have male equipment, you're male, and if you have female equipment, you're female. For so many of them it's that simple. It's your genitalia alone that determine what you are. Either they cannot grasp what you're telling them about the psychology, or they simply dismiss it as a mental disorder.
You can see some of their thinking in the misconceptions they have about us. E.g., a lot of them think that we think that by having SRS you change from a woman to a man or from a man to a woman. I.e., they seem to think that we're normal men and women like them who have surgery and then claim to be normal women and men like them. Our mental disorder lies in the fact that we want to be other than we are. Their mistake lies in their failure to grasp the importance of the psychological facet of gender. They think we're "men who want to be women" or "women who want to be men". They don't really grasp the basic notion of TGism.
We transpeople are always (painfully) aware of the psychological dimension of gender because our circumstances give us no choice. But cispeople don't have the same pressing need.
And finally the notion that you can be psychologically male and physically female or psychologically female and physically male is so outlandish and repugnant to them that many of them don't even want to make the effort to grasp it.
Absolutely, and good to quote David Reimer (and notable others). What happened to them? They were MAAB and their genitalia were irreparapably destroyed during circumcision or their male genitalia was dramatically underdeveloped, that´s why doctors decided to model them female genitalia and let them grow up as girls. Despite having grown up as girls and being sozialized as girls they all came to recognize, sooner or later, that they should be male. That´s subconscious sex. The brain is neurologically linked to the gender it belongs, that´s also the main reason Gender Dyshporia never dissapears, only exacerbates over time. So was my experience with Gender Dysphoria. The brain, your subconsciousness expect your body to be shaped in a particular way and if it doesn´t fit, because your brain is female linked while your body is male, you´re Trans.
Why do Cis people mix up genitalias with sex and gender? Why do they think being FAAB/MAAB makes you a woman/man regardless what you´re
feeling inside? It´s exactly because of what I described in my previous post. Their brain accepts the body as it is, because the body is shaped the way the brain expects it to be. The subconscious sex will never come to a conscious level as it does in Trans people. That´s also the reason why they can´t understand Trans people. Cis people just don´t have a need for transitioning. They feel complete and this sense of completeness derives directly from the assigned sex being in line with the subconscious sex. For them the thought of changing one´s sex is just monstrous; they wouldn´t do it for whatever you may promise them to gain.
As long as Cis people are unaware about having a subconscious sex too, we will have to face Cis-Sexism and arrogance. This culminates in the perception that Cis genders and bodies are more "natural" than Trans ones. Going back 30 years and you might meet honorable citizens citing that their being heterosexual is
natural compared to homosexuality, which is something artificial, unnatural and abnormal. The same argumentation we´re facing now in terms of gender and sex.
Again, as long as Cis people believe that they are the normality, that their genders are natural and denying the fact that also they have a subconscious sex, we have to face Cis-Sexism, prejudice, bigotry and hate.
xoxo
