Here’s the first episode of a new series on the Freak Revolution blog: Pace Explains.
Today, Pace explains the difference between gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and sexuality, and what all that has to do with the whole transgender thing.
Click here if you don’t see the video. (It’s 4 and a half minutes long.)
Featuring:
- Pace
- Chuck Norris
- Angelina Jolie
- Drag queens
- Biker chicks
- Charts and graphs!
What would you like me to explain next?
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you! I think I understood this in the vaguest possible way, but this was very clear, articulate, and helpful. I am rooting for all places on all the graphs and lines to be equally accepted and celebrated. And maybe even all the graphs become some wonderful 4- or even 10-D piece of art with all kinds of curves and swashes of color and music because all we see anymore is the beauty.
@Merry: The beauty of your comment breaks my brain.
The only point you lost me was using Angelina Jolie as an example of the extreme feminine end of the scale. I’m a bit stuck on what a better example would be, but that one kinda clunked for me.
Yeah, I guess she is kind of a badass, which is not stereotypically feminine. At least her characters are.
I like this. A lot. My former partner is transgendered, and it was pretty difficult for his family to wrap their heads around his identity.
For my family, (who had known him for 9 years as a woman), they said: “Of course, he’s a guy.”
I don’t mean to make this about my experience.
I would love it if you could put this on a thumb drive and mail it to every school in the country.
.-= Bridget´s last blog ..Tuning into Your Business- The Basics- Free Telecall =-.
I liked this video. I sort of got it before, but admittedly, only sorta. I’m one of the majority where it all lines up and so I personally have not done much thinking about this. Except to say that I decided early on in life that I’m a live and let live kinda chick. I don’t much care what your gender, identity or sexual preference is, so long as you are happy. I think there probably needs to be a lot more discussion about this. Thank you!
Wow, this was really spiff! I love the graphs, especially. I am a sucker for graphs.
Where you lost me is in the connection between physical sex and gender. But I’m used to not grokking that. I’m somewhere in the non-gendered range mentally, so it’s kind of like trying to explain red vs green to someone who’s colorblind. XD One of these days I will stop being so lazy/chicken and start asking people to use gender-neutral pronouns to talk about me.
I’d love to see a Pace Explains on gender expression and the nongendered/genderqueer/genderfuck crowd.
I don’t think there is a connection between physical sex and gender other than a very high correlation. Well, that and societal expectations. If people perceived me as male, I’d have a really hard time fitting into the female gender role, which is what jibes with my gender identity.
Your suggestion is a good one, but I don’t know if I know enough about genderqueer stuff to explain it. I only visited that country for a couple of months, and I don’t speak the language fluently. (:
Wow! This: “If people perceived me as male, I’d have a really hard time fitting into the female gender role, which is what jibes with my gender identity.” may have done more to help me GET IT than all the reading I’ve done to date! You are awesome.
I don’t know what I want you to explain next, but if it involves graphs, Chuck Norris, Angelina Jolie, drag queens, or biker chicks, I’m in. :)
@Ealasaid: Yay! I love to explain things. It’s nice when it works. (:
@Tanya: Woot (:
Graphs are good!! :) So most of my experience of gender identity comes from watching TransGeneration and the L word, so I loved getting this real life explanation. When my oldest was 3 (she’s 5 now), she kept telling me she was a boy and my mother was freaking out and would get into arguments with my toddler. I tried to get her to ignore it and personally I told my daughter “that’s great!” and didn’t make a big deal about it. She’s dropped it now but whatever she discovers in her life is her life, you know?
.-= Courtney´s last blog ..My New Journey Toward Better Health =-.
Very well done! I’ve had this conversation with loads of people before, and it always amazes me how many folks have no idea that gender expression and sexual preference are separate. Yowzas!
.-= Ellie Di´s last blog ..Lizzie Velasquez- 60lbs for Life =-.
Thank you so much for this, Pace! This is great! I usually get really scritchy and annoyed when people try to do “Trans 101″ and try to “explain” everything there is about transgender people by making sweeping generalizations. You did a GREAT job of not doing that. Honestly, I think the most important thing for people (of all genders) to understand about gender is that it’s okay to NOT UNDERSTAND. The world isn’t going to fall apart if we don’t understand gender, if we don’t know what gender someone is, if we don’t know what gender we are. What’s cool is when people try to THINK about gender, to examine how it affects their lives and others’, without some impossible end goal of “understanding” gender at the end of their thought process…and you did a wonderful job of giving people some things to think about without promising them that they would “understand” at the end.
.-= Oliver Danni´s last blog .. =-.
Yay! I’m happy I didn’t do the sweeping generalization thing. (:
That was cool. Pace you are a great “explainer”. You should do more! :)
.-= helen´s last blog ..Заседнах на минус 2 =-.
I will! I’ll even take requests. (:
Hey, Pace!
I can’t watch vids on my *!@# BlackBerry, but I’m sure you did an excellent job!
What I’d appreciate people understanding better is that the term “bisexual” may literally mean “two sexual,” it neither means I’m unhappy when I’m not with one of each, nor that I’m unable to commit to an individual whom I’ve grown to love.
(Sorry ’bout the grammar. All that stodgy crap comes out sometimes when I get REAlly serious. :P )
I hate the term “bisexual” because of the misunderstandings. I simply say I’m attracted to a PERSON, not their groin.
Annie
Excellent, straightforward video. I identify as a Bi female, and share Annie’s concerns around the misunderstandings there.
I got caught up reading the comments with trying to come up with a better example of extreme femininity than Angelina, and found something quite interesting happening: everyone I thought of I despise. I know it’s just for the purposes of the graph, but isn’t it bizarre that we think because Angelina is bad-ass, she can’t be an example of extreme femininity (that was my reaction too), and that extreme femininity equals fluffy airheads?
.-= Tess´s last blog ..Counting time =-.
@Annie: Some people use the term “pansexual” to mean what you’re talking about.
@Tess: It’s an interesting gender stereotype, isn’t it? “Manly” = strong and “Womanly” = weak?
Masculine/Feminine gets used a whole lot in my work- and there really *is* a duality of concept, of headspace, that people can get into that got labeled masculine or feminine because on a generic, broad brush level that’s where they noticeably manifested. Drives me nuts though, because people automatically assume that if I talk about some being in their masculine brain, they think I’m talking about ‘acting like a guy’ or being ‘manly’, or some such, and vice versa.
You want an example of complete manifestation of physical badassery, while being in an extreme expression of womanhood? Any woman giving birth.
I *LOVED* watching your video, listening to you speak, and how you so helpfully informed me to even more thoroughly understand a topic that I was already familiar with and interested in, in such an enjoyable way! Yay! :) xo
Oh! Oh! I would actually love to have you re-explain String Theory like you did in that test for WCWW. That was SUPER INTERESTING and you did a great job making it fun to listen to.
.-= Ellie Di´s last blog ..Household Uses for Tea Tree Oil =-.
Here’s a transcription, courtesy of Ellie Di.
Welcome to “Pace Explains”! I’m Pace, and I’m going to explain Transgender 101.
So, the first myth about gender and sexuality is that they’re the same thing. People generally imagine this line that goes from “manly” to “womanly”, and everybody fits somewhere on this line (according to the myth). On the “manly” side, you have CHUCK NORRIS! the ultimate of manliness! And on the “womanly” side, you have, I dunno, Angelina Jolie, the ultimate in femininity. And if you start from the “manly” side and you take a few steps, you get more more feminine and more feminine, and then whoops! you’re gay. You’re a drag queen now, okay; you’re super effeminate. You’re still a man, but you’re very effeminate. And if you start on the “womanly” side, and you head towards the middle, then you get more and more “butch” and more and more masculine. You go past “tomboy” and into, like, “biker chicks!”. The gay people are in the middle, but who’s IN the middle? What is that in the middle? Nobody knows…
Well, it doesn’t matter because this whole line is bullshit. The truth is that there’re all sorts of different things that are all mooshed together in this one line. Two of them are gender expression and sexual orientation. So, gender expression is how you present yourself – what gender role you choose to fit in (if any), whether you are generally are masculine in the way you act or feminine in the way you act (and that’s a whole conversation in itself because it’s a social construct and blahblahblah). But assume you have some scale of feminine or masculine on how you present yourself, and let’s put that on one line, and then put sexual orientation – who you’re sexually attracted to – on the other line.
Well, you can have all sorts of positions on this. You can have someone who’s very masculine and attracted to men; you can have someone who’s masculine and attracted to women; you can have someone who’s feminine and attracted to men; and you can have someone who’s feminine and attracted to women. Now, in the media you just get these stereotypes, which is why you have this myth of the one line. But in reality, you can be anywhere in the spectrum – you can be anywhere on one line, anywhere on the other line, and you can fall anywhere in between. You can fall somewhere on the “straight” line, you can fall somewhere on the “gay” line, or you can be in between. Angelina Jolie is bi, actually.
So, what does it mean to be transgender? Well, there are other lines that I haven’t even talked about yet. See, it gets even more confusing.
There’s also “gender identity”, which is your internal sense of what gender you are. For most of you, that’s the gender that you’ve always been and it’s the sex that you’re born with. That’s another line – the physical sex that you are. And this is all sorts of biological things. It’s, you know, what chromosomes you have, what genitals you have, what secondary sex characteristics you have, and all sorts of things like that. And usually, they line up. You know, there’s a grain of truth to every myth, and the reason why this myth persists is because in 99% of the cases (well, I don’t know the exact number), it lines up. For most people, the sex that you were born is the gender that you are, and it’s the gender that you express. But for transgender people, that’s not always the case.
For instance, in my own case, I was born male, and then I eventually figured out that my gender identity was female. And so, I took steps to change my physical sex to female in as many ways as I could so that my gender identity and my gender expression and my physical sex would line up.
Gender identity is internal; gender expression is how you act, how you present yourself, how you fit in socially; and then physical sex what your body is, so what hormones you have (whether you have testosterone, estrogen, etc), what genitals you have, and the like.
Notice that I didn’t have anything to say in terms of sexuality when it comes to transgender. Because it’s unrelated. I was mostly attracted to women before I transitioned; I was mostly attracted to women after I transitioned. It doesn’t really have anything to do with it at all – it is a different axis on the graph.
I could go into much more detail about all these things, but I’m just trying to give a brief overview. I may’ve even made some mistakes (if I do, please correct me).
That is it for “Pace Explains Transgender 101″. What would you like me to explain next time?
i got it! wonder woman!!! wonderwoman is the archetypal female! http://senorgif.memebase.com/2010/07/28/funny-animated-gifs-jiggly-goodness/
esspecially if you read the wiki article about the guy who wrote the comic originally.
seriously this has been bugging me for months.
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