Different = Normal
(Copyright © December 1998)
Words.
As a writer, I am acutely conscious of words; their meanings, their use and abuse, the relationships between them and the objects and events they are used to symbolise and describe.
Words.
Even the word, ’words’, I am acutely aware of.
What are ’words’?
’Don’t be an idiot - everyone knows what words are! You even used them to ask the question!’
Words.
’What’s the word on the street about ….’
’It’s only words, and words are all I have …’
’You have my word on it …’
’Mark my words …’
’In the beginning was the word …’
OK - hold it right there. This last proposition is utter nonsense.
In the beginning was the Universe, Life, God, Eternity, call it what you will. It is absurd to imagine that a word could possibly exist before the object or event which it describes - words are made up by human beings to meet an already existing human need.
It is preposterous to suggest that a word can be invented to describe that of which we are not already aware.
Do you imagine it possible that someone could think, ’One day we shall discover a substance with certain properties - we shall need a name for it so let’s invent the word ’cobalt’ and keep it on a shelf until we discover the substance to which we shall attach it’? Such a notion is ludicrous.
There is no Word Factory conducting research into our possible future linguistic needs .. we invent words to describe events and objects which already exist within areas of our understanding.
Words are descriptive tools used by human beings.
Note that word, ’descriptive’. Not ’definitive’. Words do not define, they describe.
Take a simple example - ’cup’. Immediately that conjures up an image of a bowl-shaped drinking receptacle fitted with a handle.
So can we say that the word ’cup’ is a definition of such a receptacle? Well, I’ll bet your image is of a completely different cup from mine.
No, at best, the word ’cup’ is descriptive of a class of objects and within that class there are a large number of variations in shape, size, colour and function.
There is a tendency within our modern marketing-driven society for the images produced by words to be standardised. I may prefer my hamburger to be completely different from your preference but the power of advertising is such that I bet you a double cheeseburger with fries that the image conjured by the word ’hamburger’ is identical for us both as television, print and all the other visual media have bombarded us with one standard image of a sesame-topped bun filled with round meat patties, lettuce, tomato, onion rings and smothered in a variety of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard. Dill pickle optional. Thus is maintained the illusion of choice.
And there is a tendency to regard words with a quasi-religious reverence, imagining that they are precise definitions rather than useful but necessarily somewhat amorphous descriptions. This is a fairly harmless superstition in daily practise but unfortunately it frequently degenerates into a subconscious belief that the word and the object/event which it describes are one and the same.
This is based in one of the most ancient superstitions - that of ’naming’, ie, that things have power and by giving those things names we can obtain their power for our own use or at least render that power less harmful to us.
The best example is probably the above quote of the opening lines of the Old Testament - ’In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God’. By ’naming’ what we imagine to be the prime origin of all things, we subconsciously imagine that we therefore understand and possess some of the power of this entity. The concept of ’Man created in the image of God’ has its root in this belief.
So - what has all this to do with trans people?
Well, the very use of the term ’trans people’ should help to demonstrate that.
I chose ’trans people’ rather than ’transsexuals’ or ’people with Gender Dysphoria’ because these terms are rapidly becoming useless and confusing in describing the nature of our problems.
Note the words I choose to describe us - not as ’a problem’ but as people with problems. The faulty use of words has placed us in several traps from which the only way of escaping is by changing the words we - and society as a whole - use to describe ourselves.
Let’s take a closer look at that word, ’transsexual’.
It’s only a word - ’transsexual’. It describes it quite well, doesn’t it? People who cross from one sex to another?
Common assumption - common error. Behind it lies a wealth of misunderstanding, prejudice, unthinking assumptions and negative associations.
In fact, the very use of that apparently innocent word ’transsexual’ helps to create and compound a whole host of very common and damaging misconceptions.
What misconceptions?
Well, let’s begin by reading the following list of words which use the suffix ’sexual’ -
Heterosexual, Bisexual, Homosexual, Asexual, Transsexual.
Pick the odd one out and explain why. Having difficulty? Let me help.
The odd one out is ’transsexual’.
It is used to describe a group of people who have a congenital condition which results in their perceived gender, based on their physical appearance, being different from their internal sense of identity.
The others all relate to sexual orientation or sexual preference.
Spot the difference.
One is related to a state of being, the rest relate to sexual activities. As the others are part of everyday usage, their common use of the suffix ’sexual’ has conditioned people’s thinking to make the unconscious association with the act of sex. Subsequent attempts to remove this unconscious association are inevitably extremely difficult and problematic.
Therefore, by describing such people as ’transsexuals’, we are planting the idea that it has something to do with sexual activity. This, in turn, implants all kinds of associated impressions of something slightly risque, illicit, distasteful or deviant so that these people, already burdened with a conflict between flesh and identity which causes them incredible difficulties and anguish, are further crippled by having their condition regarded as some form of sexual deviancy with the inevitable disapproval and stigmatisation which result from that.
I am not going to get into the argument of whether it is correct for any sexual activities to be labelled ’deviant’ - we live in the world of reality and the reality is that the term ’sexual’ conjures up demons in most people’s subconscious and it is those demons with which we have to live.
The use of the word ’transsexual’ has its roots in the days when the condition was regarded as being a psychological disorder, ie, a mental inability to live in one’s birth sex. That, in turn, stemmed from an inability to accept that, for example, someone born male could wish to be female, unless they were some kind of nuts.
Now, let’s get one thing clear, here - I have never met a sane person who comfortably self-identified as a man and who wished to be a woman. The very idea is quite preposterous. So it is understandable that the early pioneers in the field, dealing overwhelmingly with MtF trans people, had great difficulty in understanding that those who wished to ’change sex’, as they put it, did not have a mental illness but merely had a physical body which was at odds with their sense of identity.
This view is now largely discredited and there has been a major shift in perception regarding us. No reasonable person any longer regards us as being perverts or freaks - there has been a major shift recently away from seeing us as weirdoes who want to ’change sex’ to accepting us as people who are born with a conflict between flesh and identity.
However, there is still the more serious and dangerous perception which remains unchallenged and it brings us back to the use and abuse of words and the assumption that we are ’a problem’.
I am not a problem.
I am a person who HAS a problem.
And my problem is largely one of society’s making. Our society demands that we use the words ’male’ and ’female’ to define all human beings - not describe as general classes, but define as absolute categories - and it is into these categories that we are forced. Those who do not fit into these are regarded as ’a problem’ which demands correcting.
The evidence is gradually beginning to prove that larger numbers of people than anyone has ever suspected are born to some degree intersexed but, rather than leave them to establish their own individual identities, the medical profession routinely makes quite arbitrary and arrogant decisions as to which definition is most viable for this infant and routinely performs ’corrective’ surgery to make the infant fit into one or other category. It is routine to make this assessment based upon a figure of 2.4 centimetres for the size of the penis/clitoris - greater than this length is assumed to be ’viable’ male, less than this is regarded as unlikely to be successful as ’male’ and so is reassigned to be ’female’. This blatantly misogynous presumption is biological determinism taken to its most absurd extreme, making the preposterous assumption that the individual identity is dictated by what is between one’s legs and that altering that will alter the identity.
The sooner we begin to regard this practise of infant genital mutilation as a serious crime against humanity, worthy of Joseph Mengele at his most crackpot and malevolent, the better.
And the direct cause of this outrageous practise is the bureaucratic imperative to having human beings assigned at birth to one or other category of ’male’ and ’female’ and to make this assignation immutable. For life.
Those of us who have been incorrectly assigned are presumed to be mentally disturbed and branded as ’gender dysphoric’ or ’transsexual’ with all the underlying assumptions of ’problem’, ’deviant’, ’freak’, ’aberration’.
Personally, I have rejected any application to myself of what I regard as the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of terms like ’transsexual’ and ’gender dysphoric’.
I add hastily that I have no objection to anyone else using them in application to themselves if they choose; I have no right to reject them for another and, likewise, no one else has any right to apply them to me against my wishes. I reject them purely for myself.
But, lacking any foundation in anything other than the musings of members of the shrink professions, they can mean whatever anyone wishes them to mean and so I find them less than helpful, confusing and rather demeaning in their attempt to problematise and reduce a group of human beings to a genre within psychopathology.
Let me throw a little cat amongst the GID pigeons - and what i say is not intended to apply to anyone other than myself. Those who wish to continue to identify themselves using the terms I reject are perfectly entitled to do so and I fully support their right to do so.
I am not, emphatically NOT, ’gender dysphoric’. I do not suffer from any accurately diagnosable illness, I am not sick, I am not ’transsexual’, I am not a problem requiring classification and intervention by psychiatry. I am a human being. I do not fit easily into either of the categories described by the labels ’man’ and ’woman’. Of the two, I am closest by far to what is meant by ’woman’ but I have a lot of history of trying to live in the role described as ’man’ and my birth cert says ’male’.
I am different from what society expects and, so far as I am concerned, different=normal. It is not the fact of my difference which causes problems - it is society’s inability to recognise, embrace and respect congenital difference as merely being part of the normal variation with which mother nature cleverly hedges her bets.
Human beings are not clones - we are all unique, all of us and if we are all different then different=normal. I am the only me there ever was, is or ever will be therefore I am the only normal me and it is a gross arrogance for anyone to attempt to portray me as anything other than normal.
It is the great tragedy of human so-called civilisation that we spend so much of our intellectual capacity in denying that uniqueness.
Oh yes, we pay lip service to it; marketing constantly cajoles us to ’express your individuality’ - aye, by being like everybody else. We buy into the myth that we can be fulfilled by sublimating our individuality into ’fashion’ - and end up wearing identical clothes, using identical shampoos, eating identical food, living in identical houses, driving identical cars, thinking identical thoughts, living according to identical strictures, all in the name of ’expressing our individuality’. Oh, we might change the superficial appearance to give the illusion of variety but this is merely the triumph of style over substance. The wrapping changes but the contents are the same.
We fear difference because it means we have to think for ourselves and accept the consequences. Many are unhappy with this. Much easier to have someone else tell us what to do. This offers to absolve us of responsibility for making decisions and presents an illusion of security - and the price we pay for this ’security’ is the loss of our true individuality. So we vent our wrath on those whose difference is indisguisable, who are forced by circumstance or choice to be truly individual, because they are a living reproach and reminder of our own loss of true individuality and we have a battery of shrinks to label them abnormal and so control and inhibit them. Then we all feel ’normal’ and safe in our conformity to the herd.
In the history of humanity we have always harassed and driven out those who did not conform to this being part of the herd. In Hartlepool, they tried and hanged a monkey for being ’not like us’. For over a century, white people tyrannised and enslaved black people as ’not like us’ (’not like us’ meaning ’subhuman’). The Nazis murdered millions for being ’not like us’, ie subhuman. Gays and lesbians were subjected to the most appalling abuses for being ’not like us’. Children with Down’s Syndrome, Autism, learning difficulties etc were regarded as imbeciles and locked up and treated as subhuman. All for having committed the heinous crime of being born different from some imagined ’normality’.
And those of us who are ’trans’ and ’intersexed’ have been abused, harassed and dehumanised in an attempt to shoehorn us into one of two very narrow definitions in order that the rest of frightened, insecure humanity can cope with us.
HG Wells was right - in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is not king, the one-eyed man has his eye put out. In a world where everyone has brown eyes, the blue-eyed is not admired and cherished, the blue-eyed is a freak who must be ’normalised’.
I am not a problem. I am a human being. I am different. And different=normal. I am merely an expression of natural diversity.
So why take hormones? Why have surgery? Why change roles?
I wish I had some trite, simple answer to those questions but, in truth, there are several complex reasons.
Because I can and because I choose to; because my body fits me better; because I am happier and more comfortable and for the first time in my life I feel at home in my body.
And because society’s refusal to embrace me as normal and therefore as a human deserving of equal respect and acceptance as all other humans means my life is restricted and proscribed. And I can survive and function best in this society by choosing to live in the role which most closely reflects my own identity ie “woman”.
But this is a tactic for survival in a world which will not allow me to be myself absolutely as I truly am. It is the only way open to me to relieve the pain of being trans in a bipolar society. But I will spend the rest of my life fighting with every breath to change the situation which dehumanises, problematises and stigmatises us.
My dream is that future generations of people, trans or otherwise, can choose to live their lives in whatever role they wish - man, woman, neither, both - whichever best expresses their true identity. And all humans will rejoice in our diversity and celebrate and cherish our differences as a most precious and wonderful gift.
It was once said that the level of civilisation of a society can be judged by its treatment of gay people. I would take this further. If the world is to become truly civilised, then we must abandon the ridiculous and oppressive notion that ’one size fits all’, that there is some benchmark human against which we all are measured and those who do not conform to this within specified limits are somehow aberrations, freaks, problems which need ’fixing’.
People with Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Red Hair, Green Eyes, who are under 5 feet tall, who are over 6 feet tall, who are thin, who are plump, who are Gay or Lesbian, Male or Female or of Imprecise Gender Determination - all these must be seen as normal variations within the broad spectrum we describe as ’human’ before we can claim to be anywhere remotely approaching civilised.
And we must learn to accept, celebrate and rejoice in our infinite diversity.
Let me conclude with a little scenario to demonstrate the alternative to acceptance of diversity.
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From a recent confidential internal report by the Madam Smith Institute leaked to our science correspondant - “It has been evident for some considerable time that the so-called pluralism and human diversity so beloved of liberals and other assorted wimps, wets and pinkoes is a luxury which business can no longer afford. Production costs are being driven ever higher by having to accomodate the completely ridiculous range of sizes and colours demanded by a diverse market and it is clearly time something was done about it if we are to avoid inevitable economic collapse. The advances in genetics over the last ten years provide us with a wonderful opportunity to deal with this problem and maximise profits for the manufacturing sector (note - for PR reasons, this should be presented as “preserving essential natural resources”). The proposal is that testing should be carried out during all pregancies and those which threaten to develop in maturity so as to fall outside the following limits should be terminated on the grounds of unacceptable level of aberration (presentation of this argument to be turned over to Saatchi and Saatchi for obvious reasons)
It is inevitable that other criteria shall be needed and so this proposal should remain highly confidential until further deliberations are completed. But the benefits to the textile, design and cosmetics industries is self-evident and so we feel the proposal should be vigorously pursued. We feel it will also be of long-term benefit to undertakers, architects and a whole host of other professions where standardisation of humans would eliminate a myriad petty inefficiencies and irritations. Adolf Eichmann, Chief Researcher” |
