Trans-labeling has always seemed a bit confusing to me when I have taken the terms CIS, Trans, and Gender for their literal meanings. CIS meaning “on the same side of”, Trans meaning “on or to the other side of”, and Gender to mean “the characteristics of women, men, girls, and boys that are socially constructed” as opposed to the meaning of Sex which is “the biological categorization of female or male”.
And so, with these literal definitions, logically the below must follow:
CIS (gendered) then is to retain the sex that was assigned at birth and also to adopt the socially assigned characteristics assigned to that sex.
Trans (gendered) would be retaining the sex that was assigned at birth, but adopting the socially assigned characteristics assigned to the other sex.
Trans (sexual) is to change the sex assigned at birth and to adopt the socially assigned characteristics assigned to that chosen sex.
And with regards to sexual orientation i.e., the sex of the person/s I’m sexually attracted to.
Am I homosexual if I’m attracted to the same sex, even if according to the above criteria, I am transgendered? And am I considered heterosexual if as a transexual, I’m attracted to the opposite sex?
Somehow all of this doesn’t sit right with me.
As a Butch, I don’t consider myself transgendered, and I think that is because for me I don’t feel I have, consciously or not, moved away from an unchosen starting place, which is what I have come to consider as part of the trans experience. Rather, I understand myself to be gender non-conforming, that is from my earliest memory I rejected the societal gender norms that are assigned to my sex. I see no transitioning taking place, I see instead an acceptance of my sex and a self-selection of gender.
Yet interestingly if gender is a social construct driven by external exposures, socialization, family, media, etc. rather than something that is biologically innate, I struggle to understand when for me this socialization took place. I was not born into a situation where there was any significant male influence, and my brothers were born long after I recall my emphatic refusal to be adorned in anything feminine. But what I do recall is my beyond-questioning attraction to the same sex, and specifically an attraction to femininity. And perhaps it is in the telling of stories where the boy gets the girl, that had some influence on the development of a masculine identity; perhaps the social construct that bore influence was about adopting a gender that would ensure a “fit” that supported my sexual orientation. There is no doubt that growing up as a “tomboy” manifested into a Butch identity in my teens once I discovered femmes. However, why not just homosexuality without the non-conforming gender identity, which is probably the more common occurrence? To me, the only real explanation is that there must be some components of gender that are pre-wired, which socialization either keeps contained or enables for full development.
I have known people who in meeting a parent for the first time in adulthood, have exhibited the same mannerisms as that of the absent parent, they have both stood a certain way, moved a certain way, as though they had kept each other’s company their whole life. So then might it not be possible, and probable, that the traits associated with masculinity or femininity might also be part of our DNA? And that perhaps the social construct is just about how society assigns those traits to a given sex, in other words, society did not make me masculine, society just told me that masculine was not appropriate for my sex.
I therefore have not transitioned, I have remained fixed, and if transition is necessary, it is in society’s opinion about a “natural” connection existing between sex and gender, about females and femininity and males and masculinity, that needs to change.
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