Topic of the Week: Excerpt Discussion

[CJ]

Heh. Techno-babble and gobbledygook? Sounds like a pair of new Marvel comic book superheroes. Move over, Batman and Robin!

So this excerpt generates comments about research methods or social theories more than it does anything else. I wonder what would count as non-gobbledygook theory? Jargon is almost a requirement in any specialized field. Just ask anyone not familiar with transgender (or psychological) issues what the word "dysphoria" could possibly mean. Why not just say "unhappiness" (which is what the word literally means)?

This is something I've found difficult in my own readings and explorations over the years, this quasi-disdain from so many members of the transgender community for social research into the transgender fact. On the one hand, the people concerned want more info on the social and psychological natures of crossdressing and transsexualism; on the other hand, they don't want to be put into neat little boxes. Well, at some point, in a box is where we'll end up, regardless--even if that box is titled "rebellious, highly individualistic refusal to be categorized."

In the end, we can't have our panties and wear them, too.

Love,
CJ

[Lydia]

Hi CJ,

I don't mean to clutter the forum with lingistic trivia, but in the quote that I used: have you ever really looked at the definitions of "ontology" and "epistemology"? Try parsing that sentence, and you'll see what utter nonesense it is. It gets more meaningless further on. Your full exerpt has some even worse examples. This Ekins guy must have swallowed a thesaurus and has been retching it out ever since. Unfortunately, he is not unique in the field of epistemological and ontological interactivistic pseudo-psychology.

At least Senator Claghorn was more euphonic. Ekins sure comes out with tongue twisters.

Hugs,

Lydia

[Absaroka]

I suppose it might be good reading for those who can follow that sort of verbiage, but truthfully reading it was just too much work for me.

There is definitely a place for scholarly articles for ones like that. I personally don't relate to them all that well, but someone has to try to make academic sense of all our first person narratives.

To sum up what I think the excerpt said, some guys like to act like girls and are sometimes troubled by that.

Absaroka

[Jaye]

I don't like being labeled a "femaler". It doesn't even sound like a proper word. "One who females?" "Female" isn't a verb. It's almost as though he's trying to trivialize what we do and are by making up words. Or else, he's dumbing it down for the little-minded people. Something about the tone implies (at least to me) that what we are is deviant. I've spent a lot of my life trying to get away from that feeling, and I don't like having it rubbed in my face.

[Anita]

Ah, "Male femaling." I don't think that's going to catch on with the community.

...which expression is Ekins's way of circumventing the problematic word "transgender"--the definition of which even we, here on this forum, seem unable to agree upon

So he replaces one problematic word with one that is more awkward.
Got to say, though, it is fun to come up with new labels for things observed. I mainly do it if there's not one already in place, though.

Studies done on groups of people don't usually please the people being studied. If it's done by someone who understands them thoroughly, then it's usually not a scientific or scholarly study--it's more like a memoir. If it is scholarly, then the scholar has to hold the community at arm's length while he or she examines them under a microscope.

I'm with Absaroka--there haven't been too many scholarly works on gender that hold my interest.

[Jeannie]

"Never overthink the situation" You can listen to all the so called experts and read your brains out and always come back to the same place. Yourself. You can spend your whole life making others happy at your own expense. Knock yourself out girls.
I waited until I was 55 years old for others to make me happy. It was a dead end ladies. Life is short,be yourself or you will end up as no one at all. Trust me. I know.
I think of Jack Nicholson in the movie"A Few Good Men" when he says"You can't handle the truth!" It's their problem not yours. Hugs.

Love
Auntie Jeannie

PS. " The truth will set you free."

[CJ]

Uh oh! Whose "truth" shall set me free, Jeannie honey? The medical establishment's truth? The lawmaker's truth? God's truth? My truth? Your truth? The social researcher's truth? The political right's truth? The political left's truth? Stephen Colbert's "truthy" truth? The biologist's truth? The college teacher's truth? The artist's truth? The philosopher's truth? My girlfriend's truth? The writer's truth? My aching tooth's truth? Which?

I have an enquiring mind; I wanna know. I wanna be set free, free, free!

Love,
CJ

[Kimburly]

Overthinking, overanalising seperates the body from the mind.
Sorry to throw a song lyric in there, but it's making sense to me these days. Other's definitions always make me uncomfortable, so I've decided to define myself.
The discussion is fascinating--Thanks everyone!

[Sylvia H]

The glass is half full or half empty. Why cant it just be a glass with water in it?

Sylvia

[Absaroka]

Who said the glass had water in it anyway? Maybe it had poison in it. Maybe it was merely filled with air. Maybe it's a communion goblet filled with the blood of Christ, miraculously transformed to wine, and it's almost empty because of the souls it has saved. Maybe it is the glass of time and our lives are only half lived, or maybe it is the glass of morality half filled with things we have stolen, weighing us down as we swim in the sea of life.

Absaroka

[Sylvia H]

This discussion is getting way too obtuse for me.
How about another topic CJ?

xox
Sylvia

[Absaroka]

I was just being silly and pseudo profound.

Absaroka

[Andi L]

Stop it!! Stop it!! You girls are making me think too hard and when I think my head hurts. Anyone have Tylenol please??

[CJ]

Hi all,

I apologize for the headaches. I agree: thinking can be painful. Okay, a short one this time.

September 23rd 2008



The Politics of Transgenderism
Janice Raymond, in Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-dressing and Sex-changing, Richard Ekins and Dave King, eds.; Routledge, NY, 1996. pp. 217-218.

There have been pleas from some feminist commentators to recognise that cross-dressing, drag and transvestism are on a continuum of masculinity and to sympathise with these ways in which some men are deviating from acceptable masculine gender behaviour. And often men dressing as women is compared to women who wear pants. There is a fake symmetry here. When most women put on pants, a necktie, combat boots, or a business-like blazer, they are not trying to pass as men. Nor do most of these women stage theatrical performances that call attention to their cross-dressing. They do not mimic, for profit, male behaviour. Most women who wear male clothing are not trying to be men, nor to imitate men personally or professionally, nor do they expect to be mistaken for men. And there is no significant number of women who fetishise certain articles of male clothing for sexual pleasure or gender relaxation.

The reason women wear pants is mainly comfort and convenience. Pants are practical in all types of weather and don't make women physically vulnerable or encourage sexual harassment, as certain styles of feminine clothes do. More significantly, a woman putting on a man's clothes is, in a sense, putting on male power status, whereas a man putting on women's clothes is putting on parody. That drag queens and cross-dressers can draw hoots and howls in audiences of mostly men says more about how women were and are perceived than it does about the supposed boundary-breaking behaviour of gender-bending men putting on women's clothes.

Cross-dressers, drag queens and heterosexual transvestites--who clandestinely parade around in ultra-feminine dress while often retaining their public personas as straight, white, male conservative pillars of the community--depend upon a certain mimicry of women's persons, roles, status and dress. That some men may find gender relief, sexual pleasure and/or stardom and financial profit in this mimicry does nothing to challenge the political power of the normative, dominant, powerful class of men that the male gender-bender still belongs to. Cross-dressing could be more accurately perceived as another form of male self-expression and exhibitionism. Scratching the surface of masculinity by flaunting its opposite conventions of femininity, whether in drag, cross-dressing or heterosexual transvestism, may incur the wrath of other men and expose the cross-dressers to pain and punishment. But pain and punishment do not necessarily challenge the substance of masculinity that is male dominant political power. The mostly one-way traffic of men moving down the transgender highway is not new. Males have been imitating women on the stage and in religious rituals since time immemorial, but this has done nothing to change the reality that men, including many of these men, are in power.

Love,
CJ

[Andi L]

........More significantly, a woman putting on a man's clothes is, in a sense, putting on male power status, whereas a man putting on women's clothes is putting on parody........

OK CJ, So women wearing men's clothes are seeking a power status. And I was taught, read articles, heard others say that a man wearing women's clothes was weak, a sissy, and deserved to be ostracized. (common stereotypes, yes?)

Well, I have come to believe that women are very strong, exert a lot of influence and stand tall in any crisis. It should be the ultimate complement to womanhood if a man wants to dress, act, look, feel, think, and in fact become a woman if done in a serious manner. No parodies, no ridicule, no bad mouthing.

Thinking about women and wanting to become one does not make my head hurt but not being able to live as one does make my heart hurt.