Identity Crisis
I already talked once about tests some time ago. You know that you can open your browser, type a nice URL and then you get to one of these personality test that you can fill out. Sometimes I like doing them because it’s a lot of fun to see what comes out. But don’t worry, I won’t repeat much of what I already said except that one shouldn’t take the results all too serious.
Lately I found such a test on a lesbian page – it should evaluate whether you are a lesbian and what type of person you are. Okay, it wasn’t all too bad because it figured out that I actually am a lesbian. But the rest was quite funny. It just quote the most important results here.
To other women I seem to appear quite masculine according to my character (hey, I’m a transsexual, it’s rather the outer appearance…). However, I’m a big seducer and sexually rather dominant – wow, that’s a really new one. I don’t like straight women because I don’t get why they are attracted to men – don’t know why I have so many straight friends then. I tend to think in black and white – now that’s really mean! However, I seem to have a rather tender and sensitive character in love – finally something that I agree with.
I think that mostly people who know me will be quite shocked by some of these statements and if they would believe more in the test than in their eyes they would really rethink their view of me. But because I actually prefer people that use their own brain (in case they have one) they rather will find this funny.
But actually I’m not here to write about lesbian identity tests but rather about the categorisation in our world that such test are built on. Well, of course it starts with obvious things like what job one does. We think differently when we hear the guy next door is a broker and not working on construction. We have an image for everything – not surprising in a world ruled by images. But as a queer I don’t do that much thinking about brokers and construction workers but rather about other queers. So I’m also thinking in categories then – shame on me. Now, as a trans-woman I also need to put myself into some category on the MtF spectrum. We have here transsexuals, transvestites, crossdressers, drag-queens and everything in between. If we widen the horizon we could add intersexual and transgendered. Okay, so I am a transsexual, transgender and according to some rather new theories claiming that transsexualism is an intersex condition, I’m also intersexual.
Here the mess starts. Some of the radical transsexuals would already freak out when they hear the term transgender because they think that it’s a term to descrbe everyone who isn’t a real transsexual. However, it actually is an umbrella term for every trans-condition including transsexuals and, if we widen the horizon we could even include tomboyish women and effeminate men. Transgressing gender doesn’t necessarily mean to be “in between” but it can also mean to “cross over” of some sort. I know that many don’t like to hear this but as sorry as I am, language is pretty well defined and we should try to stick to it in some way. Now that I seem to have pissed of all the radicals we can go on.
Within this transgender category-cloud there are a lot of people that are trying to make a pecking order. We could describe it like this:
- Intersexuals are better than transsexuals because with them it’s a visible physical condition that doesn’t need some genetic proof of being relevant.
- Transsexuals are more serious than all other transgender people because they take the pain of crossing over and want to gain a proper social role.
- Bigender/genderqueers are better than transvestites because they don’t just crossdress to make a gender statement but actually dare to be real “anarchists”. Interesting here is that some also blame the transsexuals to try to fit in a certain role and therefore to be too conservative.
- Transvestites don’t have many groups left to call them less serious, so they maybe blame drag-queens.
Seriously folks – do you really think that some scheme like that does pay off? Don’t we have already enough religious fundamentalists, radical conservatives and others to blame? It’s really counterproductive to mess with the ones that could support our own interests. And there are already a lot of weird fights between some gay and lesbian groups and transgender groups I don’t really see the reason for. Maybe we should rather make a class distinction within the whole LGBT community that we can also apply to the straight and cissexual people. The group of radical conservative dorks and the group of the rest – the people that also can accept what they don’t understand. We grant the last group all social privileges and give the other group a country where they get enough space and ammo to kill each other – I guess that the world would become quite a peaceful place pretty soon…
Your meanie Liz
Transgender was invented by VBirginia Prrince, a full time cross dresser who did this exactly to distance herself from transsexuality. She also founded tri-ess, a club exclusivly for heterosexual transvestites. It was the media who started to use the term more and more for any crossgendered action. Since it was created in a homophobic and transphobic way it is no wonder some people don’t like it.
Language is not as well difened as you say it is. Still transgender has the function as umbrella term and at the same time as a term for all between crossdresser and transsexual.
I actually don’t mind that there are some people who don’t like the word – it’s just the most ccommon umbrella term, maybe next to “trans-*” or some similar approaches. What I do mind is that most people who dislike the word because of the discriminating roots still apply it to others (like: “We transsexuals are not trnasgender, we’re better” or some similar stuff).
The thing about language definition is quite difficult. All common definitions I know (for instance Wikipedia and pretty much all definition Google finds) point out that nowadays it’s an umbrella term. Soemtimes it’s als mentioned that it’s still used in the other way too. However, it’s rarely defined in the old way nowadays and in case of doubt I always stick to official definitons instead of the use. To me the original use is mostly connected to a negative touch which is anoter reason for me to point out the current definition as the only one – it helps to avoid misunderstandings.
It kind of reminds me of the German word “Platzangst” which refers to agoraphobia but everyone uses it to say claustrophobia.