Lets Talk Labels

23Feb09

Labels are one of those things that seem to always be present, wether we like them or not. Being honest, I’m probably just as bad as anyone else for our innate human need to categorise things into neat little packages. If something’s quantifiable, then it’s understandable. Well, at least seems more understandable. While I feel uncomfortable about labels, I do think it’s important to have some kind of language that we can use in conversation with people who want to understand.

The whole ‘trans’ term is a very broad brush, and serves to confuse many people – including trans people. I’m not professing to be an expert, but at least here is my interpretation of the labels we use. I guess first I should talk about ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. Generally, sex is considered to mean the body you were born into, and gender is how you identify yourself, but even this isn’t too clear as there are so many intersex people who are neither male nor female. There are also people with a birth sex who don’t identify as either, and so the entire thing is fluid. Transgendered then is taken to mean someone with one birth sex, but identifies, and is, a different gender. Transexual can be taken to mean someone that is the same, although decides to bring their physical appearance into line with their gender; thereby reconciling how they identify and how they present to the world, and themselves in the mirror for that matter. Whenever someone referred to me as being male, I was always quite surprised. I have these ‘oh yeah, that’s what you see‘ moments – I just never identified as male. I’m not going to get into the whole situation in which the boys and girls are split up into teams or something, as that just is always strange.

I’m of course talking mostly about people who were born physically into a body that was at one end of the spectrum, and who actually have a gender somewhere at the other end – if I can use that crude metaphor. As soon as you’re born, the absence or presence of a penis defines how you’re ‘categorised’, and that’s on your birth certificate. Anyone that’s looked into it knows how hard it is to change that, regardless of which gender you identify. Often the problems arise when sex and gender are confused. If your sex and gender match; then cool! If they don’t, then generally people find it hard to understand. The fact is that they aren’t linked, per se. Often they’re the same, sometimes they’re not. It’s estimated that even 1% of the population is in exactly this same situation. 

Then there’s the ‘trans’ label. It’s all made harder by the fact that there are so many different types of people covered under the term ‘trans’. Most people would interchange any ‘trans’ word with ‘tranny’, although generally that’s associated with transvestites. It’s a huge generalisation to make, and one I make very advisedly, but transvestites often identify as male, are often attracted to people of their opposite birth sex and choose to wear the clothes of their opposite birth sex. Of course, for every person there is a different sexuality! My sex/gender mismatch is a completely different thing to my sexuality. There are also cross-dressers, who often identify as wearing clothes of their opposite birth sex, sometimes for erotic reasons. The fetishising of items of female clothing is a big thing, I suspect due to the fact that there are only two types of clothes that manufacturers sell; women’s clothes, and clothes for everyone. It’s not at all uncommon to see someone who identifies as female and female birth sex wearing a suit and tie, traditionally associated with ‘male’ clothing. It’s much less common to see someone who identifies as male with a male birth sex wearing a skirt. 

So it’s no surprise that people don’t really ‘get’ the whole trans thing. People haven’t really had time to think about it, or what it means. At dinner the other night we were talking about the amount of FTM and MTF transexuals there are, and why there are so many more MTF. I’m not entirely sure that there are, as being transgendered or transexual is a different thing to being a transvestite or cross dresser. It can be someone’s first steps on a road of discovering themself though, so it’s not uncommon for someone to identify as being a cross-dresser, then transvestite, then plenty of ‘trans’ words, then transgendered, then transexual. Similarly, if someone is FTM transgendered, if they wear ‘female’ clothes, are they cross-dressing? I’m proud to be in a world where people are starting to be able to express who they are, and it’s healthy for society to be able to do that. If someone identifies as ‘gender queer’, ‘gender fuck’, or none of the above, then that’s great! If you want to grow a beard and wear a ballgown; you should be able to do it! To visit the point I made earlier on; if people saw a ‘woman’ walking down the street in a ‘male’ suit, they’d probably not comment. If a ‘man’ was walking down the road in a mini skirt and heels; generally he’d be termed a ‘tranny’ or some such label. It is also true that, unfortunately, it almost seems to be a cultural thing to laugh at ‘trans’ people. Some cultures like Native Americans would revere ‘two-spirit’ people, and often they would fulfil the role of a healer. Seems like we may have regressed a little to the ‘I’m a ladeeeeyy…‘ jokes.

Personally, I was born with a male sex, and a female gender. Regardless of my choices; I need to reconcile these things. While I’ve never been completely disgusted by my body, I’ve never liked it, or felt that it was mine. The ever present thought I had though was: ‘am I just doing the same thing and subscribing to a binary notion of genders?’. Worrying that I want to celebrate the entire spectrum of sex and gender, it could be vastly hypocritical of me to think in these terms’. But, there are also ‘bois’, ‘gurls’, ‘tgirls’, and an infinate number of permutations that fit somewhere between and beyond our labels. The important thing for me was to understand who I am. I’m female, I’m a woman, and I’m proud to live in a world with everyone that knows what or who they are; no matter how undefinable or impossible to label that may be.

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