It’s all food for thought. Enjoy.

The set-up: I try to watch movies at the theater in one sitting. Sometimes, this isn’t practical: drinking one of the 55-gallon drums of soda they sell at the concession stand and expecting to make it through Titanic (all that water!) is probably foolhardy. Lately, I’ve had trouble with this because spironolactone is a pretty effective diuretic, so halfway through the movie, I had to relieve myself. I made a bee-line to the restrooms only to be stopped short. I momentarily didn’t know which one to use. Actually, this isn’t quite true; my first instinct was to use the ladies’ room, but I stopped myself from actually bursting into the ladies room. There was a brief and very disorienting sensation of confusion as I had to wrestle my brain into the mindset of my gender presentation.

At this point in time, I’m still pretty manly. I usually have some growth of beard to accommodate my electrolysis schedule, so I was in total “guy” mode when we went to this particular movie. And yet, I felt the planks of my gender presentation fall away beneath my feet. It was profoundly weird. I surmise from this episode that the hormones I’m taking are doing a big number on my brain. I also wonder about the dichotomy this suggests in the old mind/body problem. I’ve always “known” that I was a girl, or rather, that I should have been a girl, but this episode suggests that my neurochemistry DIDN’T “know” that I should have been a girl prior to being told so by hormonal intervention. Is this an example of the ineffability of consciousness divorced from the body? Is gender identity parsed and scattered through different sections of the brain, some more aware of it than others?

Y’know, I don’t know. And some of the implications of these questions trouble me.

Cheers.

Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’

–Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

All of which leads to the curious tendency of quantum mechanics to limit not only what human beings know, but what we CAN know. This may explain why Schrödinger later said of his involvement with quantum physics: “I don’t like it. I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” The irony of Schrödinger’s Cat and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle–which states that we can know either a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both–is that they were formulated by Germans. For a German scientist to throw up his hands and say “We can’t know!” rather confirms the validity of these principles to me.

Two centuries earlier, another German put a different spin on this. Immanuel Kant describes an object that is “not an object of sensible intuition.” A transcendent object, he calls it, and one that is out of the realm of observation. This is a noumenon, a thing in and of itself. And like Schrödinger’s Cat, we can’t know what it is.

I describe myself as transgendered because, from as long ago as I can remember, I always wanted to be a girl. The thing is, I don’t know what it actually IS to be a girl, nor do I know for certain that being a “girl” is, in fact, what I want. This is because of the limits of my knowledge. I certainly didn’t know what the biological differences between boys and girls were when I first expressed the desire. What “femininity” is is still a noumenon to me. I can only observe the empirical phenomena that surround “femininity” and adopt those for myself or try to generate them myself. Perhaps, by a means of psychological calculus, I can close the gap between my own gender expression and the asymptote of “femininity”. But unless that happens–and how would I know?–the cultural signifiers of “femininity” don’t mean that I am a “feminine” person. Nor do I even know that “feminine” gender identity is a monolithic, singular experience felt by everyone born female– it could be a broad spectra of experiences that are as individual as one’s own fingerprints. Ah…there’s the rub. Is there even such a thing as gender identity? Or is there only individual identity, shaped by experience and its interraction with biology? We can’t know, can we? This puts a new spin, I think, on Kate Bornstein’s realization: “I know that I’m not a man…and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman either…” I would suggest that her gender identity, like my own, is a kind of superposition. Neither male, nor female, but both at once and neither at once. If that makes any sense. To an extent, this kind of superposition creates an identity where the behavioral manifestations are largely a matter of the will of the individual, and are largely abstractions in the first place.

In any event, I’ve ceased thinking about gender identity in psychological terms. I prefer to think of it in philosophical terms. Here’s why:

The standards of care for gender reassignment assign a gatekeeper role to psychiatric professionals. Because I believe that gender identity is a noumenon, I believe that a psychiatric observer will not be able to determine the state of that identity from observable phenomena. This is doubly true given that the “wants” of the subject bid fair to skew the observable phenomena. I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to have read the standards of care AND the biographies of transgendered people–I know enough to “fake it” if I had to. From a philosophical point of view, any diagnosis provided from such observations are bound to include fallacies. Of course, this is a problem with all psychiatric diagnoses that don’t have their basis in actual physiology (i.e. observable phenomena). You might get similar results from tea leaves or chicken bones.

So, lacking a demonstrable psychological imperative, what legs do I have left, should I take this behavior farther? From a strictly aesthetic standpoint, I think the female body is more beautiful than the male body. (This flies in the face of my stated sexual preferences, by the way, but when it comes to sex, all cats are gray in the dark, so to speak). I would prefer to have a female body and appearance because I think it is more beautiful than a male body and appearance. It’s also a matter of free will. My body is my own–I reject the notion that what I can and can’t do with my body is governed by The State or religion or what have you. If my body is my own, what legitimate moral imperative is there to create a gatekeeper? The stock answer is the Hippocratic oath, and its directive to “first do no harm.” The hypocrisy of this stance where the elective alteration of the human body is concerned is evident in the office of every plastic surgeon in the world.

Cheers.

Howdy. I’m Christianne. My user name says that I’m “Dunyazad,” but you can’t trust user names.  Dunyazad was the younger sister of Scheherezade, the storyteller of the Arabian Nights. I picked the name for use online many years ago when I had a computer named Scheherezade, and I wanted to use a name that related. Plus, Dunyazad is agreeably exotic, but I don’t use it in real life. In real life, I’m “Chris,” a “Christopher” in my youth, formerly a “Christine,” and currently “Christianne,” or “Christi,” or “Chris,” or even “C.” Playing with appellations is one of the fun parts of being T. And thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me a name with a gender-neutral diminutive. That’s handy, because when I get around to a legal name change, neither of my brothers will have to grope around for a new name to call me when we have dinner at the holidays. I find that “Christianne” is agreeably exotic, too. There are a lot of Chris’s and Christines and Kristens, but not many Christiannes at all. I like that. 

So, yes, I’m a transsexual, which is something I’m finally comfortable with. Oh, it’s not like I didn’t know from an early age. I DID know from an early age, but knowledge and comfort are two different things. I’ve been “in transition,” as the saying goes, for about a year and a half (which is how long I’ve been enduring electrolysis). I’ve been seeing a therapist for nine months. I’ve been on hormones for five months. For the most part, things are going swimmingly, though I doubt that I’ll transition to living full time in my gender of choice for another year at least. The physical things–the beard removal, in particular–need to be done before then. I couldn’t imagine doing electro with my beard from hell, all the while trying to live full time. Ain’t gonna happen. Nope. In spite of that, I think I clean up pretty well. Here’s what I look like: 

And here’s another photo out in public and with different hair. 

That’s the fabulous Laura Carrillo standing next to me. She’s a partner in crime over at the other blogging collective in which I’m participating.  

Based on the tenor of the posts that have already surfaced here, I suspect that I’m going to be the class clown. It’s not that I don’t write deep “think” pieces–I do–but I have such a sunny disposition and such a stable temperament that you probably won’t see any real angst from me. I’ve mercifully escaped a lot of the troubles encountered by my fellow travelers. I have a good job, a nice house, a wonderful life partner who knows about and supports what I’m doing. I have great friends, a dog, a cat, and none of them care about what I’m doing. I have it good, and I don’t foresee any of it changing much. And I have no illusions about just how friggin lucky I am, either. You may see political and moral outrage from me (I’m looking at YOU, Human Rights Campaign), you may see a jaundiced view of what Mark Twain called “The Damned Human Race,” you will undoubtedly see bemused comedy (and perhaps all of these things at once). You will certainly see me commenting on the image of transgenderism in mass media, a subject in which I have more than a passing interest. But not angst. 

Finally, a word of thanks to Lori, who invited me to participate in this mad tilt at the windmill. One day soon, I’ll meet you in the flesh, methinks.

Namaste.