https://www.transsexual.org/cogiati_english.html asks the all-important question, in 2019, "How close was your upbringing, as a trans woman, to that of a man in 1950"? So many stereotypes. So much gender essentialism. I still managed to get a classification of "probably transsexual" when answering all the questions earnestly though skewed towards my understanding of me being a trans woman.
Now, for further fun, let's look at the "
self discovery" questions.
1. Do I express femininity MORE for freedom of being, or for the pleasure I feel?
No? I "express femininity" because it makes the feeling of my penis less like the feeling of crossing your index and middle finger across your nose and making your fingers feel like their map of your body is wrong.
2. Clothes, or Self? If everyone dressed exactly the same, male or female, how would this need in me express itself....or would it?
Sure.
3. Which gender expression permits me more freedom to be and do what I REALLY want, male or female?
What I REALLY want is to reshape the universe to give everyone better options of doing what they want, being who they want and going where they want. Or failing that, to write stories that touch people who recognize themselves in those stories. Having a vulva probably would make both of those things more likely to happen.
4. If I do nothing, I will lose the ability to be accepted as a female forever, and within about five years. How do I feel? What does this make me want to do?
This actually happened to me about 30 years ago. I did nothing, and I lost the ability to be accepted as a woman forever. It makes me feel like we need a more open and less frightened society where more kids are allowed to be themselves, instead of forced to fit into one of two little boxes.
5. My penis is GONE FOREVER. How do I feel about that?
I'm relieved to have no more inconvenient erections.
6. If I had to pick only one sex to be FOREVER, would it be male, or female?
You mean "if I
got to pick one sex to be". Most people don't ever get to choose. I'd be happier with boobs and a vagina, myself.
7. That choice is already being made for me. How do I feel about that?
It feels like I'm living in a world run by people who're frightened of everything they believe to be different from themselves.
8. List the single most important thing that comes to heart about being 'en femme' (dressing or otherwise expressing female gender).
A list usually has more than one item on it, but okay. I'm going with the clitoris.
9. If I spent the rest of my life just dressing as a woman, but living as a man, is that enough?
No.
10. It is ten years from now. WHAT am I?
In twelfth grade the boys in my class were conscripted to do the voice of the "Böjg" in the eight graders' performance of
Peer Gynt. It is an amorphous mass of opposition in which Peer gets stuck in one scene of the play. Peer repeatedly asks it "What are you?", and the best answer he gets is "I am myself. Can you say the same?"
The question, as Peer eventually figures out, is "Who are you?" Recognizing the basic humanity of the Other is the first, baby step towards a meaningful conversation.
Ten years from now, I hope to be myself, with boobs.
11. I wake up one morning and I am a woman. It is PERMANENT. It will never, ever change. How do I feel about that?
I feel like this is too good to be true. It'll probably take all day to experimentally confirm the veracity of my experienced reality to myself.
12. Is there ANYTHING I cannot do as a woman that I could do as a man? How important is that?
For one thing, I cannot speak credibly about how eagerly and shamelessly men in our society torture those who're not very good at being men, even though it's been my experience for 18 years. I can't cite the 43% suicide rate of trans people as though it concerned me personally.
And there's a lot of subtle stuff. I can't hold a woman in my arms and truly believe that she can imagine that I can imagine what it's like to be afraid to go outside alone at night, every night. It's probably important to building a relationship. I wouldn't know, I've never been in a relationship.
13. If I will feel about my gender the way I do right now, for the rest of my life, can I live with that? For exactly how long?
Yes. I've lived with it since I was about nine years old. I have developed an entire life around not feeling anything that my body's telling me so that I won't feel how wrong it's grown since puberty. I have been, essentially, a perfectly duped trans woman. And the answer to your second question, it worked for almost thirty years.
It's not working anymore.
14. Suddenly the entire world is devoid of gender. All people are hermaphrodites, utterly androgynous in personality and form. The culture reflects this, as does all human interaction. I am still me. Living in this world, would I still want to be a woman? Why?
I used to think no, it wouldn't matter to me. I used to be very anti-gender binary, avoiding gendered pronouns at every turn, imagining that within our lifetimes we'd outgrow the practice of defining people by their gender before all else, or before the fifty more important things.
Now, if I picture myself as a hermaphrodite, possessing both a ding-dong and a hoo-ha, I'm thinking "That's better, but not perfect".
15. One of the following things is stopping me from being my preferred gender. Which is it?
A. I am unsure.
B. I fear what others will do.
C. What if I regret it?
D. It is too much to face.
No.
The main thing that's stopping me from being my preferred gender is my body. But I'm going to disagree with this question on account of it's reducing the obstacles for trans girls to four things, and then one out of those four things. As though the other things wouldn't be problems if you decided the one thing was the main problem.
16. I am offered two choices. I am assured that I will not regret either choice, once it is completed. Both are painless and foolproof. One choice is to have the wiring of my brain altered so that it corresponds with my male body, eliminating forever any yearning to be female. The other choice is to have my body altered to fit my brain, so that I am fully female. Which is my preferred choice? Does one choice seem wrong? Why?
I choose the second one. The first one seems wrong because the human brain is, next to the universe itself,
the second most complex structure in the entire known universe. We have the science to alter our bodies. We do
not have the
smallest part of the science we would need to
begin to understand how to alter our brains. It's an outrageous fantasy of ignorant bigots, and I would deny them that victory over me on those grounds
if nothing else.
Spite is an amazing motivator.
But even beyond that. . .how can I explain this simply, to even te most wilfully ignorant? Having a feminine body, to me, feels right. It's what I fantasize about having when I go to sleep. It's what I spend my waking hours trying not to think about not having. I never learned to shave my face properly, without cutting myself, in a subconscious protest against my body producing facial hair. I touch by dick and balls sometimes and it feels like looking in the mirror one day when you're going through puberty and have been told that your body is going to change, your dick will grow and your voice will sink and your bones will grow so fast it hurts and you'll get hair in all kinds of embarrassing places, and you think you're ready for what your body is going to bring but instead you find a third eye growing in your forehead.
That's a dream I had when I was fourteen, if you're wondering. Try to imagine it. You're a widely read, semi-enlightened boy, you're learning how rubbing your penis feels like nothing you could ever imagine and makes sacred baby juice come out of it and you're trying to deal with all of that that the books have told you is going to happen, and then your body turns into something science has never heard of. Something monstrous, shameful. You become something that your first impulse, upon seeing your reflection, is to fear what people will think about it; to desperately try to conceive of a way to keep it secret from everyone. You're becoming something so
wrong that you actually have no way of dealing with it, you just learn to ignore it as much as possible, learn not to be aware of your body; learn it so skillfully that twenty years later you're only beginning to learn how to interpret its signals, how to understand what you're feeling, to understand even the smallest part of what you actually
want.
Because you have built your entire life around this fear that you can't talk to about anyone, and you've found it safer to just want things that are inevitable and things that don't require anyone's help for you to get. You've never had a job or a relationship. When people ask your opinion about things you're baffled, and you have to search your entire mind for anything to say, because it does not occur to you to form value judgments of your own. Caring about things is something you have had to learn to avoid; it's all part of the thing that you are, and that thing is wrong and needs to be hidden away where no one will see it.
This is just the smallest part that I've been able to figure out of the damage that has been done to me because I don't fit in a society that expects me to be a cisgender man. All of it could have been avoided if people like you didn't exist, or if you at least had the good grace to keep your unreasoning hate for people who you imagine are different from you, to yourself. If you'd given me, and the millions of people like me, space to grow outside of the tiny little boxes that you need to fit people into.
I'd choose a feminine body in your simple hypothetical scenario. I'd choose it for the same reason that you choose, in the real world, to have a penis, to be right handed, to close your right eye one microsecond before your left when you blink. (I'm assuming.) It's
not a choice. It's just how you are put together. The fact that I'm put together wrong and would change it if I could is quite beside the point. Your whole quiz here is quite missing the point.
I'll repeat it for all the TERFs who're probably reading this in the future and thinking about how to not get their comments deleted: My body, the way I dream of me being, with an innie in my bathing suit area, is simply how I'm put together. It's as self-evident as the taste of my own tongue, if I fold it to touch itself in my mouth. (It's as much my business as the taste of my own tongue too, if you should happen to worry about sticking your nose where it doesn't belong.)
The fact that I require conditioning, psychological therapy, hormone therapy and surgery to get the body that I'm actually physically schlepping around anything remotely like that map of that body that I have in my heart, well, if we want to be specific that is a technical obstacle that stands in the way of my self-actualization. If you compare it with the obstacles standing in the way of your ideal weight and muscle tone and occupation and love life and home this obstacle is not a difference of kind, but only a difference of scale.
I have a birth defect that gives me a masculine body. That's all. Everything else is society acting out its "prevailing superstitions and taboos", to paraphrase Mencken. I'm not saying society hasn't screwed with my head as much as anyone else's but we have to recognize my condition for what it is. I have a birth defect. That's all. That is all.
