Thinking about appearance, and how it’s not actually bad…

08Apr09

The process of transitioning used to be much harder than it is today, even though it’s still exceptionally hard. Health professionals were put in place as ‘gatekeepers’, and processes were put into place to ‘protect the transsexual’, but given these were things like requiring the transsexual person to re-locate, change jobs and deny all existence of their prior life, they really seem only to ‘protect’ the cisexual public from having to deal with transsexuals. Indeed, often a person would only be able to transition (or be actually called a transsexual) if a health professional thought they would be able to blend in with the cisexual public; a move really stating that you have to look good to be allowed to transition. In some cases, the health professional used their own sexual attraction as a criteria! There is documentation that shows that one of the criteria for allowing a transsexual to transition was if the doctor was sexually attracted to them (see The Whipping Girl, Chapter 7 – Pathological Science: Debunking Sexological and Sociological Models of Transgenderism). The fact that you were, in some cases, allowed to transition, in-part, based upon someone’s sexual attraction to you, is clearly horrendous and deeply sexist. I was going to write more about this some time, so I’ll leave my other thoughts until then, but I wanted to pick one point that these health professionals also picked up on; that some thought that transsexuals wanted to undergo genital re-assignment surgery as part of a fetishised, sexual fantasy so they could have sex with men…

Typically, the emphasis again is on sex, the inference being that the idea of subconcious identity is not important; it’s just about wanting to sleep with men….

I was thinking about this after reading it, and was attempting to resolve my own feelings about wanting to look a certain way, and how that sits with my feelings about myself. I was thinking about how I look and how I’d like to look – and the reasons for that. I guess the biggest reason I want to look a particular way is because I have that sense of myself, that looks like that. My physical form is incongruent with how I truly see myself. I guess, if I’m honest, that it’s also about how people treat me. The more ‘feminine’ someone looks, then the more they are treated as a woman. By feminine I really mean secondary sex characteristics such as breasts in a woman. To turn this into a suggestion that someone like me would just want breasts vastly downplays this and actually turns it into something it’s really not. Of course this is how I feel, but also it’s how I want to look and how I want people to see me.

On Colleen’s Real Women last night (ok, I wasn’t really watching it, but my housemate was) she made a huge understatement when she said ‘clothes tell you a lot about a person’. Of course we all understand that clothes tell us a huge amount about a person, but the point is that most people wear clothes for themselves, that make them feel good, smart, sexy, professional etc. Some wear clothes to make them look aggressive or challenging. The point is that people do interact with you differently in different clothes. I’m also not downplaying this to be all about clothes, but rather make the point that people do express themselves through how they look, and that it’s completely ok to do so. It’s not trite to want to do this, and is one of our most fundamental human, and probably pre-human, characteristics.

So for me, it’s no where near wanting to transition to have sex with men, although I will still be having sex with men as that is my sexuality, but I want to resolve my subconcious sex with my physical sex. Of course, the added bonus will be that as things progess, I’ll hopefully slowly but surely be accepted as who I really am, rather than who I looked like…

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Tags: appearance, clothes, subconcious sex, transition