???

[brittyn.livejournal.com]

alright, i've always been confused about the exact definition of a transgendered person. can anybody help me out? yesterday i started my sociology class, and the teacher was talking about the different ranks of sexes. of course on the top was male, and then on the bottom, people said "female" but she corrected everybody and said it'd be the transgendered. nobody knew what it meant so she told them that it meant a person that had a sex change. i didn't think she was completely right, but since i don't KNOW the exact answer... i didn't wanna speak up. it kinda bothers me if people have the wrong definition of it. i just thought a person that had a sex change was a transexual?? please help!

GENDERNAUTS

[sermoa.livejournal.com]

I saw this great documentary about transgenderism a few nights ago, and this amazing woman shared some really interesting insights. This is a transcript so the grammar is not perfect, but just listen to this wisdom...

Genders take every possible form. We think of them as only two, masculine and feminine, because we've learnt to make the others invisible and that, first of all, before we can truly talk about what the other genders are, we have to learn to see them. We have to rediscover vision. We have to re-learn how to see.

We are taught, most of us, to believe that only a single gender identity is safe, and all other genders are dangerous. So we have one that we are required, pressured, expected to have for life, and it's the one, first of all, that matches our physical genitalia. It's the one that matches our socitey's expectations of what those genitalia are - and what they're supposed to do.

If we're born with different genitalia, we are changed, usually, right at birth so that we meet the physical expectations, and then we have one gender that matches that.

But what the real world is like is not like that at all. In the real world we have many genders and we have many identities and none of our bodies really match any standard of what things should be like.

The number of people who are born with the genitalia of more than one sex are far greater than we know because some doctors have been trained to act as gate keepers for our expectations of the way that gender operates. And so they change what are called ambiguous genitalia in order to make them more recognisable as one of the traditional male or female. If we allowed people to grow up as they were born, we would find that there was a much greater variation of even physical identity than we think there is.