The Left-Handed Darkness

[steepholm]

To what extent is gender the product of biology, and to what extent of culture and social conditioning? These positions, both unsatisfactory in their extreme form, often function as a rock and a hard place where trans people are concerned. Radical feminists who believe gender to be purely a social construct have frequently viewed trans people as dupes at best, naively perpetuating patriarchy by adopting conventional forms of gender expression. (Of course, the vast majority of cis people also adopt these conventional forms, and many trans people in fact do not, but trans people are singled out for special opprobrium here - I'm not sure why.) Conversely, a biologically deterministic account of gender is unsatisfactory both on empirical grounds - ask Cordelia Fine - and on ideological ones, raising the prospect of a men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus world. As far as trans people is concerned, it leads to the argument (frequently seen on Youtube and newspaper comments throughout the known universe), "You were born into a (fe)male body, therefore you are (fe)male. That's all there is to it!"

It would be surprising indeed if the truth were not more complicated, and I think most people agree that this is the case. Still, conversations about "What is it like to be trans?" often seem to spiral away into one or other of these positions. For example:

"I was a tomboy and always hated girly things - does that make me transgender?"
"No, it doesn't - and the fact that you think of your younger self as a tomboy (i.e. a boyish girl) suggests the opposite. You're confusing gender expression with gender identity."
"But if gender identity is different from gender expression, what does it consist of? And why do you feel compelled to express yourself in your gender? Can't you just identify as female secretly, and not frighten the horses? Why is that not a viable option?"
"Perhaps if you tried living for a few years as a man, being seen and addressed as a man by everyone you knew, you could answer that for yourself."
"But then I've always lived as a woman. I'd have a whole lifetime of habits and socialization to undo, so the cases aren't alike."

Or else:

"If trans is a real thing and not just a mental disorder, where is the scientific evidence for it?"
"Well, there is some evidence of differences in brain structure between trans and non-trans individuals, but the jury's still out. To be honest, there's been surprisingly little research."
"Then I don't believe in it. Chromosomes rule!"

Answering the question, "If gender identity is different from gender expression, what does it consist of?" is no easy matter. One approach is to hand the questioner a complete set of the works of Judith Butler - but Butler isn't the easiest or clearest of writers, for all that I think that performativity is a useful way into the subject. Julia Serano's notion of "subconsious sex", as described in Whipping Girl, is attractive but feels like a placeholder until a better-evidenced theory comes along. One can point out, as I did a few months ago, that gender expression is very largely in the eye of the beholder - but I'm well aware that that isn't the whole story. Or one can simply say, "It just is different. It may be hard to understand if your body, gender identity and gender expression are all in alignment with prevailing norms, and because the language available for us to discuss the matter is also in alignment with those norms it is equally hard for me to describe. Are you prepared to trust my account of my own experience?" Of course, while some people are prepared to extend that trust, others are very much not.

Yet another approach is to suggest an analogy. In that spirit I'd like to suggest that a helpful analogy (by no means a perfect one) may be with the way that left-handedness has been understood over the years. As it happens, it's not a random connection: research has in the past shown a strong correlation between left-handedness and transsexuality. What the significance of that correlation is for the aetiology and nature of either condition is, however (and somehow typically), not understood.

There are numerous commonalities between being trans and being left-handed.

• Language has often valorized right-handedness over left-handedness. Dextrous, maladroit, cack-handed, gauche, sinister, are amongst the many words and phrases that do this. Even "right" and "left" themselves are value-laden terms, if you consider their etymology. I hope I don't need to demonstrate that there's a whole vocabulary of negativity for trans people, too.


• The aetiology of handedness is still unclear, as far as I can tell, but the range of explanations covers very similar territory to those advanced to explain gender identity. Is it simply a question of upbringing, for example? Kenneth Zucker, Joseph Berger and other reparative therapists still make a living telling parents how to "cure" their trans children. Back in the sixties Abram Blau was using a similar shtick, writing articles with titles such as "Don't Let Your Child be a Lefty". Today, over- or under-exposure to hormones in utero are amongst the biological causes invoked to explain left-handedness, as of being trans. (Note, it is almost always left-handedness that is seen as in need of explanation, rather than handedness as such, or - still less - righthandedness. Similarly, cissexuality is a subject that no one researches.)


• For a long time - and perhaps even today - left-handed children were forced to use their right hands. Mental distress and effects such as stammering were a frequent result (George VI being a high-profile example). Left-handed people occupy a world in which right-handedness is the norm, and in which many environments and tools are designed with the assumption of right-handedness - opening them to disadvantages and even dangers that to right-handed people are largely invisible. The higher rate of accidents amongst left-handed people is then ascribed to their being "clumsy". Trans people could make similar observations, about upbringing (being forced to adopt normative gender identities), about design (e.g. in the area of official forms) and more generally about how living in a world run on aggressively cisnormative lines leads both to mental distress which is then attributed to their being trans (viz. the classification of being trans as a mental disorder) and to physical danger (viz. the high murder and assault rates).

The analogy is not exact, as I say - either between the phenomena themselves or between the ways they are perceived and treated. Five of the last seven Presidents (including the current one) have been left handed - and so for that matter is the current British Prime Minister - statistics that trans people can only envy! In fact, for all that anti-leftie prejudice certainly exists, I don't see the same kind of incomprehension and antagonism that I do in the case of trans. No headlines scream "Left-handed man accused of murder!", for example. I don't think many people today would dismiss being left-handed as a "lifestyle choice", or as "unnatural". The fact that we don't fully understand handedness doesn't seem to detract from people's acceptance of it as a genuine phenomenon. Left-handed people aren't constantly asked "What is it like to be left-handed?", as least in my experience (for yes, I am). I've never been told by anyone that my left-handedness is all in my head, or that my right-handed interlocutor's ability to use their left hand for some tasks makes them left-handed too.

No doubt the percentages make a big difference here. The proportion of left-handed people - depending whom you ask - seems to be about 10%; for trans people (again depending whom you ask) it's considerably less, perhaps as low as 1%. The chances of someone knowingly being acquainted with a left-handed person are extremely high. Perhaps too handedness isn't as central a component of most people's identity as gender, and variation in that area is therefore less threatening. But that's precisely why it's a useful analogy, I think, because people might be able to look at the question rationally, without getting defensive, or indeed aggressive - and then carry their understanding across into the more contentious area of gender. "If I can accept left-handed people, why not trans people too?"

Just throwing it out there - left-handedly.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Well speaking as a (very) left handed trans woman, who am I to disagree? :o)

[gillo]

I've never questioned my gender identity, so I don't fully understand what it is to be a transperson. I understand and accept that it is real and important, and I would hope I'd never be so crass as to ask "What is it like", though I have sometimes pondered the same question with reference to left-handedness; I feel such a fool when I try to do things with my non-dominant hand that it's a real stretch of the imagination to think of the experience in which it is the dominant hand and such tools as scissors are a bloody nuisance or expensively created in "non-standard" form.

I don't really understand why some people need to make such a fuss about othering individuals who do not identify with a majority in some way. Whose business is it but their own and, where relevant, that of those close to them?

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid the left-handedness analogy doesn't work for me at all. Perhaps it's because my father*, husband, two best friends and one grandchild are all happily left-handed and have no desire to be anything else? Whereas I thought the whole point of being trans was that you could not identify with the body you had been allocated at birth?

The analogy I came up with recently was nationality/ethnic identity. Why, having been born and brought up in Manchester, did I always want to live in Wales? This seems (as an analogy) to fit more closely with the idea that some people want something different to what they were given at birth. It perhaps also matches the trans experience in that to most Welsh people, I'm still not Welsh, despite speaking the language and having lived in the country for far longer than I lived in England. And yet I totally don't belong any more where I was born.


* Dad is 91 and so I have no idea how he managed to avoid being forced to use his right hand when he was at school. As you say, in those days kids were usually made to conform. But he didn't and all the usual stereotypes of left-handers -- being clumsy and messy writers -- absolutely didn't apply. In fact he was a draughtsman, an occupation that demanded total neatness in drawing and labelling plans.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The analogy is imperfect in a number of respects, but I think it works quite closely in the case of left-handers who are forced to use their right hands. As far as I know, there is no reason to think that left-handers are more clumsy except in those cases. Their higher accident rates are largely due to the design of the world they live in. Messy writng, in countries with left-to-right script and fountain pens, is due to the hand moving over the wet ink - avoidance of which leads to the characteristic 'hook' writing position.

Be that as it may, the point of this post isn't to show that left-handedness and being trans are alike in every respect - as I've said, they're clearly not - so much as to argue that being trans, like being left-handed, is in the category of things people shouldn't feel they have the right/obligation to understand as an experience before accepting its validity.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

My father too is left-handed and exceptionally dexterous. He's highly physically co-ordinated, good at navigation, anything involving spatial awareness really, which I have from childhood associated with his left-handedness. I also associate left-handedness with his kind of normative cis masculinity, so this was a very interesting read for me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have no trouble understanding the difference between gender expression and gender identity, because I spent my childhood in revulsion from the conventional gender expression for boys (I hated sports, cars, roughhousing, bodily-function jokes, etc.) without ever doubting my gender identity. At times I wished I had been a girl, but only so that I wouldn't have to associate with the boys in school. I never thought I actually was one. So if you thought you were (either then, or later in life), your experience was obviously very different from mine, and that shows the distinction, clear as day.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Except that many people's experience of rebelling against conventional ways that gender is expressed has led them to believe that that's all that's really going on with trans people as well -- that if we could all just do what we wanted, the need for hormones and surgery would fade away. As it happens I've just read Whipping Girl, and I have to say her account of 1970s feminism brought back a lot of attitudes that I once internalized myself, and had more or less forgotten about.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have this theory that many people are simply unable to imagine that anyone else can be different from themselves. Whereas my experience has led me to believe that everybody is totally different from everybody else.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have started referring to my own gender as a religious decision. This may not work as an analogy for other people, but then again it might.

The thought process goes something like: 'Well, I was raised as this one thing, which had good things about it but which was really really restrictive, and into which I never quite felt like I fit, and which comes with things which are absolutely wrong for me on a deep physical level; and now when I say that I am not part of that thing everyone says oh you must be this other thing, but no one seems clear on the exact differences between the two, or why there are two, or whether I could do just as well in something else entirely; and also politically I still quite align with the one I grew up in; and this has the effect of making my body a battleground between many philosophers and medical personages, all of whom seem to be working from a position of, more or less, mystification and faith once one gets past a certain level of discussion, which is very problematic because it is my own personal body; and really all I can trust is my own experience on this one, and I cannot tell what my own experience is based on, except that it is my own faith and at least is probably not externally-caused mystification (I hope)'.

And I have literally heard people have that exact dialogue about denominations of Christianity...

Mind you, I am in a somewhat different place than you on this one, as my gender identification ranges from 'AARGH' through 'NO' through 'if you absolutely have to pick one go with male which is what I would prefer physically but having been socialized female is very important to me in the following directions', so it is actually useful to be able to look at people and say did I ask you about your religion? But it's being a very good analogy for me, and is interesting for me to compare with the handedness one, so I thought I'd mention it.

[yalovetz]

And to extend the analogy - some people are naturally ambidextrous, just as some people's gender identity naturally falls outside the existing gender binary.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I should have thought to mention before, my mother (just three years below your father at school) is also left-handed, and she wasn't forced to use her right hand for writing either. On the other hand, while I don't think of her as clumsy at all in general, she has a block about many of the fiddlier subjects she was taught at school. She's never sewn a button, for example - certainly not for the last 50 years - and as for anything like knitting, forget it! I suspect this is because these subjects were taught right-handedly.

It seems to have been pot luck, who got forced to go right-handed and who didn't. Of the left-handed writers I know ten years younger or so than my mother, Diana Wynne Jones was not forced to use her right hand, but Alan Garner - left-handed descendant of a line of left-handed craftsman - had his left hand stuck up his liberty bodice by his mother to ensure right-handedness. His writing as a right-hander is excellent, almost calligrapher standard, but he writes (physically and not just in every other sense) very self-consciously.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I find that analogy very interesting and persuasive. Yes, we come from different places: I appear to be more binary identified than you (though I think I exaggerate the extent of that so as not to confuse people - sigh); and I don't have any political investment in being male, but I totally recognize the mystification and battlegrounding.

Slightly off topic, but I mention it because your reply reminded me, I heard an interesting programme yesterday about non-osbservant Muslims in Britain, many of whom were saying that other people (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) had difficulty "placing" them. There's an established cultural place for non-observant/secular Jews, and Christians who cease to believe typically cease to be seen by themselves or others as Christians at all, but for Muslims the situation is more complicated - at least here, at least now.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I have been through the same thought experiments, trying to imagine what it must be like to have a dominant right hand.

I don't really understand why some people need to make such a fuss about othering individuals who do not identify with a majority in some way.

It does seem to be a very basic human instinct, unfortunately.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I wasn't very clear, there. It's not so much that it's difficult to understand the difference between gender expression and gender identity (as you eloquently demonstrate), as that it's difficult to define gender identity itself, at least without recourse to concepts of gender expression (or biology, to take the other horn of the dilemma), at which point the career to reductionism is usually fairly precipitate.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I was recently discussing this with another cis person who falls very much into that "if gender policing were abolished there would be no need for hormones and surgery" camp -- and as steepholm notes below, the career into reductionism was pretty steep, after I answered his "well, what do trans*people want anyway?" with "Well, not to speak for them, but at a guess, to be able to live as the gender they feel they are with dignity and respect?" and he answered my "live as the gender they feel they are" with "well, what does that mean?"
At the least, it was a good working illustration of cis privilege (on both sides) because it became pretty clear that we neither of us knew the hell what living as a man or a woman was, we just hadn't really been forced to think about it very much.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I use the mirror analogy.

When you looked in the mirror as a kid who did you see?

Most people's response would be 'myself'.

It didn't work for me- I constantly saw a stranger staring back at me- a stranger with a stranger's body. Only the eyes told the truth (they say the eyes don't lie after all) and they were saying 'please get me out of here!'

If gender policing were abolished, I'd still need the body I've worn since I was 21 and that's what the 'no need' mob simply seem incapable of getting a handle on.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The phrase "trapped in the wrong body" or things like it are used so often that they lose their power for people who haven't experienced it, I think. But the eyes saying "get me out of here" brings it home.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

And to complete the analogy, a week after surgery I was allowed out of bed for the first time (it was all much longer winded and slower back in the late seventies along with almost ten hours of surgery) and able to take a bath. There was a full length mirror in that bathroom and as the dressing gown slid to the floor, I saw myself for the first time in my life. :o)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mean that what I eloquently demonstrate is my own difficulty at understanding the difference.

I don't claim to understand gender identity itself, except that it's obviously something I have no problem with but other people do. See hoary analogies of a fish trying to understand water. I can sort of grasp it from a distance, the way I can sort of grasp people whose complicated or uncertain parentage gives them problems with that aspect of their identity, something else that's boringly straightforward for me.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

My grandfather (b. 1894, I think? or thereabouts) was forced to use his right hand in school, but as he was, or so I have been told, almost completely ambidextrous, he didn't much mind. He later found the ability to use either hand extremely useful in surgery (he was a country doctor who did a bit of everything, but would have been a surgeon had he had the luxury of specializing). My mother was basically left-handed but did certain things with her right hand, which she put down to having been taught by her right-handed mother (using scissors, for instance). But the reality was that she was nearly as uncomfortable using left-handed scissors as I (an extreme right-hander) was, which always puzzled me. My oldest sister, however, also left-handed, managed to use right-handed scissors at home, but gravitated thankfully toward the left-handed ones when they were available. And I, when as a baby I had both my mother and my oldest sister automatically handing me things in my left hand, would slowly and painfully change them over to my right hand -- not an easy task at eight months or whatever I was. I remember thinking about this a fair amount when I was little, and wondering why everyone wasn't ambidextrous.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm not ambidextrous, but (possibly due to having a left-handed father) I seem to use my left hand more than many right-handed people. For example I always use my mobile phone and TV remotes with my left hand. The phone is partly self-training so that I'll have my right hand free in case I need to write anything down, but why should I find remotes easier to use left-handed? Also, though I am right-handed, I am definitely left-footed, as indicated by preferred jumping leg and also from the days when I played football in the park and on the beach. And I hula hoop left-to-right, which is more normal for left-handers.

Similarly, regarding gender, if there's a spectrum from utterly feminine at one end and utterly masculine at the other, by both natural inclination and upbringing, I self-identify about the half-way point. Therefore anything that seems to suggest that gender is a strict binary and you have to be one or the other, thus sweeping me out of my comfortable middle ground and forcing me to be something I'm not, makes me a little uneasy.

However, to return to the original point about understanding and acceptance, I don't feel that that line of argument is particularly helpful because they're completely independent variables. I don't understand why some people end up gay -- no one does. It doesn't seem to be genetic, though that could be part of it; it could be to do with hormones in the womb, whatever. However, I have no problem accepting the existence of gay people or their right to live in accordance with how they feel. Ditto transsexual people.

In other words, if you want to improve levels of acceptance, trying to explain how something came about is not necessarily a productive approach. Instead you need to encourage people to accept that gays, transsexuals, disabled people, etc. etc. are not a threat in any shape or form and instead are valuable and interesting members of society who are just a bit different.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

PS I've just realised that in that final paragraph I've re-stated your main point about acceptance. However, I meant that you need to apply that in practice by refusing to engage in pointless arguments about "what it means to be transsexual". That sort of argument will not lead to enlightenment and is probably a waste of time and energy -- at least on the Internet and in the media.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mean that what I eloquently demonstrate is my own difficulty at understanding the difference.

Of course not. I seem to demonstrating only my inability to write a clear sentence!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I use knives and forks right-handedly, that is to say, I use the conventional settings, because that's what I've always known, and it doesn't require significantly more skill to use one than the other. However, as a teenager I would be irritated by my mother's laying the dessert spoon with the handle towards the right, even when we two lefties were the only ones eating!

Later, I had the bright idea of laying the table myself, which was perhaps her game all along (she's a crafty one).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, it probably is, most of the time. I talk about it here partly in the spirit of thinking things through for myself in the company of intelligent friends rather than in any hope to change the world thereby!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

wondering why everyone wasn't ambidextrous

Seriously, I think that's a very good question.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

But you folks across the pond ALL eat left-handedly compared to USians.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think it's worth establishing that something did NOT come about in various pathological ways (i.e., none of these things is the equivalent of, say, thinking one is a teapot -- according to Poe a surprisingly common delusion). I can remember my father talking about reading The Well of Loneliness not many years after it first came out, and realizing that no one would choose such a sad fate, that people must be born that way, it was their misfortune not their fault, and that such people didn't do any harm, after all. For a guy born in 1918, this was a fairly liberal view (and if I remember correctly, he ended up having no problem with gay marriage), but needless to say I think it falls far, far short of reality.