I was doing an assignment for a women and gender studies class I’m taking, and one of the first things that stood out to me in the reading I was assigned was when it referred to the sexes: "Opposite is the word we use, and it has strong implications: that whatever one sex is, the other simply is not."
Being transgender myself, that line really stood out to me. It's easy for me to get sad about what biology has handed me, but in reading that line, I felt a certain happiness wash over me. It helped me realize that I've been trained to think of the 'sexes' as opposites, when in reality they're very similar and that I'm not less of anything just because I am not the biological sex that matches with the stereotype of my gender binary.
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When the writing ventured into gender ideologies and “transsexual” people it said that the famous Beatie (famous for being a pregnant man) identified as a “man in a woman’s body” it made me think of my own path and how I view myself.
I have switched from a mindset of “being trapped in a woman’s body” to being “in a man’s body with just a few of my parts mixed up” for several different reasons. One: It validates my identity as a whole and ultimately really helps me sleep better at night. Two: I feel like for transmen it can seem demeaning to an identity they lived as for x number of years because they way society views ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ We’re trained from a young age to not see people but to see woman or man. For various different reasons this has always lead to seeing ‘man’ as superior to ‘woman.’
As a man, I don’t want to feel superior to women. I don’t want to be disgusted by the thought of having a women’s body. I may be sad that my body curves and that my parts don’t match up in a way to the sex I am, but that doesn't mean I'm disgusted at the thought of being a woman. So, I don't want to say anything that might insinuate that at all.
We were also assigned a video titled: “ending gender” As I’ve experienced myself in the community more and more I’ve heard many thoughts of how gender is dead, how we should use a third inclusive pronoun, and how we shouldn’t let binaries define us.
I always thought those things were great, albeit a little confusing because the world I was raised in was so small, but I never knew what they meant for me. I identify as a transsexual FtM transgender man. But if gender becomes dead…what am I? If stereotypes don’t exist, where do I fit in?
This video helped me realize that by ending gender, using an inclusive pronoun, letting people live and let live…I would still have a place in a world like that. That while the world asked questions and made a spectacle of me and anyone around me, I could live in a world where I am who I am and that’s all that I am. I’ll inject hormones that help me present and identify as the man that I am, all the while exuding that anything and anyone can be a man. A man can be anything. “A woman can be anything.”
