Trying to understand the T in LGBT

So, I grew up in a very conservative, evangelical tradition. Any sexuality not traditional and hetero was seen as sinful, deviant, and something that ought to be illegal.

I have, since then, change my perspective for a variety of reasons. I think I've developed a better understanding of homosexuality and bisexuality and the reasoning behind LGB rights. It's been a journey, but I'm on board there.

That said, I'm still struggling to understand the "T" in LGBT: transgender identity. To me it seems like a qualitatively different concept. It's a sensitive topic for many people, but I'm wondering if the anonymity of the internet might be helpful here.

So, is there anyone here who wants to have this discussion and help me out? Specifically someone who feels like they understand and support transgender identities and has the patience to work with someone who is trying to?

If so, here's a place we might start, and maybe this is my central struggle: When a transman says "I was assigned female at birth but identify as a man", what does "identify as a man" mean?

 

Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies"

 

One thing that you might want to look into is the case of David Reimer. Born a male, his circumcision was so badly messed up that the doctor thought that the best thing to do would be to have his wedding tackle removed and him raised as a her. The thought being "If that's all she knows, she'll identify as that."

IT didn't work as "she" somehow knew in spite of everyone telling otherwise, and the new configuration of his body...that he wasn't a girl. He knew that what his internal mental image of who and what he was did not match who his body and all those doctors claimed was the reality.

It's not quite the same thing that the Transgendered go through, but it might give you an insight on how a difference in perceived gender and physical gender...can cause people to want one to match the other.

Because that's basically the issue. In your example, that woman felt deep down in the depths of her being that she was not meant to be a woman, that somehow her persona was dropped into the wrong body. So much so that she decided to stop being a "she" and start taking steps to make the body match her persona through various means of surgery and hormonal replacement. And the same works the other way for all the men who don't feel like they're supposed to be men and go the other way. A good example of that comes from a webcartoonist who realized that at some point he wasn't supposed to be a "He".

Real Life Comics. Start from there and you'll see a humorous internal monologue that gives insight on why the decision was made.

Check out those links and when you think of new questions or want something clarified...post them and we'll see what we can do.

 

First, let me just say thanks for being willing to engage. I appreciate it. I don't know if you have personal stake in transgender issues (aside from just being a human who cares about other humans), but let me apologize in advance for anything insensitive I write. It's not intentional.

Ok, so, David Reimer... I think I understand why you'd mention him, but I have trouble seeing anything meaningful there beyond the fact that if a psychologist horribly abuses children you end up with deeply messed up, traumatized children. I'm not sure I'm willing to build any significant understanding around an example that involved that much manipulation, deception, and trauma.

The RealLifeComics thing was pretty cool. Thanks for that. I made it through the internal monologue and a bit beyond; I may come back to it later (always nice to find a good web-comic).

Ok, here's the idea I'm trying to wrap my head around: what does it mean to "feel like you're [not] supposed to be a man"? Like, what specifically gives one that feeling? For instance, if I think about myself, I come up with three possibilities:

I feel I am [supposed to be] a man based on...

(1) ...my physical biology is male. Basic plumbing and chromosomes. My body is certainly not any culture's definition of the "male ideal", but I think that, having had a look at my naked body, very nearly every culture would immediately identify me as male. A trans-individual obviously is not basing their identity on their physical body. As I understand it, the entire point is that their real identity is recognize some other way and is in conflict with their physical body. So, moving on...

(2) ...my sexual preference for females. This is a poor indicator, but I'm adding it for completeness and because I think it makes an important point. I could say that I "feel like I'm supposed to be a man" because I'm [much] more strongly attracted to female bodies than to male bodies. I wouldn't say that because obviously I could be a attracted to male bodies and still be a man, I'd just be a homosexual man. So if it turned out I was attracted to other men, that wouldn't mean I'm secretly a "woman" on the inside or that I need to identify as female; it'd just mean that I'd be a man attracted to other men. And, as best I can tell, the LGBTQ+ community mostly agrees on that point. Which leads me to my last possibility...

(3) ...my personal preferences and tendencies align with what my culture considers "masculine." American culture has traditionally labeled some things "masculine" (football, beer, big trucks, aggression...etc) and some things "feminine" (dresses, tea parties, shopping, nurturing...etc). I could argue that I "feel like I'm supposed to be a man" because my personal preferences tend more toward what the culture calls "masculine" and less toward what it calls "feminine." But that seems like it would be silly, since those cultural definitions are somewhat arbitrary, highly subjective, often intentionally constructed, and subject to change. If I moved to a different culture, the labels might be very different, but theoretically my core identity shouldn't change just because I relocated.

...and that's all I can think of, though maybe there's another I'm just missing? At the very least, I don't have any purely abstract concept of "man"-ness to feel or not feel. As best I can tell, if you strip it of its role in physical classification of genitals/chromosomes and its cultural associations, there's not any meaning left in the terms "man" or "male."

So, back to our hypothetical transman: When they "feel they're supposed to be a man," they obviously don't mean they have male genitals; I'm pretty sure they aren't talking about sexual orientation (because then they'd just be lesbian, not trans); which leaves me with option 3, they mean that they feel like their preferences and tendencies primarily line up with what society considers "masculine."

Is that what it means? Or is there something I'm entirely missing here?

 

It sounds like you are sincerely interested so I'll engage and try. I'm not an expert on this but I am natural born advocate so I support the LGBT-Q movement.

Labels, essentially, what a society uses to convey certain imagery, right? We label people by gender, race, sexuality, etc.. Words are merely our way of getting ideas across to one another in a meaningful way. For example, if you were to describe yourself to someone that had to pick you up at the airport but had never met you, you would tell them basic information about your physical characteristics so they can try to pinpoint you in the crowds of people exiting a plane.

However, if you were to describe yourself to someone that already knows you, you would use fewer physical labels and more mental/emotional ones. For example, if someone asked me to describe *who* I am, the essence of my being, I would say that I'm kind, patient, tolerant, understanding, forgiving, non-judgmental and resourceful. Nobody could find me in an airport using any of those adjectives. LOL

So, basically the same thing is happens within a transgendered person. Those of us on this side of the person identify them based on WHAT we see and they identify themselves by WHO they are inside. This is fundamentally why bigotry is so detrimental. People are using one or two observations to judge others, often unfairly and incorrectly, with no interests in seeing anything else.

 

[QUOTE="Disaffected, post: 1073525817, member: 123284"Ok, so, David Reimer... I think I understand why you'd mention him, but I have trouble seeing anything meaningful there beyond the fact that if a psychologist horribly abuses children you end up with deeply messed up, traumatized children. I'm not sure I'm willing to build any significant understanding around an example that involved that much manipulation, deception, and trauma.[/quote]

I know it wasn't quite relevant to the discussion, but it was there as an example of how there can be a difference between what is considered normal (the fact that his doctors, parents and body were saying "female" but his mind was screaming "But I'm a dude damnit!"

That's similar to the mindset of a transgendered. They were born "this", society says they're "this", but their self-image says "But I'm "that"."

Glad you enjoyed it. It was probably the best example of one sort of epiphany that some transgendered go through. That they were trying to be the "this" that everything else was saying they were...but only as a defense method to keep from getting bullied. As Mae said in the comic (and yes, Greg Dean the artist did transition to Maelyn in real life), she was supposed to have been driving long before now.

Let's look at it this way.

I wish I could find it, but there was something that discussed how there are more than one thing that states gender in the DNA. It's more than the "X" and "Y" chromosomes that states what a person is. In a majority of cases everything matches well enough for a person to be [gender] and feel that it's the proper fit. But there are times when something else flips and the person feels...wrong. The professor stated that they didn't allow their students from looking at their own DNA because a 60-minute classroom lab was not the place to deal with someone who realizes that while the genes for one aspect of their gender matches, others say they should be something else.

That one doesn't work because a lot of homosexual men don't feel even remotely feminine. My friend and his husband are fact as much of "manly men" as anyone else in my circle of friends. In fact it wasn't until we were working together at the factory and he was complaining about how management had their collective heads up their behinds. I quipped "Ah, they're being a [Richard] in your [bum] eh?" to which he replied as he was walking away "Yeah, and not in a good way."

I don't walk around with a "gay-dar, but you don't drop a line like that without my curiosity popping up and going "Did we really just hear that?"

So sexuality isn't a good marker. The web cartoonist in fact was raised as an "Attracted to women" guy and when he transitioned, was *still* interested in women. A friend of mine who did go M-to-F once said "I was a lesbian stuck in a man's body."

My cousin restores classic Harley Davidson motorcycles. She has more dirt and grease under her fingernails than I do. She's as vulgar and sweary as I am. We both speak fluent Marine with a Truck Driver's accent when it comes to dropping cuss words. Rather manly by societal stereotypes. Yet she's also a mother of three, typically donates her time and talents at the local bake sales for the Girl Scouts and her kid's school. Things that are quite feminine by those same stereotypes.

So that don't work as a metric.

So what can you go by?

When you close your eyes and imagine yourself, you have an image of who you are. In the Matrix series of movies, this was called "residual self-image" and it's how the characters manifested in the Matrix as opposed to what they were outside in the real world. Again, not quite the same but similar.

I close my eyes and I see myself a certain way. That certain way contains among other things, the concept that I am as male as I present to the real world. I was born male, I grew up male, society says I'm male, I'm comfortable being male, I feel male...by every definition I am male.

Now imagine we change one little thing. The fact that a person was born male, was raised male, society says they're male...but now they're not comfortable being male, that they feel like they're not male...

That's it. That's the reason people transition. They literally feel like they were supposed to be something but due to a hiccup of biology, they were shoved into the wrong body.

 

Ok, this is helpful.

I will say, I'm dubious about using our internal self-image as a way to define our identity, because people's self-image is so often a poor reflection of who they are in real life. Anyone who's getting older knows the feeling of suddenly seeing a stranger in the mirror and realizing that how we see ourselves in our mind's eye is not how we really are [anymore]. But it doesn't just apply to physical appearance. We humans are notorious for either vainly imaging ourselves more clever/charming/humorous/intelligent than we are or, perhaps just as often, pessimistically devaluing the qualities we really do possess.

In short, without a mirror (either a physical one or a social one) we all quickly develop objectively inaccurate images of who we are in reality. So I'm highly uncomfortable with the idea of defining a core facet of someone's identify solely (or even primarily) based on their own self-image.

But the part I bolded above stands out to me, that idea of being "comfortable" with an identity. I still want to think about it some more, but that might be a fourth alternative my list earlier didn't consider. It makes sense to me that someone could be physically male (in terms of biology) and be culturally masculine, and thus labeled "male", but still be uncomfortable with that label, still want to be labeled differently.

I'll come back to this after thinking more. I haven't had a ton of time to devote to it today, but wanted to put down some thoughts while I had a second.

Thanks again.

 

My husband (@Skruddgemire) has had his shot, so let's see if I can shed some more light on this for you.

One of the problems that we have here is a matter of language and the word symbols that have been used for years, even centuries. Up to now we have been defining the inner and outer selves with the same words. And to make matters worse, we have been in the habit (in the context of the whole of history) of beating up and bullying, physically and/or verbally and/or socially, anyone who deviates from those norms. It is only recently that we have been able to get to a point where we will tolerate those differences. Yes, we have had isolated times across time and culture when these were accepted, but overall, we are entering into a new age.

So what is a "man"? If we want to talk about biology, that's pretty straight forward (although I could make that complicated for you). But then we have sayings like "Any male can be a father, but it takes a man to be a dad." So this indicates that we can look at being a male and being a man as two different things. But what does that mean?

We do have a lot of things that are social constructs. What each sex or gender is supposed to do, how they are supposed to act, to wear, etc. We know that these are constructs because they change from age to age. After all pink used to be a male color and high heels started as men's fashion. But just as our actual bodies are not social constructs, is our inner self not a social construct? Or is it.? Right there. That is where the struggle is. Trying to reconcile what is inside with what people tell you should be inside.

Think about this. Gays have been living with this for centuries. Men and woman trying their hardest to be good little men and women and having heterosexual marriages and raising children. They lied to themselves to try to fit in. Transgenders are no different. They have been typically lying to themselves about their true self.

But the fact that we have social constructions or stereotypes simply confuses matters more. After all we have cis women who dress like men. And at this point we don't bat an eye at it. And then we have cis men who dress like women. Neither one of these groups identify as transgender. And we have transwomen who still dress like stereotypical males. So obviously the self is not based upon the constructs or the stereotypes. Those are expressions of gender or sex, but they do not define gender or sex, especially since they change from age to age. But it still confuses things. "I was born male, but I like wearing what is currently considered women's clothing. Is that because I am a (male) woman, or just because I like wearing those clothes?" I agree with you about how we can lie to ourselves about positive things and raise ourselves to be better than we actually are. But we also lie to ourselves in order to fit in. It's when we stop lying, whether it is being gay or being trans, or simply liking the opposite stereotypes for our sex, that we finally see the truth. And we should trust people when they face that truth, especially when doing so opens potentially more problems than if they kept lying to themselves.

Let's start from there and see where else we need to go.

 

Well I think a good starting place is asking you this question;

“Are you more than your body?”

 

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I don't understand the T thing at all. I have zero frame of reference for that. Beyond that, I really don't much care if you are a boy who thinks he is a girl or a girl who thinks she is a boy or one of those two who changes identity with the wind. It doesn't affect me in any meaningful way. I don't need to understand the trans thing to recognize that people should be treated with civility and hate should be reserved for those whose actions warrant hate.

Now as for your last question, it is pretty obvious that they were born with no penis but consider themselves a man.

 

Wow. A family effort. That's pretty cool and I appreciate your caring enough to help me out.

Just so you know, I've written about four versions of this post, all of them long-winded and each focused on a different facet of the question. This has been a tremendous mental exercise for me and given me a chance to think through a great many lines of reasoning; if nothing else comes of it that's worth the price of admission for me by itself. In the end, I settled on the words below because (1) it was a relatively short version and (2) it seemed to most immediately engage with some of what you've written and to focus in on the original premise of the thread.

Hopefully it also makes at least a little sense.

This seems like a good place to start. I think the gay/transgender comparison highlights some confusion I have.

For a long time many cultures, including ours, said that men should be attracted to women (and only to women). In short, we assumed that external bodies and internal feelings must/should always be related in specific, rigid ways. I.E. That there was an objective, absolute definition of "man" that included not only biology but also sentiments and preferences. Gay men, of course, prove this notion false and we've adapted our understanding to recognize them.

Crucially, we saw that the solution was NOT to label "gay men" as "women," but rather to fix our illogically narrow definition of "men," separating external bodies and internal feelings. I.E. We recognized that "man" refers to a physical, external reality, and must be distinct from internal feelings. Thus we have "Gay (internal feeling) Men (external body)," as opposed to "Straight (internal feeling) Men (external body)."

Despite the conservative/religious opposition, I think this choice has worked out very well for us as a society and everyone is pretty clear on the terms. Had we made the opposite choice, demanding that our internal idea of "man-ness" was absolute, and simply labeled all gay men as "women," we'd have set ourselves up for immense confusion and strife.

Transgender identities seem to have made that opposite choice.

E.G. In your example we have a born-male who prefers women's clothing, but really we could broaden that to include a born-male who has any number of feelings/preferences society tells him should only belong to "women", not "men." If we followed the path we did with gay men, we would recognize that the solution was to fix our narrow definition of "men" to be independent of clothing choice (or whatever). Our protagonist is still a "man," just a "man who likes dresses (or whatever)", just as a gay man is still a "man", just a "man attracted to men."

It seems to me that transgenderism teaches the opposite: that this individual should treat what society taught him about what "men"/"women" feel like with respect to clothes (or whatever) as absolute and thus recognize himself as a "women."

Put another way, with homosexuality we recognized that your internal feelings [in this case sexual orientation] doesn't change your identity as a man or a women. Yet transgenderism seems to argue exactly the opposite. And the result has been immense confusion and strife.

And this, I suppose, is why I struggle to fit the 'T' into LGBT. It seems to me that the approach to accepting transgenderism is not only different from but runs directly counter to the approach to accepting homosexuality.

 

Well just kind of a lot going on here.

Tell her to focus on the first part. LGBT was grouped together in the 70s. There wasn't any distinction between gay people and chance people so they really kind of fit together really well as allies. Trans woman which is person who is for male but identifies as a woman (I'll get into that in a minute) was just seen as a gay guy.

So to help you understand that this isn't the way you treat these people but it's a way for someone on the outside looking in to understand it. A female that identifies as a man is someone that was born a girl but what's to be a man so they go through a few things to try it look male.

It's not really complicated in no reality doesn't really deserve a whole lot of thought as I presume your probably a pretty respectful person and it's not very common you run across a trans person that gets upset with you for not knowing.

 

I think this is such a difficult concept for so many of us because we (or most of us) don't have that internal struggle. We have never felt alienated in our 'birth bodies'. I have, however, had the advantage of two people in my life who have. One transitioned, the other has not (yet). And while they can explain their thoughts and feelings very well, I still cannot relate. So what is required is respect for those thoughts and feelings and support for our fellow humans who are travelling a much more complicated and difficult path than we are. I really don't think that's too much to ask.

 

And that hits the nail right on the head. There are different levels of understanding at play. I understand that there is an internal struggle, but I don't understand what that struggle feels like since I don't have that struggle myself. It's like how I can understand PTSD and how it can be a burden on someone, but not understand what it feels like since I've never experienced it myself. There are quite a lot of things out there like where we can understand the concept but not understand the experience.

And as Pants has said, that level of understanding isn't needed as all we have to do is acknowledge that the experiences are real and palpable to them and to simply accept while we might not have the faintest clue...that they're still people, possibly friends and/or family members, and they deserve the same respect.

I may not understand why my one friend went Female to Male or why another opted Male to Female, but I can accept that to them, it was the best course of action and give them the friendship and support they deserve.

 

circumcision should be banned for children under 18 years old

 

Irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Regardless of why it happened to David Reimer...it happened, someone decided that the best way to cover the mistake was to try to convince "him" that he was a "her".

Thus causing the internal struggle between what was being told and what was being felt internally.

 

the mistake never should have been made without his consent, chopping up a babies privates is sick and how some religious people do it is gross and unsanitary and would be a crime if anyone else did it

his struggle was cause someone wanted to circumcision him as a baby - then cover it up when it went bad

we need to wait at least until they are old enough to decide for themselves

I agree with the rest of what you said though

 

@Disaffected

@Derideo_Te and @Kranes56 might have insights. Both on hiatus.

 

It;s just a scam is all. No need to take any of that neurotic fetishism seriously. You're just being manipulated by commies, who in turn have been promoting sexual deviancy as a door to the rest of their culture war against the U.S. Read up on Antonio Gramsci and his strategies for weakening societies from the inside. Saul Alinsky's 'Rule For Radicals' is just Gramsci For Dummies', aimed at American Burb Brat doper culture, ie hippies and 'libertarians. The whole 'Deviant Privileges' movement was started by a card carrying Communist trained in Gramsci's media tactics. Here are two of his students and their media strategies as examples:

http://library.gayhomeland.org/0018/EN/EN_Overhauling_Straight.htm

Notice anything about how they try to control the narratives? Seem familiar?

You might want to read up on Harry Hay, the Communist who founded the 'Deviant Privileges' movement you're confused about in your OP. He was also a big fan of NAMBLA, a criminal organization of kiddie rapers who were one of the founding organizations of the ILGA and marched in many 'Gay Pride' parades for a couple of decades; Hay is also suspected of founding NAMBLA, too. Here are some Communists gushing over good ole Harry:

https://progressive.org/magazine/meet-pioneer-gay-rights-harry-hay/

Note they leave out his NAMBLA affiliations.

So don't be 'confused'; they're just mentally ill deviants, and they and their fans want to convince 6 year olds to sexually mutilate themselves. just for fun and because they can now, thanks to Democrats and 'libertarians'.

 

While I agree that it's a practice that needs to go away (save for medical reasons) it's still irrelevant to my point.

Regardless of why it happened to him, regardless of whether or not it's right or wrong, it happened to him and he had a disconnect between what his body and his doctors and parents were telling him and what his mind told him what he was. That...is the point I'm making.

I'm starting to wish I'd had used Jim Bruce as an example instead.

 

I'm impressed. We managed to go a full 6.5 days before the first one of these posts popped up. That might even be a record. <slow clap>

 

Given that every communist government to date has made homosexuality illegal and some have even gone as far as to kill homosexuals, it's very obvious that communist is not the driving force behind LBGT. Which simply means that you just want to conflate things you don't like to be the same. At least make your lies coordinate.

 

It's what we do. We are educators (not professionals) within the BDSM and ENM communities. So LBGT ends up with quite a bit of overlap.

At least you are willing to actually think about it with an open mind. Even if you end up disagreeing with us, you have made more effort than more who oppose LBGT do.

This is a start, and honestly, for when homosexuality was the only issue and not transgenderism, it makes a good working premise. But once transgenderism comes into play, it starts to break down, but not entirely. Part of the reason is the language issue I noted earlier.

Excellent! That leap is a very good one. I just kept it to clothes as a simple single example, but yes, the whole concept extends to anything that is stereotypically "woman". But a key point to note, is that they don't have to go to everything, or even anything in that stereotype in order to have that internal identity.

I think if you had just stopped here, you would have about have it, but the next part seem to counter this, so I am not sure yet.

This is where you have shot off to left field. The problem is that we are talking about several different things that get stereotyped to "men" and "women". Gender, sexual orientation, sex/gender roles, sex/gender expressions, sex/gender expectations. When you talked about gays, you addresses sexual orientation, and touched on expressions and expectations as bit. Roles is also a thing affected, but you didn't really touch on that part. Transgenderism hits gender, and all the others except orientation. Roles, expression and expectations can be addressed in context to either gender, orientation, or both. But here is the clincher. Even as a cis gender, heterosexual man, the person can live counter to all the stereotypes of what a "man" should be. So we really can't use roles, expressions, and expectations as any kind of absolute in determining either orientation or gender. Reliable rules of thumb, sure. But not absolutes.

But the gender is also internal, and that might be part of your problem. We have two different things that are part of the whole identity. And here is something else that makes things confusing. Orientation labels. They are based upon both the attracted and the attracting. So riddle me this, Batman. If a straight male transitions from man to woman, and still is attracted to woman, what changed; the orientation, or just the label?

Except that it is not. In both cases, what we are doing is first acknowledging that the variance is an internal issue for both. Both challenge long held beliefs as to what is a "man" or a "woman". It particularly helps if you think about issues of the body being about male and female, leaving man and woman to gender, and holding sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) separate. Even if you don't agree with the new use of the word symbols, at least in discussion you can maintain a consistent dialogue of the concepts, which remain constant even if the labels used are not accurate.

 

Well, I'm glad to be doing well so far.

I've got a sick kid here at the moment and a trip I'm supposed to be planning for (if she gets better in time). I'm telling you this (1) to explain why I'm a bit slow to respond and (2) to explain why my wording may be more rough around the edges; I just don't have the time to sit and revise and I'm probably a bit sleep deprived. So, you know, forgive me for the bumpiness.

Hmmmm.

This seems to fall back to my initial question: What does "identify as a man" mean in this context?

To quote the old "duck test": "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." I.E. The qualities of the animal either match the qualities listed under the label "duck" (in which case we call it a duck) or they don't (in which case we don't).

So what qualities are we looking at to label a trans man a "man" rather than a "woman"? Because it seems like you've ruled them all out. If it isn't biology and it isn't orientation and it isn't social role and it isn't expression and it isn't social expectations....what else IS there? We've eliminated both form AND function and I'm at a loss to understand what's left.

Ok, wow, this seems like a key (maybe THE key) to a lot of confusion, including my own.

This is a semantic issue: are the labels "man" and "woman" primarily about sex or gender? On the one hand, I can absolutely see how the transgender idea makes more sense using "man"/"woman" as labels primarily based on gender instead of sex. The idea appears to be much more consistent with that framing clarified.

On the other hand, there are at least a couple problems with resolving the issue that way. The first one is that that simply isn't what most people usually mean by those labels. At least in my experience, people usually use "man" as either synonymous for "male" or, sometimes, as referring to a subset of males who meet certain criteria, as in the saying you referenced earlier: "every male can be a father but it takes man to be a dad." Merriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries both give us "an adult female" as their first definition for "woman," which also, I think, reflects general use.

I feel fairly confident in saying that it would be easier for broader society to adapt to the notion that some males have many non-biological characteristics traditionally associated with femininity (and would like to be treated accordingly), but are nonetheless still "men," than to adapt to the notion that some males are "women." The former is essentially what has already been done regarding gays and lesbians. The latter is requires people to accept what seems like a direct contradiction, given the way most Americans use those labels.

The second problem is that when it comes to the most sensational "hot button" issues regarding transgender rights, the focus is very much on sex (or at least physical biology) rather than gender. I'm thinking here of sports and gender-affirming medical procedures for children. In both cases, the attention is very much fixed on the physical body of the individual, either to classify it or to modify it.