Your proposed long term is fine - except of course that it's a bit... long.
Seeing/blind and hearing/deaf seem to me less weighted terms than "seeing/unsighted" and "hearing/non-hearing", simply because of the way that prefixes in English correlate to linguistic (and hence cultural) markedness. Similarly, one of the commenters on the Dreamwidth twin of this post (who is disabled) refers to "disabled" and "temporarily able-bodied" precisely to counteract the way in which "disabled" tends to be understood in terms of its "opposite". (I continue to be amazed that the phrase "person of colour", which blatantly normalizes white people, continues to have currency - but that's not my call.)
Since so many of them go in for surgery, I'd expect they'd be willing to say that it isn't normal to have a body that doesn't match your sex identity, as this is either a burden you have to live with or something you get medically fixed. What's your take on that question, not just your own opinion but your perception of what others think?
Well, my perception (not necessarily to be relied on) is that there's a huge variety of attitudes and experiences. Of course many people never do seek surgery, for one reason or another. For some, what is unbearable isn't so much the bodily configuration as the experience of being continually misgendered and of having to perform a gender different from their own - especially in environments where gender roles are strictly demarcated and enforced. For others, the somatic element is far more prominent. For most, I would guess, it's both, in various proportions, which may change over time..
The fact is that the way most societies - and certainly both of ours - define these matters, it isn't normal to be trans - in the sense that it offends against the gender norms that are imposed from without and internalised from within by cis and trans people alike. If that weren't the case I find it hard to imagine that this post and discussion would be necessary. It's also not "normal" in the statistical sense that most people aren't trans, just as most people aren't left-handed (an analogy I've pursued before). The second of these is unlikely to change; the first we can work on.
Homosexuals, on the other hand, tend to bristle at the suggestion that there's anything "wrong" with them, and they emphatically don't want it "corrected" either, though that may be because of the rhetoric and attitude of those who think they can correct it.
The case with trans people is actually very similar. The kind of reparative therapy you're alluding to, which has largely been repudiated by psychiatric organizations in the West for gay people, is still vocally advocated for trans people both by some psychologists (e.g. Kenneth Zucker) and by some feminists (e.g. Julie Bindel). This is I think quite different from seeking surgery - which is not seen as a "cure" for being trans, but as a way that life as a trans person can be made livable.
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Date: 2014-03-22 03:27 pm (UTC)Seeing/blind and hearing/deaf seem to me less weighted terms than "seeing/unsighted" and "hearing/non-hearing", simply because of the way that prefixes in English correlate to linguistic (and hence cultural) markedness. Similarly, one of the commenters on the Dreamwidth twin of this post (who is disabled) refers to "disabled" and "temporarily able-bodied" precisely to counteract the way in which "disabled" tends to be understood in terms of its "opposite". (I continue to be amazed that the phrase "person of colour", which blatantly normalizes white people, continues to have currency - but that's not my call.)
Since so many of them go in for surgery, I'd expect they'd be willing to say that it isn't normal to have a body that doesn't match your sex identity, as this is either a burden you have to live with or something you get medically fixed. What's your take on that question, not just your own opinion but your perception of what others think?
Well, my perception (not necessarily to be relied on) is that there's a huge variety of attitudes and experiences. Of course many people never do seek surgery, for one reason or another. For some, what is unbearable isn't so much the bodily configuration as the experience of being continually misgendered and of having to perform a gender different from their own - especially in environments where gender roles are strictly demarcated and enforced. For others, the somatic element is far more prominent. For most, I would guess, it's both, in various proportions, which may change over time..
The fact is that the way most societies - and certainly both of ours - define these matters, it isn't normal to be trans - in the sense that it offends against the gender norms that are imposed from without and internalised from within by cis and trans people alike. If that weren't the case I find it hard to imagine that this post and discussion would be necessary. It's also not "normal" in the statistical sense that most people aren't trans, just as most people aren't left-handed (an analogy I've pursued before). The second of these is unlikely to change; the first we can work on.
Homosexuals, on the other hand, tend to bristle at the suggestion that there's anything "wrong" with them, and they emphatically don't want it "corrected" either, though that may be because of the rhetoric and attitude of those who think they can correct it.
The case with trans people is actually very similar. The kind of reparative therapy you're alluding to, which has largely been repudiated by psychiatric organizations in the West for gay people, is still vocally advocated for trans people both by some psychologists (e.g. Kenneth Zucker) and by some feminists (e.g. Julie Bindel). This is I think quite different from seeking surgery - which is not seen as a "cure" for being trans, but as a way that life as a trans person can be made livable.