Across the globe, the woman is a victim; a victim of various forms of oppression: sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, political under-representation, education deprivation, and considerably more.
From the highest to the lowest of civilizations, however, the male can also be seen as oppressed. The transexual male, perhaps, being the most persecuted of them all.
This is a post about gender self-identity. It will reflect mostly on my observations and thoughts that surfaced after reading a biographical case study that was written by the open (proud-proclaiming) transgender Betsy Lucal, titled "What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
Blending / Bending
THE BLENDER: For the majority of my life, I have been a gender blender. As both a child and a teenager, my closet was filled predominately with jeans and t-shirts. In the third-grade, while my female peers were playing braiding each other's hair by the jungle-gym, I took to trading Pokemon cards with the boys. When most girls were developing crushes and practiced dating, I watched Dragon Ball Z and mimicked masculine toughness ("You talkin' to me?").
True, I hardly felt at home amongst my own sex; but that did not mean that I identified myself as a male. I was one of the guys, but I was not a guy. Looking back, dressing like a boy was my way of finding acceptance. It was not until the later part of high school, however, that I began to pay attention and invest in my femininity.
THE BENDER: Lucal, in contrast, is a gender bender. Although born into the body of a man, she came to recognize and develop (re-shape) her inner gender identity as a woman. Naturally, as her body was built larger and taller than the average female frame, many members of society failed to look beyond the exterior and perceive the gender cues Lucal used.
"My gender display -what others interpret as my presented identity -regularly leads to misattribution of my gender. An incongruity exists between my gender self-identity and the gender that other perceive." (Lucal 787)
This incongruity is Lucal's lack of a groomed feminine exterior. The absence of such things as makeup and pumps causes onlookers to raise an eyebrow on such occasions as when Lucal uses her credit card or the ladies' restroom. What she sees as normal to herself, the world perceives as a joke or a perversion.
"Vagina envy"
To often help explain the aggressive demand by women for equality (in comparison to their male counterparts), patriarchy members will recycle an old Freudian term: castration complex (i.e. 'penis envy'). In essence, the argument insists that a woman who hates herself will covet the image, the symbol of man.
But what is a man?
For a number of women, man could be the embodiment of freedom; freedom, that is, from social and physical persecution and/or restriction. To envy this, however, claims the patriarchy, is childish.
But does not the average patriarchal society tend to shame women, to make them hate themselves and their bodies?
Men, too, however, are not safe from the pressures of fitting within a mold. Males are expected to be buff, to resent the feminine. When they do not, social shunning may take place.
In reverse, for a man, the woman might appear as the symbol of beauty, of divinity. (An outlook that can prove potentially dangerous, depending on the male and his urge to conquer.)
But where might the transsexuals exist in correlation to the condemned woman and the shunned male mentioned?
In the article "From Official Transexuality to Transexualities," Berenice Alves de Melo Bento provides a plausible insight:
"The transexual experience revises [the penis envy theory]. Penis envy become, metaphorically, 'vagina envy.' The penis (the universal signifier) loses its power and is transformed into 'something that will not let me live.'" (371)
For the transexual, the penis therefore is an obstacle. But the loss of that obstacle, as even Lucal hints at, would strip the transgendered male of her reserved male rights and make her additionally vulnerable to gender-violence.
A Plea for Transcendence
For a heterosexual female, the vagina can be seen as a source of damnation. And yet, for the transgender female, a penis keeps her from living. True, the struggles are physically different; but at heart, they are not. At the center of it all, both identities one thing: to be relieved of the pain the body and one's society places on them as women.
In a century of so many broken archaic boundaries, surely humanity can do with the loss of one or two more.
Reflecting back on my previous article pertaining to Plato, I pose this question: Might it not be time that society take aim for transcendence?
And to all my hetero and trans sisters out there: you go, girls!
Keep fighting for the right to be a woman!
Work Cited
Bento, Berenice Alves de Melo. "From Official Transexuality to Transexualities."
Sexuality, Culture and Politics - A South American Reader (2013). 366-389. Print.
Lucal, Betsy. "What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous
Gender System." Gender and Society 13.6 (Dec. 1999). 781-797. Print
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