After yesterday’s stark, awful entry (only to those UK residents with CFS/ME, maybe), I’ve been trying to get less anxious by diverting my tiny brain. I tried looking at pictures of kittens on the internet, but it didn’t really work, so while talking about nonsense with a friend of mine on MSN, I decided to just get really silly playing with the terminology thing and see where it would go. Let’s pretend we’re in the Garden of Eden, and we want to say who we are, and what we like. If I can express states of biological sex vs internal gender identity with terms like jeebo and beejo, why not have an optional attachment to be able to succinctly state your sexual preference? Again, I stress that the point of this isn’t just silly wordplay: I’m trying to find ways to scratch the current categories of words, which can be misleading, and express important facets of human nature in the simple most elemental terms, like Lego. It’s playing with bricks, yes, but might illuminate why I feel uncomfortable with the current set of labels, or if I’m just being picky.

So let’s play with some bricks: what if you’re a girl-in-a-boy-body (g-i-b-o – “jeebo“) and you like boys? Then you’re a jeebobo.
What if you’re a non-transgendered man, who’s straight? Then you’re a beebojo. What if you’re a bisexual transman? beejobojo. You could even use the order of the suffix to order your bisexual preference, if you wanted: -bojo if you tended towards men, and -jobo if the reverse. Or I guess beejobi if you really didn’t want to express a preference, loathe as I am to use any previous terminology, as we’re imagining here we’re children in the Garden of Eden, starting with language again. So I’m going to use -bojo and -jobo interchangeably.

Pushing a little further, imagine a world where we think freely enough about gender/body variance that people differentiate between whether they are attracted to particularly-sexed bodies, which might be at variance to their preference for the mind contained therein. Some people are attracted to transgendered people. This is easy to incorporate too. If you’re a biological and gender-identified woman who is attracted to FtM transpeople, you’d be a jeejobeejo.

What about if you’re a transperson who’s had surgery? Then I guess you can define yourself in relation to your body as you see it. If you’ve always identified as a woman but were born in a male body, you were a jeebo at birth; if you subsequently changed your body sufficiently that you feel it identifies as female, you can call yourself a jeejo now. It depends on what your stance is on whether hormones, chromosomes or sexual organs define a body’s physical sex. It really doesn’t matter, and gets rid of the monolith of gender=sex. And you actually could go onto Jerry Springer and say “Hi Jerry, I used to be a jeebo but now I’m a jeejo”. If you were a masochist. That’d flummox him.

I presume most of my readers are beebojos and jeejobos so I can imagine your patience may be wearing thin. I’ll add one more qualification to really walk a tightrope, for fun. In genderqueer circles in the US, being butch or femme seems to be becoming more of a conscious identity badge too, so to really push this to extremes, you could add a third suffix to express this: -fee and -boo. An example: if you were a FtM transperson who is attracted to biological girls, and sees herself as femme, you’d be a beejojofee. If you were a butch gay man you’d be a beeboboboo. I think the last word is possibly my favourite.

I’d love to make a website where you could tick boxes as to your physical sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and femme/butchness which would then punch out an icon for your website, but I’m too stupid to make one. If anyone wants to help please say!

The other point you’ll have noticed is that precedence is important here, so you don’t confuse your jee’s bo’s and fee’s. It’s dead simple. Just as it is on the map in the human heart, the most central important concepts come first. The order is:

[gender-identity][body][sexual-preference][gender-roleness]

And of course in most cases you’ll only need to use the first two, (or even one?), so you’ll say to your Edenite friend when she calls you “he”, “oh, actually I’m a jeebo”, at which point, she’ll laugh, apologise and share an apple with you.

I feel I should leave a set of exercises with multiple choice questions for the reader like instructional books do at the end of each chapter. “What would you call a bisexual transwoman who identifies as butch and is attracted to mainly women?”. First one to answer this one in a comment gets a gold star! It’s remarkably easy to construct these terms when you get used to it, and a whole lot easier than leaving a messy syntactically complicated sentence to express your identity should you need to at a cocktail party.

I think this jeebobojofee‘s said enough.

Afterword: it comes as no small surprise having written this that this book exists: I’m happy to give it some publicity in return for images. Apparently it’s a bit controversial. The author is quoted as saying “And while it may strike some people as odd that God called on an atheist to illustrate the Bible in Lego, remember that Moses was a murderer before he was called, and Paul a persecutor of Christians. So by comparison, I’m practically a saint.” His website, The Brick Testament is fun, and hardly more profane than the supposedly sacred and downright terrifying With You Always site.

This is the second in an exciting series of entries about names, and why they’re important, and the strange synchronicity between naming problems with the two things this weblog is mainly about: having CFS/ME and being, um, transgendered. Two preliminary comments:

1. Note the “um” in the previous sentence. It’s hard not to preempt the whole point of this entry about names by naming what you’re going to talk about. Note also the gap after the colon in the title. Um…

2. I’m going to say this a million times, but I don’t want to imply any synchronicity between the physical states of having an illness (CFS/ME) and being born in a body whose biological sex is different from the gender of the mind it contains. The second is not an illness, doesn’t need a cure, and is just difficult to live with in our current, unusually cisgender-oriented society. I’ve talked about this lots elsewhere, so I shall desist from ceaseless babble.

Now, you see that phrase underlined in the last paragraph? That’s the issue at stake here: what to call someone born in this condition (me!), and whether (and what) subsidiary terms could be applied to this term for those who have sought to adjust their body to cope with either their own self-image or current western society’s inability to countenance such a person existing.

Note two starting blocks here too: firstly, I’m not again going to debate whether this state of being exists right now: it’s a bit like me asking you to debate whether your mum and dad actually existed. Secondly, I’m going to assume it does make some approximate sense for people to call themselves “male” or “female” or “a man/woman”, and because words are just convenient bendy ways in which humans approximate the world, it makes sense to apply these terms to what we really think of as ourselves – our insides, ours hearts. Physical intersex conditions do of course exist (rather more commonly than believed) in which the person is born with physical characteristics of both sexes, but self-identified intergendered people seem a whole lot rarer. The sense in which anyone can sum up their whole identity as man or woman might seem only approximate if you think very hard on a rainy day, but brain differences really are there, and it should be at least as valid for a person in my own state of being to be able to assign myself a internal gender as it is for you. So I’ll be using “man” and “woman” to mean internal gender identity here. Besides, it’s snowing outside for the first time this year, it’s really pretty and I’m tired, and there’s only so long that this entry can be before I need to stop and just look at the nice white featheriness through the window and stop zapping my achey body with thought.

In time I might get used to referring to gender identity as “man/woman” and physical sex (chromosomes, hormone levels, sexual characteristics?) as “male/female”, but intersex people teach us it’s all greyscale physically anyway. And I’ve discussed elsewhere how stubborn I am on the existence of a core wired-in gender identity in each of us (contrast with mutable gender roles), and I’ll continue to be stubborn about that. So give me a break! I bet everyone reading this knows if they’re a man or a woman. So do I.

So. Like all words associated with the birth of new concepts, particularly contentious ones, they’re stirred up and spin into popular use in a linguistic baptism of fire, forking into many different terms with crossover meanings, all communicated, misused, redefined and qualified by the subculture which forged them into existence (in a rush to become visible) and the critical culture around them. The result is linguistic soup. I say “new concepts”, of course recognising that it’s not really new, but re-emerging: lots of others cultures already had words for us without blinking.

The most obvious words existing for people like me begin with the prefix trans-: words like transgender, trans(s)exual, transwoman, transman, and then some other words that are really associated with quite different things such as sexual persuasions or kicks: transvestite, etc. Then there’s a slew of associated terms, MtF, FtM, transgenderist, etc. and again a lot of misleading seemingly associated terms, which are actually about sexuality and using characteristics of the opposite gender, usually surface roles, to make a point: for instance in drag. Hopefully I don’t have to explain that sexuality has little to do with being, um, transgendered.

The most balanced general description of the history, developments and disagreements about these terms I can find readily is on the Wikipedia website. I quote for the definition of transgender:

The term remains in flux, but the most accepted definition is currently:

People who were assigned a gender at birth, based on their genitals, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.

Another one is: Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the gender one was assigned at birth.

Transgendered people may or may not have had medical gender reassignment therapy, and may or may not have any interest in such a procedure.

When referring to the two basic “directions” of transgender, the terms Transman for female-to-male (which may be further abbreviated to FtM) transgendered people and Transwoman for male-to-female (which may be further abbreviated to MtF) transgendered people are often used. In the past it had always been assumed that there were considerably more transwomen than transmen. However, the ratio is approaching 1:1.

I’ll have to dive in here and say as I’ve said before that I don’t like the trans- words, particularly when applied to gender (but will often nevertheless use them because they’re the best of the little-understood words). Here’s why:

Think quickly: what does trans- imply to you? I’d suggest one of two things which are more or less closely related:

1. Changing or moving from one place to another: transfer, transport, translate;

2. Being between two states or lying across a boundary: transverse.

So, what does the word transgender imply to Homer Simpson? I’d imagine he’s thinking (if he thought) of someone who either (a) is lying between the two genders mentally, half girl/half boy, or (b) has moved from one gender to another.
We can dispense with (a) quickly: there’s already a word for people who (relatively rarely) think of themselves between genders: bigendered. As for (b) I’d contend that’s impossible with gender identity (as distinct from gender role, with which it’s of course possible to swap and play around). As David Reimer said so memorably before his death with regards to being raised in the opposite gender and his eventually traumatic rejection of this:

I was never happy as Brenda, never. I’d slit my throat before I’d go back to that. I’d never go back to that. It didn’t work because that’s life, because you’re human and you’re not stupid and eventually you wind up being who you are.

Some people might disagree with this hard line on the immutability of gender: but I’ve talked about Jerry Springer enough.

Note that transgender as originally coined in 1970 was sometimes actually supposed to mean “lying between genders”. It’s now however generally used as an umbrella term as defined above.

So where did the word transgender come from? Probably as a reaction to the word transsexual for two reasons: firstly because people like me who haven’t resorted to medical intervention need a word, and secondly because anything with “sex” in makes people think of, well, “sex”, before they think of physical sex (“male”, “female”, chromosomes, hormones, unmentionable body parts and all that).
So what about the word transsexual? Much as I dislike it (see above connotations) it makes a bit more rational sense if applied (only) to those who’ve undergone sexual reassignment surgery (not “gender reassignment surgery” which would require a brain transplant!), at least as far as changing the outward sexual characteristics go. But it’s not as if all your XY chromosomes are flushed out and supplanted with XXs, or vice versa, or that you suddenly become fertile in your self-assigned new sex. In a sense, you become intersex, although not born that way. I suppose both trans- definitions above therefore do apply, but they encourage the usual confusions (“I used to be a man, now I’m a woman”), and have become something that sometimes sound a bit negative to me. To me I should stress, as it’s very subjective, and probably TV and my impressionability’s fault.

What of the other words? Transwoman refers to someone whose gender identity is a woman but whose birth body was male, and vice versa for transman. But because of the confusion of the trans- prefix, I have a feeling they used to be used the other way round, and my friend in Sweden tells me they still are there: in Sweden I’d apparently be referred to as a transman, which would lead to a whole new level of mess, and I don’t want to be referred to as any kind of man. Plus, they sound a bit Star Trek. MtF and FtM? Horrid abbreviations, make you sound like a genus of grey alien, and, like
“transman” in Sweden, the subliminal first hit of the first letter to someone new counts for a lot. If someone hears “transman” they think “man”, and I’m pretty sure if you flashed the letters “MtF” at someone in a lab with electrodes in their brain they’d first think “man”, when the whole point is they should be thinking “woman” first. “MtF” is supposed to stand for “male-to-female” (see “transsexual” discussion above) – why on earth not rather say “FfM” (“female-from-male”) if you have to have a three letter acronymn. The “F” or “M”ness at the beginning matters, I’m quite sure.

So where do we go now? Coining new words rarely works, and I’m not usually one for battles about names: the constant fights in the world of CFS/ME to invent new names, while meaningful, are exhausting. However, I think words so misleading at first sight (which is what matters) can really be a problem to a beleagured minority. much as I have to continue to use them for now. I think we might need a word for being born in a body whose biological sex is different from the gender of the mind it contains that isn’t “transgendered” and I don’t think it should be “transsexual”, as this logically implies surgery. “Genderqueer” is gaining some acceptance in the U.S. as an umbrella term but it’s not specific enough for use in this instance, and to most U.K. people “queer” connotes sexuality still, rather than “not like you”. I’ve wondered about silly invented terms while trying to sleep like XYXism (“zicksism”?) but that falls into the same traps as everything above – it’s not about chromosomes. Reverse the words? “Nanow” for me, “Nam” for a transman? Silly night-time reveries that don’t really imply the simplicity of the fact of existence for people like me, which really isn’t a hard concept, at least to someone in a teepee.

Brandon Teena before his death

I keep falling back on jeebo and beejo! Just because they most simply express a concept children can understand (from real experience): I’m a “girl-inside-boy-outside”, g-i-b-o or jeebo.
Brandon Teena was a beejo. They’re fun words, they sum up the essential facts of existence, and they don’t imply any necessary physical intervention: they describe a state of birth. I can see this weblog’s going to need a glossary.

Any word defining a minority makes that minority seem… well “not-normal” and can lead to pity or brutality just as public consciousness of this minority begins to emerge. A good way to combat this is to define the majority and set up a friendly polarity, so that the majority think “hey I’m something too” rather than just feel normal. “Heterosexual” is the best example, and I bet Europeans didn’t think of themselves as “white” until they met people who had different skin colours. “Monosexuals” is another nice way for bisexuals to point out that hetero- vs. homosexual aren’t the only two valid options. In this sense, most of you, dear readers will be either jeejos or beebos. Please spread this meme!

I’ll leave you with a thought about the word “cisgendered”, coined with very respectable Greek heritage to mean “not transgendered”. The alternative to coining new words of course is reclaiming hate speech as your own: “queer” and “nigger”. This thought from the Wikipedia article:

If trans people can be called trannies for short, then cisgender people can be called “cissies”.

Nightcrawler: They say you can imitate anyone, even their voice.
Mystique: [as Nightcrawler] Even their voice.
Nightcrawler: Then why not stay in disguise all the time? You know, look like everyone else.
Mystique: Because we shouldn’t have to.
– X-Men 2

I recently discovered via Wikipedia that I’m a gender refusenik, or, even better, a gender otkaznik (Otkaznik (ru: “отказник”, from “отказ” (refusal, rejection)). Brilliant! Nothing like being told what you are by an encyclopedia. I imagine many gay, lesbian and transgendered people have had the experience sometime around their early teenage years, but I didn’t really expect it at my age. “Refusenik” has generally got two accepted uses:

1. Those denied permission to emigrate abroad, particularly Soviet Jews.

2. Those who refuse to serve in occupied territories, particularly in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

So, two shades of meaning, one implying denial of certain freedoms by external circumstances, and the other a personal unwillingness to participate in something you don’t believe in. I’d like to think my otkaznikking is very much a case of the second definition; but there may be a bit of the first thrown in too. We’ll see.
Why a gender refusenik/otkaznik? Well, it’s very much a case of “I thought I was the only one”, but the quote from the film X-Men 2 at the top of this entry sums up my feelings on being a person who, on being born and surprisingly finding herself in the odd position of having a body that doesn’t match her insides, looks around, sees transgendered culture as popularly (self?-)identified on the web, and doesn’t much like it. I should add I didn’t like X-Men 2 much either, but the person I accompanied to see it in a rural Irish cinema was thrilled, so I was happy. Just as I was beginning to doze through the mutant/alien/special effects mush (sorry!), the quote above jumped out at in such a bizarre non-literary environment and brought tears to my ears because of the resonance with my own feelings. The context (for those like me who don’t really do scifi) is that a segment of the population grow up as mutants (but are misunderstood very nice people really), and can do standard stuff like freeze people by touching them, runnng through walls, and, oh I don’t know, turn enemies into hedgehogs or something, and these mutants are persecuted as a minority. Mystique above mainly runs around in a sprayed-on blue scaly body suit in the film, which is presumably as near to nudity as the film-makers dared go for the parents’ sake while keeping their options open for a children’s certificate. She can apparently turn into other shapes at will; the above dialogue explains the rest. Why doesn’t she just morph into looking like a non-mutant and stop being persecuted? Because she shouldn’t have to.
I may have lost most of my cisgendered (that’s you) readers already, and I can feel disapproving glances from transgendered readers. But I’m really uncomfortable about lots of aspects of transgendered culture, to the extent of not liking the trans* words at all (see my Naming II entry whenever I write it) and not even wanting to have used them in reference to myself to friends , but they seemed like a shorthand I felt I had to use at the time: with hindsight, I’m not sure I would use them again in such an email.
The basic fact of being born this way, is that your brain and therefore mind, personality, soul if you’re religious, identifies itself very early on as being of a different gender to your body. If there was a word for “girl-inside-boy-outside” (and I bet there is in Finnish, or Anglo-Saxon) then I’d use that. The prefix trans- raises lots of problems, discussed elsewhere, implies a transition from one place to another, and using a suffix referring to either gender or biological sex after it just confuses more. Frankly, I’d rather be called a g-i-b-o (but please, at least, let’s pronounce it “jeebo“).
So “girl-inside-boy-outside” (and vice versa for b-i-g-o’s: recent studies show there are just as many beejos as jeebos) is how we are born. And since sex reassignment surgery existed, it’s been seen as “the answer to the problem” within western society – the goal being to change your external appearance sufficiently that you become invisible as such a person, and disappear into the mass of people with the same internal gender as you had all along anyway – in my case, a woman. Those who can’t or choose not to do so are told they in an incredibly high suicide category, they’ll never be happy, etc.

And yet, in lots of other societies, this just wasn’t and isn’t the case. No room for details here and cultural interpretations vary: but most Native American tribes recognise two-spirit/Berdache or Winkte people, Tongans Fakaleiti, Indian culture Hijra, part of the Arabic work Xanith, Maori culture takatäpui täne ki wahine. Modern western culture lost this idea somewhere along the line.
Being of one gender in your brain while another physical sex in your body is about as difficult a concept as understanding that some cars come left-hand drive and some right-hand drive, regardless of whether they’re made in the UK or France. Sure we’re made for a minority market, but we’re not badly manufactured: just specially made. The few children I’ve explained the jeebo thing to have casually shrugged, asked a few impertinent questions (brilliant!) and carried on quite happily. I’ll never forgot one response when I told a small gorgeous wide-eyed child I was a girl on the inside and a boy on the outside; an hour later when we were walking along a quay, he said “we’re outside, does that mean you’re a boy now?”. He looked a bit glum when we all giggled; I had to rephrase it and he was happy.
As we get older, we seem to get a big block on this. If someone looks like a girl, they’ll feel like one inside, right? I’m not referring to gender role here, but identity: who she feels she is. If she thinks (and has always thought) she’s a he, then for some reason, this can’t be so. She must be mistaken, have suffered some childhood upset, be unhappy about her gender role, or just be mistaking being a tomboy for having a central male gender identity. But it’s such an easy concept to understand: body doesn’t always match brain. How did we get such a blind-spot that such a thing might happen, when most other societies saw it plain as day? Imagine biting into an apple pie and finding out it’s cherry: “Oh! I didn’t realise! How nice!” would probably be a more sensible response than telling the cherries they’re really traumatised apples.
It could be that I’m a bit transphobic, just as many gay people were homophobic a few decades ago. I’m certainly not very self-liking just now. But I just feel very uncomfortable about the reams of websites by transgendered people, particularly transwomen, that endlessly display photos of themselves made up for the studio, discuss hair removal techniques, vocal training techniques, and show what to me looks like a ghetto. I’ll repeat myself frequently on this weblog, but for me it’s always been more about hearts than handbags: there’s nothing wrong with any of the above but I just sense a deep lack of balance about where the heart (identity!) is in all this. All the above methods are ways in which transwomen can appear to have always had the body considered as more congruent with their internal gender. It’s (some would say necessary) subterfuge – the ultimate goal being to “pass”, dread word, i.e. not be spotted as a transgendered person, and then in many cases to slip out of the transgendered community into “normal” society, bolstering up the view that such mixes of brain and body don’t occur in nature.
Obviously this just encourages the self-perpetuating view that being transgendered is, well, odd, rather than just unusual. The current way the state deals with people who seek reassignment surgery is to make “patients” prove their intentions, by conforming to some idealised (almost 1950s) view of their internal gender identity: “living as a woman” for a specific period of time. Lipstick, nail varnish and heels get you a huge tick on the road to surgery. Why is this necessary? Isn’t it a confusion of gender role with identity? In what sense am I not generally living as a woman now? The name almost everyone calls me by is generally recognised as being more feminine than masculine; I wear “girls’ clothes” (jeans and tops, some jewellery, like my other girl friends); my partner has seen me for years as a girlfriend. Equally insane to the idea that a transman (beejo!) should be out chopping wood and fighting bears every day.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with reassignment surgery! If it makes someone feel good, that’s good, just like if you don’t appreciate the shape of your nose, getting it bashed with a hammer might help how you feel about yourself (or might not). For me it would be very convenient to step inside a little booth and come out looking as if I was born as a genetic sexual female as well as a woman inside. I’d probably be blissfully happy for a month, because the upset of being addressed as male (which really does sting) would just disappear. But this isn’t going to happen. It would be misleading of me to imply that my refusenik status is all to do with the proud non-combatant second definition above: my body’s quite ill and probably wouldn’t take the strain, and my judgement is too that the process wouldn’t achieve the ultimate aim, which is I maintain a form of camouflage: to appear to have always had a physical sex that society reckons as congruent with your internal gender. So if I’m truthful, I’m also probably a category one refusenik – no visa to travel. Sure, it would make things easier if I could, but couldn’t there at least a bit of the world have a stab at seeing me female inside without having to jump pre-feminist hoops? This of course requires you, dear reader, to make the little leap of imagination a few year ahead of when your culture does the same.
Yet a little category two refusenik voice inside me keeps asking: would it be truthful in some sense for me to alter my appearance so dramatically? I’m a girl-inside-boy-outside – a jeebo – and at the moment a gender otkaznik. So do I have to feel my whole life that I’m not going to be happy if I don’t alter how I look? “You know, look like everyone else.” A very large bit of me does think, like Mystique that I shouldn’t have to.