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The Gender Conformity Cop-In
@katebraestrup got a lot of love a while back on her post, “Thoughts From a Former Dysphoric”. My impression upon reading it was she was describing gender nonconformity, not dysphoria. Our dear Kate was a tomboy, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Dysphoria ought to mean deep discomfort, though, not just being a little different. The red tribe has an interest in both downplaying and, well, up playing “gender dysphoria”. Describing tomboyishness as “dysphoria” both downplays and up plays the condition: First, tomboyishness is not so bad, not really all that dysphoric, so what are people complaining about? Second, if every tomboy becomes convinced she’s “gender dysphoric” then oh my sweet Jesus on rollerskates, what is this world coming to?!! Before you know it, there’ll be fire and brimstone coming down from the skies; rivers and seas boiling; forty years of darkness; earthquakes, volcanoes; the dead rising from the grave; human sacrifice; dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!
What about those who aren’t just tomboys, or their male equivalent, but truly unhappy in their birth sex, perhaps with good reason? Even then, even though their discomfort is real, they may find copping into gender conformity a more sensible solution than, as @henryracette put it, copping out of it.
I can use myself as an example. I have a slight but pervasive connective tissue abnormality. The closest thing to “treatment” for it is being born male if you have to have it: testosterone-fueled muscle mass ameliorates it, while the vagaries of female hormones worsen it. So as soon as puberty hit, I found being female uncomfortable — really uncomfortable. At the time, I didn’t know I had the connective-tissue abnormality. All I knew was that, apparently, being a woman Hurt me with a capital H. Physically, mentally, even spiritually. My “woman’s body” disgusted me and just felt… wrong. Besides discomfort, I also had to manage, while still young and skinny, unsightliness that’s typically associated with the elderly and obese.
***
Being seen as sightly is a pretty big deal for women. Not all women desire to be paragons of sightliness, of course, but conforming to norms regarding feminine appearance can make a woman’s life much easier. Appearing to have a certain shape, or unblemished skin, or other signs of beauty, even when you don’t, is a feminine art. Most girls learn something of it, but some of us, if we want to “pass” as “normal women”, especially when we’re young, have a lot more to learn and hide than others do.
One way to hide unsightliness is simply to cover it up. A life lived in a full-length housecoat would conceal a multitude of sins, but gals who wear clothing any frumpier than it needs to tend to be looked down on, too. For someone like me, passing as a “normal” young American woman, therefore, meant not only much artful concealing but also artful revealing, when possible, to prove that I wasn’t dowdy.
I cannot stress enough how much of this was an act, an artifice. I wasn’t naturally interested in clothes, or boys. Though not exactly a tomboy (I was outdoorsy but not fond of most sports), I was a nerd, and I would have happily given even fewer f…igs for personal adornment than I did if it weren’t clear that such adornment aided in making my otherwise-marginalized self socially acceptable. I might have been a loner when other gals went to even the bathroom in groups. I might have been in pain when my cohorts were in the peak health of youth. But by golly, if I tried hard enough, I could at least look pretty feminine. Womanhood might not have felt right to me, but putting on a feminine appearance at least helped me conceal from others how wrong it felt to me.
***
One rule for putting others at ease is to be at ease yourself. For some of us, that’s never gonna happen. We can’t fulfill others’ expectations that we’ll put them at ease with our own ease, so we compensate by fulfilling their other expectations. Some of these expectations might be gender norms, even shallow ones, like ones about appearance.
I admit I can frump it up pretty hard during pregnancy, but otherwise, if you see me at a meetup, you’ll usually see me dressed to the nines. Travel isn’t always easy on me, and I might be tired and sore, but at least I can wear a pretty outfit and smile. It’s one way to make up for all the other normal stuff I’m not so good at, whether it’s normality that applies to both sexes, or only to women.
I “cop into” gender conformity not because gender conformity expresses the “real me”, whatever that is, but because by conforming in the ways that I can, I buy a little more leeway for the ways in which I won’t or simply can’t conform.
***
Conservatives: when someone tells you gender is a performance, don’t roll your eyes. It very much is. It’s especially obvious for women that artifice is involved. This performance is related to biology, yes, but it’s not rigidly dependent on it. It’s dependent very much on social expectations. That might be uncomfortable to admit, because what if folks want those social expectations to change?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fend off changing social expectations by declaring our preferred expectations “natural”? Why yes, yes it would. And sometimes it’s reasonable to argue that some expectations are more “natural” than others. Nonetheless, @henryracette can’t describe “The Gender Non-Conformity Cop-Out” unless there’s also a gender conformity cop-in, a set of choices people can make about performing their gender in order to negotiate social expectations.
Published in Culture
You could have said aunt Irma came to visit.
My sisters and I always said Aunt Flo.
My body was a bad guide, and I think I got as far as I did by defying it. Maybe I defied it a little too hard when I was younger, and burnt myself out on the defiance: maybe I should have been less defiant then, and more defiant now; I don’t know. At the time, though, it seemed pretty clear that my body was a prison, so it was probably better to listen to social expectations, rather than my body, if I wished to live, and live something like normally.
Well… no, I don’t believe “I had it”. That said, one way to discover what all these supposed experts mean by “gender dysphoria” is to see how they measure it.
To measure it, they use questionnaires. Questionnaires have obvious shortcomings as measurement tools, but then, their shortcomings become wrapped up in how “gender dysphoria” is effectively defined: it’s the thing folks can say you have if your honest self-report scores high on these questionnaires.
And I score pretty darn high.
For whatever reason, there are a lot of questions on gender-dysphoria questionnaires that don’t boil down to, “Do you delusionally believe you are literally a man trapped in a woman’s body?” Many are more general questions asking if you feel trapped in your body, and if so, is it because of your sex characteristics? (To get tropey about this, is the sex you were born with a source of body horror for you?) Other questions ask about comfort with social roles.
Evidently, these forms are put together so that you don’t need a delusion to score high on them. Maybe the fact that you don’t need to be delusional is part of a sinister plot to confuse the populace, but then, the word “dysphoria” itself suggests misery rather than delusion.
In my family, it was called “Eve’s curse,” or just “the curse”.
Nobody had to tell me, “We call it Eve’s curse because this is God’s way of punishing women for the sin of having been born woman.” My family was neither religious enough nor patriarchal enough to ever suggest such a thing. Nonetheless, I believed it — it just seemed obvious.
Menstruation is a hassle, and would have been much more so before modern plumbing and sanitation, but it is not a curse.
It is a sign of a woman’s ability to bring forth new life.
A problem with modern times is our response to suffering or as @BossMongo has wonderfully labeled suckitude. In II Cor 1:6 Paul says, But if we are troubled (afflicted and distressed) it is for your comfort (consolation and encouragement) and … salvation. In v. 9 Paul says, Indeed, we felt within ourselves that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to keep us from trusting in an depending on ourselves instead of on God Who raises the dead. Paul is not suggesting that human suffering will be solved, but that suffering is not in vain but has purpose. Now with our imagination and our surgical and hormone replacement skills we entertain the idea that we can remake ourselves and by doing so our suffering will disappear. We have decided that we do not have to accept the basic facts of reality, and that the problems of life can be solved by conforming our external reality to our desires. Victor Frankl says that even in a world of extreme suffering, you still have responsibilities even to the world. That is even in a world of extreme suffering there are fellow suffers who lighten our hearts and ease our suffering, and there are those who are suffering as we who make our suffering worse. We are to be those who lighten the suffering of our fellow suffers. The suffering/suckitude will not be eliminated no matter how we reconfigure our physical world. Speaking of my own suckitude misunderstanding, I have often thought that if I could just solve or fix this one problem, my life would be perfect. Well as one can imagine, that never quite worked out.
When I was a teen, I was thoroughly convinced that Life Was Suffering And My Duty Was To Bear It Because Obviously Life Could Never Be Anything Else. I was utterly mystified by all these other teens around me acting as if life weren’t suffering. Were they really just that oblivious? Or had I, uniquely, sinned?
Whatever the cause, it seemed obvious to me that my calling was To Suffer And Bear It Without Complaint, even if God called others differently. I never had hope that solving this or that problem would make my life “perfect”: the alternative to suffering, as far as I could tell, was nonexistence — and even that would do more harm than good if God put you into eternal torment for ending your own life.
Other kids, who talked about suicide? Pfffft! Weaklings! So immature! You didn’t talk about it. You either did it, or not, and if you didn’t, you played the part of clean-cut straight-edged kid to the best of your ability so others wouldn’t suspect. Because that’s Just What Life Was: A Sucky Thing To Be Endured — With A Smile, if possible.
In the modern world, we conservatives have this tendency to walk around assuming everyone else’s problem is too little stoicism. But there’s still such a thing as too much, as Viktor Frankl himself would tell you.
While I doubt several readers of this OP would agree with me, the purpose of my writing it was to ease suffering. Conservatives can be pretty hard on those who experience womanhood in particular as naturally-occurring body horror. The message that you can experience your own body as naturally-occurring body horror, and find a way to live with it — even a conservative way to live with it — is not a message that either Progressives or conservatives seem interested in spreading right now. So I took it upon myself.
Unhealthy menstruation can feel like a curse. Problems with menstruation and fertility cycles can feel like a curse.
But a healthy menstrual cycle is really a blessing.
Midge is gorgeous. It’s really heart-wrenching to know it is mostly an act.
While I agree with the hypothesis that gender expression is at least partially a cultural construct, it also horrifies me how different groups seek to dictate how it shall be constructed.
I’ve never been the “manliest” of males. Never developed much upper-body strength. I like cats more than dogs (sometimes obsessively). I’m not into hunting, or fishing, or most team sports. I get mildly upset when I see roadkill on the highway. I often (but not always) got along better with girls than I did with boys. I preferred Home Economics to Industrial Arts. I can be pretty wussy, is what I’m sayin’, and was occasionally bullied for it.
But that’s not the point of the story.
The point of the story is that the worst thing about my coming-of-age is that, no matter how hard I protested, there were people (some of whom were close relatives, some of whom were phenomenally left-wing) who simply could not be persuaded that I wasn’t gay. They pressured me to come out of the closet, when there was no closet for me to come out of!
That’s where I see the insidiousness of the radical SJW and/or trans movements. They don’t reject gender stereotypes. They raise gender stereotypes to the level of biological destiny!
I too shudder at the thought of how my upbringing might have been disastrously different had I had my coming-of-age in today’s environment.
…
I’m also reminded of the late Ed Wood. He was no weak-kneed girly-man. He was a freakin’ paratrooper in WWII. He was wildly heterosexual (he married three times, and was rather addicted to pornography). But he liked wearing women’s clothing from time to time, not because he thought he was a woman but rather because the fabrics (particularly angora) were soft and cuddly and he could see no logical reason why men should not be allowed to wear such fabrics. (Although he did also have a female alter-ego, Shirley, that he’d occasionally put on in public, so it’s not entirely cut-and-dried how he saw himself. Also, apparently his mother would dress him in girls’ clothing when he was very young, which also suggests his preferences were neither wholly genetic, nor wholly a rational choice.) He was clearly a gender nonconformist, but I wager he would have bristled if anybody had suggested that he should identify himself as LGBTQ+, or that he wasn’t really a man.
I think this is because if you haven’t experienced the “body horror”, it’s very hard to comprehend what that must feel like. I’m pretty sure I don’t comprehend it, not anywhere near fully anyway. While there’s aspects of my body I’d change if I could (like my height), that’s more an annoyance than something I find horrifying. If you’d asked me before I really thought about it, the idea of someone who is otherwise healthy being horrified by their own body would really never have occurred to me. It’s a thought provoking subject, and that’s really good. Thanks.
There is a bright line between
thinking you would like to do, or wear, things which in your culture are traditionally limited to the opposite sex–
and coming to actually believe that therefore, you are not “really” the gender which you manifestly are.
The first is a mark of individuality. The second is mental illness, as much as if you believe you are “really” an animal. Or believe that despite the health and ability of your body, you are “really” a paraplegic, or blind, deaf, etc.
And we do have people in those latter two categories. And shamefully, just as it did with trans-sexualism, the medical community is now colluding with them, actually performing disfiguring plastic surgery or surgical mayhem to make their “dreams”, which are actually a sexual fetish, come true.
Turn back O Man, forswear thy foolish ways!
Thanks, Midge. You’ve written on this topic before in other contexts, and I always feel enlightened. It is such a devastating condition that I’d never heard about before that it was difficult to grasp how difficult it would be to live with it. So I appreciate your candor and courage in discussing it and sharing it with us. I can’t imagine having to live with that kind of condition, and you show a level of courage in finding your way through it that I admire.
So in a quirk of events I have recently spent some time visiting in a stroke rehab hospital. While there, there was visitor who has had RA since the birth of her only child 40+ years earlier, and a woman who was a fellow patient recovering from a broken hip because a fall because of Parkinson’s, and another patient had had a stroke probably because she had had radiation therapy on her brain 35 yrs earlier, and a younger visitor who was allergic to milk, soy, and did not react well to sugar. This woman in her 30’s had been examined for gut problems since she was grade school age. These could all be put under the title of body horrors, the woman with Parkinson’s knows it is only downhill, she still goes to the “boxing” classes (if you know about them), the nurse with RA, let us hope we keep finding new meds, the stroke patient, some recovery but the vessels damaged by the radiation will not be getting stronger, the young woman with the food problems, who knows. So what is one to do? Back to Paul, Paul is saying suffering of one kind allows one to empathize with those suffering something of a different kind. Suffering is the universal, and that we see that through suffering, we are joined even when our sufferings are different. Frankl is saying something similar, even in our suffering we can hold up others who suffer, and be glad that perhaps we got that burden and not someone else dear to us.
The only cases I could find of doctors in the English-speaking world amputating a healthy limb from someone with xenomelia happened in the 1990s in Scotland and have not happened since. Do you know of others? In other countries, like Russia, disreputable doctors sometimes collude with a patient by having the patient injure the limb first, so the doctor has colorable prextext for the amputation.
John Money thought these were all sexual fetishes, but now that seems wrong. It’s possible these people have something off about their proprioception, something wrong with some layer of body-mapping in the brain. If so, retraining the brain seems a better treatment than amputating a limb, but in that case the brain retraining would be more like what you give a stroke patient, not necessarily convincing the patient he’s a delusional pervert.
Sure. I believe this. My father, whom I helped nurse at home in his weakened final days, when, out of love, we had to invade his privacy in ways which would have been hateful shame if he still had all his faculties, also qualifies.
I’ve never hospiced professionally, just relatives in my own family. But it seems to be something I do well. Perhaps because it’s hard for others to disgust me in ways I haven’t already disgusted myself? I don’t know, exactly…
There’s a lot to be said for the social expectation that we’ll all put on a good show for the world at large when we can — I said as much in the OP. But also a lot to be said for letting people know they’re not alone when being “shiny happy people” isn’t an option for them.
Compassion.
It isn’t to “confuse the populace” exactly, so much as it is to redefine what people fundamentally are. The deconstruction of male and female down to feelings and hormones and roles is a way of disassembling humanity. It is a symptom of the larger problem. Babies are “balls of cells”. It’s a way of discounting humanity and at the same time elevating animals (at times) to near-human status. I don’t know how organized it is, but it is definitely sinister.
Gender dysphoria should be exquisitely rare.
I score highly on those stupid tests because I don’t tolerate gender roles and I like wearing jeans. Does that make me less a woman? I really do not know. Apparently the idea that what you do or how you dress doesn’t make you a man/woman has been abandoned by feminism. I guess my value as a woman is reduced because trans-women are more feminine than I am.
Sexual fetish is too specific. It isn’t a sexual fetish. It’s a validation of mental illness which has become hysterical. There is a large group delusion in the larger liberal community and more and more children “are trans”.
…or they’re being encouraged to believe it and are being mutilated at a developmentally delicate time.
Physicians should be ashamed.
Would the harm of the surveys depend on what they were being used for?
We’re suspicious of these surveys because we suspect they will be used to persuade people to get treatment which won’t make them whole, but which could be used as an excuse to avoid coming to terms with the fact that we are souls born into the bodies we’re born with. But what if these surveys were used to help people acknowledge that yes, being a particular soul born into a particular body can be uncomfortable in certain ways, and to help them come to terms with those ways, and accept that that’s just the way they are?
Sure.
Have you ever seen that? Most mental illness surveys exist to indicate a propensity for mental illness and to encourage people to seek help. In this particular case, the help is mutilation of the human body.
There should really be a much more positive take on this. How about this: men and women come in all sizes, shapes, feelings, and hormone levels. Some are more feminine, some are more masculine, but all of them are valid examples of their sex. Not all men want to work in construction, not all women are desperate for babies.
How about, “it’s okay to be you and how you dress does not determine your sex”.
I’m forward, some would say blunt. I’ve been called manly and @titustechera will never live it down. I am often the instigator in relationships. I’ve been called strong both physically and emotionally. I was once voted “most likely to become a professional wrestler” (6th grade awards!).
But this does not make me a man. It just doesn’t. If I were constantly bombarded with this idea that I wasn’t good enough as I was to be a woman, yeah, I just might go for a reassignment surgery. Because at the very least, I wouldn’t be judged. All this hysteria is doing is enforcing sick gender stereotypes that are actually unhelpful.
Every. single. woman. I. know. wears pants on a daily basis: dresses and skirts are for special occasions. It has been this way for as long as I have been alive (almost 50 years). If surveys are now saying that women who wear pants are more masculine and may be gender dysphoric, something is seriously wrong. Like, maybe the people who devise these surveys should look around at how most women dress most of the time?
Wait, Titus does that to all us ladies? Now I’m jealous! ;-)
No, Judithann, the surveys don’t presume pants must be masculine wear. Rather the survey questions are more like this (granted, this is the first one I found this morning, and unlikely to be the most reputable):
Being confined to yes/no answers rather than a Likert scale makes this particular survey hard to answer, honestly, and in my impression, particularly useless. But it does give an idea of the variety of questions asked — not just about habits stereotypically associated with men or women, but also about body comfort and general psych history. And it’s not assumed that liking pants is a characteristically masculine trait.
Well, I hope so. But I know folks more easily disgusted than I am who I don’t think of as less compassionate.
I’m not a big believer in Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundation Theory — that is, I think the theory is good as far as it goes, but incomplete, and that something like Cultural Cognition captures a more complete reality. But the five foundations he posits are
There are respects in which sanctity has been more important to me than is the usual modern norm (for example, personal chastity, not taking Eucharist lightly), but I don’t think my natural disgust reaction is usually as acute as most other people’s, particularly most conservatives’ (who are said to have a stronger disgust reaction on average). (Perhaps similarly, I’m not sure I see “subversion” as the opposite of respect, but that’s a little off-topic here.)
It’s dude strategy. Call them manly, and they have something to prove.
“Manly” to Titus is high compliment, no?
Also a Tocquevillean one. Tocqueville rather famously described American women as virile.
Which of course comes from the Latin for man, vir, viri.
@therightnurse, I know right. Just try walking (well, okay, maybe prancing) around the job sight in fishnet stockings and high heels, and, badaboom, you’re labeled. I hate hate hate beating guys up on accounta I’m not cruising dates, I just like the silky feel…