Is gender identity disorder inherently sexist?
QUESTION Submitted June 27, 2020, 1:01 p.m. by sk8erboi1985I don’t totally understand how someone gets GID... but isn’t it inherently sexist to “feel like” you are a boy or girl? How do 2 year olds (Jazz Jennings for example) “feel like” they are a woman? I have read stories where young children (toddlers) hated their penises and “knew” they were a woman. Can someone explain this? Preferably someone on here with more knowledge on GID? Thanks!!
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Thank you for your response 💕
But wouldn't you feel that way because omg you suddenly have a penis?
But most people diagnosed with GD nowadays do not feel "that way from birth" and they do no want "to change their body accordingly."
The original question was whether GID is inherently sexist.
Most people with GID are clearly very sexist. In a reformed society, I believe a small number of people with true GID would still exist, and they would need to be treated like a BDD patient.
Please look at the current diagnostic criteria for "gender dysphoria" or GD I linked to above. The criteria is inherently sexist, as is the idea that GD is a special kind, and more horrible sort, of unhappiness that causes the worst suffering and deserves special sympathy and special accommodations and treatments.
I've used GD rather than GID because the latter is no longer used in medicine, psychiatry, psychology and "gender clinics."
There have always been people with all sorts of body and body-image issues, what since the late 80s have been called BDD. Some people with these issues will focus on sex organs and characteristics - and I agree that such cases should be treated as a subset of BDD.
But that doesn't alter the fact that there is nothing in the current diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria that requires a person to dislike their body in any way or to have a distorted body image.
Also, I think this point is salient: long before shrinks and psychologists came up with the brand new category of mental illness called BDD in the late 80s, it was pretty much the norm for women and girls during/after puberty in the West to have "issues with" one or several of their sex characteristics: their overall shapes for being too fat an "too womanly;" their hips for being "too wide;" their breasts for being the "wrong shape" and size; their genitals for not being "fresh enough" and for "smelling funny;" their groins, pits, faces, arms and legs for being "too hairy;" their bones, hands and feet for being "too big" and "unfeminine;" their flesh for being "too soft" and given to cellulite; their lack of male musculature and male grip strength for making them "too weak" and "too vulnerable" to male violence; their uteruses and ovaries for bringing them the pain, inconvenience, and embarrassment of menstruation; their reproductive organs for making them "too susceptible to unwanted pregnancy;" their hormones making them "too moody and unpredictable;" their anatomy and pain receptors making childbirth "unduly difficult," etc.
Human unhappiness - "dysphoria" - has existed since the dawn of our species. But how that unhappiness manifests, is expressed and is regarded is always shaped by the culture in which individuals live. The culture of ideas such as beliefs about the different natures and roles of the two sexes. And also physical or material culture of the era. Fact is, GD and BDD wouldn't be "a thing" if we were still living in a world in which we didn't all have easy access to the modern invention known as the looking glass - along with such recent developments as electricity, central heating, private and discrete rooms for sleeping and bathing/toileting, the mass media, advertising, "beauty culture, commercialism...
Trans activists got the psychiatric and medical community to stop calling it "GID," which stands for "gender identity disorder," a number of years ago. It's now known as "gender dysphoria" or GD.
To be diagnosed with GD, it's not necessary to dislike one's own genitals or other sex characteristics; you only have to have a "desire" and "preference" for the sex stereotypes, roles, clothing, toys, games, hobbies etc that in the view of rigid, regressive genderists are associated with the opposite sex.
I did an OP about the diagnostic criteria for GD here a week ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/hc7dl0/gender_dysphoria_diagnosis_does_not_require/
I am a dysphoric/dysmorphic radfem lo these many years and I agree. If I had had a magic lamp to rub, I would have wished for a penis. I asked one college boyfriend to call my vagina/external vulva/all below-belt-above-knee erogenous zones a 'dick', but I never pursued genital surgery because I knew it wouldn't be the fluid, easy organ I dreamt of.
And at some point in my late teens, I realized that, if I had a magic lamp, wishing for the end of female oppression would be more noble than wishing to escape it myself uniquely. From then on, even while I was still eager to change and hadn't heard of a rad/lib difference, I knew that magic wishes of "ending poverty wages" and "ending female oppression" were more important than "make me perfect." Couldn't shake the radical thoughts thereafter.
Glad to hear. And good for you. Also, from what I understand, going down the transmed route, especially the surgery route, just causes most people's gender dysphoria to worsen over time. And phalloplasties and other genital surgeries done on TIF are horrific and barbaric. As the case of Scotty Newgent illustrates.
In the most salient way, it's impossible to know, since everyone grows up in a fundamentally sexist, misogynist world. However, since the world is sexist, it's safe to assume that anyone's "gender identity" is tinged with sexism. Feeling "wrong" or "off" is a natural state of the human condition, but manifests in different realms (personality, sport, height, etc.) and feeling limited by the confines of "gender" only makes sense in terms of human variability and potential.
I had dysphoria (psychic discomfort) and dysmorphia (physical discomfort, rejection and misperception of the reality of my body) from as long as I can remember, at least three year-old preschool. My pain came from knowing that I wasn't what I wished to be and felt like. But by the time I was 20 or 21, I felt stupid saying "Call my genitalia a 'dick,'" which is what I asked of my then-boyfriend/now-husband at the time. The discomfort and what I'll call 'ookiness' persists, but I have learnt to live with it. I was a radical feminist before I knew what "radical feminism" was; the tenets of "gender is poison" came to me intuitively in childhood, "I'm not feminist but" came to me in my teens, "I AM a feminist" was my twenties and "Shucks, THAT's what radical feminism is? Already there" was my late-twenties/current thirties. I'm 31 now and I still have dysphoria (all feminists do) and dysmorphia (which is painful, but infrequently drives me to suicidal ideation because I've been made to come to terms with the reality of my body due to my body never having gone away no matter what I did to it).
Let me know if you have any* questions, here or in inbox.
(To preempt certain questions: I have bound my breasts recreationally; used pills to stop my menstruation for years; have obtained one gender-type surgery for dysmorphia (tubal ligation after fifteen+ years of pleading); have asked for different camaraderie and genital terms; was a persistent, insistent, consistent child in begging/demanding/asserting that I was in the wrong body/role; feel a specific and certain missing physical ache in erogenous zones during a subset of sexual encounters; wear 'butch'-coded clothing more than 60% of the time; was the only female person I knew whose voice cracked in puberty; and was the 'gross' girl who flirted and propositioned half a dozen other gals in middle/high school.)
So at three years old you wished to be a boy? Did you feel like doing boyish things or in your mind you just knew something was wrong and felt awful for having a vagina ? I am sorry if any of this sounds insensitive. I just want to understand more.
No prob; I wouldn't be public if I were squeamish about it. I'll give it to you in the most explicit terms I can hash out in under fifteen minutes: I wanted to be a boy so bad and 'boy' and 'male' were the same because that was the only difference between the "cool toys" and the "mom toys." I was an only child, but my (narcissistic, negligent) mother's friends all had boys, so I knew vaguely that boys had "something" between their legs and I had "nothing" between my legs. It's hard to not feel like you're missing something when those are the most elementary terms in which you learn about your body. "Boys" can pee standing up in the woods; girls are stupid and prissy and have to use a bathroom or their pee on their own feet. I can't tell you how I felt before age three in terms of that weightiness because I simply don't remember, but I can tell you with certainty that my feeling of a physical weight where there "should have been" different genitalia was present by the time I was in school and lining up with "boys" and "girls."
As an adult now, I've had sexual experience with males and females. I am married to a man (who is male). I still feel a weighty 'omission' where I assume the weight of a scrotum would be and I have a sort of phantom limb feeling in the lower, front part of my pelvis sometimes wherefrom I wish I could enter and cleave into someone, but it's such a nebulous feeling that it's hard to put into words that relate to any other mood/impulse/desire/whim I have ever had. It's not every time I experience sexual desire, nor is it only linked to sexual desire; sometimes, I feel it when I'm just walking around doing errands. It can become a preoccupation that sometimes messes with a sexual encounter with my spouse, but it's mostly under control and it's just part of my mental health and reality that I deal with --- sex either moves on or pauses and takes a slight alteration of course.
I liked 'boy' things like dirt and tree climbing and hatchet-competency, but I did mostly define my desires negatively: I didn't want floofy dresses or cutting dress shoes or baby dolls or baking-at-holidays or babies at all or blush or vacuums or aprons or breakdowns or wine. I loved My Little Pony and Little Mermaid and fought to keep these 'shameful' desires private because I knew (or feared) that any blemish on my 'boy' cred would be used against me by parents and peers alike to exempt me from the muddy 'boy' play. I was mostly allowed to wear slacks in church and to Thanksgiving, but Easter and life milestones like Confirmation meant a fight about dresses because "it's how you do." I knew that girls/women/females became "Mommies" and that meant cookies and wiping noses/butts and perfume and slips and part-time work and feeling fat all the time for no reason. I began puberty at age 7 with breast growth and menarche at age 10, so everyone was more than happy to fill me in on the rest of my fate: avoid boys, entice boys, stick this inside you to absorb sinful blood, weddings and sitting quietly are fun, why aren't you interested in hairdos? It was a nightmare that never stopped unveiling more limitation and secret body horror (hey, eleven year old, this is what a speculum is!).
In short, I guess couldn't tell you whether there was a hormonal wash in utero or whether the natural variation of human personality was so early quashed that it became a neurosis. But I do know that I consider myself a person who would be "real" trans; if I believed in inherent gender, I would definitely identify as a transman, a demiboi or some kind of genderfluid (since I've always loved big, gaudy clip-on earrings, even when I knew they would give away my pony secret). I see so many of my peers and so many other girls who feeling a version of what I felt and it makes me sad that I can't have a real avenue of communication about these things.
My mother-in-law has asked me if I've ever "considered" that maybe I'm not cis. I laughed. It ruined Christmas. I'd do it again.
Is GID or dysphoria sexist? In the same sense that anorexia is fatphobic, maybe. But it’s not like any of us can choose how culture (mis)informs our self-perception. What is sexist is when pediatricians, psychiatrists, and parents collude to validate this “feeling” as being a sign that a child or adolescent was literally born in the wrong body; you can’t possibly be.
For me, dysphoria was feeling like my breasts shouldn’t be there; wishing my shoulders were broader; feeling there should be a penis with which I could penetrate a partner. Socially, it’s hating when someone addresses me as a ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ when I’d rather not have it acknowledged; wishing I could go be among men and just exist as a friend and not a potential sex partner.
I think some of these feelings are perhaps sexist (debasing my worth as a female). At the same time, some are just... bizarre, compulsively constructed fixations. Like a phantom of someone’s past life stuck inside of you that you can’t hope to embody.
Thanks for your explanation
Trans ideology is inherently sexist. The idea that you can change sexes in any way that actually matters is inherently sexist. The idea that reproductive biology doesn't matter is inherently sexist. But GID/GD? I don't know. It may be the wrong question.
Two-year-olds don't even know what biology is. I'm not sure at what age kids stop believing in Santa Claus, but Lawrence Kohlberg (an expert) quoted a 5-year-old believing that you could turn a cat into a dog by cutting its whiskers off. They know the words boy, girl, man, woman, but most kids don't understand the underlying biological categories very well until about age 6–7. Kids respond to the sexism around them, but I don't think it's fair to take anything sexist they say seriously until they're older. And it's unfair to them for people to tell them that they can actually change sex. They don't know any better yet and take it literally.
Yes. How can a man presume to know the internal feelings of a woman? Its patriarchal, gendered thinking to say that you know you are a woman based on your internal life. That is the product of a lifetime of internalized misogyny and a powerful patriarchy telling you that only women feel certain things.
Gender is a social construct but with a purpose and that purpose is to ascribe certain thoughts, feelings, and roles to womanhood and claim that they are innate. A man who believes he has these thoughts, feelings, etc. is conforming to the patriarchy when he then assumes hes no longer a man instead of making the logical conclusion that women actually do not innately differ from men in their feelings/thoughts