Get Real! I Feel Like My Body Is Wrong, But My Parents Say My Feelings Are Wrong

By Heather Corinna, Scarleteen.com
May 28, 2010 - 11:07am

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/node/13570

LondonIsABurningFire asks:

    I'm a girl, but I've always felt like I'm in the wrong body. Every time I picture myself, I see a boy. I want to get a sex change, but I know how much it can cost. My parents are also Catholic, and are already angry about me not being religious, and every time I try to bring up the subject, they get angry and tell me that I was "made a girl", so I should only feel like one, and that everything else I feel is wrong. But my friends are very supportive, and I even have a guy friend who wants to be a girl. Who do I listen to?

Heather Corinna replies:

You listen to your own feelings and sense of self. You're the expert when it comes to your own identity.

"Who do I listen to?"  That would be yourself to start. But then comes councilors, close friends, others who have your best interests in mind. There is something to be said for a outside opinion too, a disinterested stranger can sometimes give you an objective viewpoint (that would be the therapists).

If the parents are incapable of engaging in a rational discussion on the subject, it might be time to cut them out of the decision loop.

It would have been good to know LondonIsABurningFire's current age.

The response is very sweet and well-written, but it comes from a particular ideological perspective that I don't necessarily agree with - that is, that all trans people's issues are rooted in "gender" rather than in "sex," and that trans people are necessarily "gender variant." Neither of those is true for all of us. I wish that we, as a community, could develop a better language to talk about ourselves.

I wasn't completely happy with this response either and thought that some of it was, well, absurd even if well-meaning.

How do you see yourself, Kyril?

Me? I'm a reasonably gender-conforming gay guy - I just have a hormone imbalance and some unfortunate congenital defects.

(pulls tongue out of cheek) My objection to the terminology isn't really about me. From the outside, I personally could be described as "gender-variant" by a reasonable observer (regardless of which sex they perceived me as). But there are transsexuals who are not gender-variant in their birth sex, and there are transsexuals who are not gender-variant in their preferred sex. And there are gender-variant people who are not transsexual. And there are even gender-variant people who aren't trans at all (the gay guys I fit in with, for instance, could be described as gender-variant, but are not on the trans spectrum).

I think it just needs to be acknowledge that some of us have a problem with our assigned sex, some of us have a problem with our assigned gender identity, some of us have a problem with the standard gender expression for our assigned gender identity, some of us have a problem with all three, and some of us don't necessarily have a problem so much as a preference for nonconformity.

I getcha. Thanks for elaborating.

Personally, I'm becoming fond of those four-pronged models that include sex (or sexual) identity, gender identity, gender, and gender role. Except I can do without the gender role part.

Quote from: Arch on May 31, 2010, 12:16:18 AM
I getcha. Thanks for elaborating.

Personally, I'm becoming fond of those four-pronged models that include sex (or sexual) identity, gender identity, gender, and gender role. Except I can do without the gender role part.

Yep, that's why I tend to use a three-pronged model (sex/sex identity, gender identity, and gender expression).