Typical girl

I have a blog reader who challenges me. It's important to have people who challenge you. I am doing some very serious things with my life, and going into anything like this without questioning would be foolish. So I appreciate the one who challenges me.

She has very strong ideas about gender. She agrees with my comment that the gender binary is not adequate to describe reality. She figures that we should all be able to express whatever gender we want without regard to anatomy. I think so too. So why do I reinforce the gender binary with my own life?

I think it's about individual needs, individual desires, and individual choice. I examined my needs and desires over and over again. I found the idea of expressing my femininity without actually transitioning to be very appealing, for any number of reasons. I think genderqueers rock. They get in the face of the system and tell it to fuck off, that they will create their own gender expression regardless of which box anyone tries to force them into.

I figured out, however, that genderqueer wasn't me. And given that I had gone through life making choices that did not make me happy, that in fact made me unhappy, there was no way I was going to perpetuate that pattern. So as politically and sociologically bold as genderqueer is, it just would not have been right for me. It would not have made me happy.

My desire, a desire so strong that it is sometimes painful, is to have been born female, with female genitalia, a 46, XX karyotype, the hormones that go with that karyotype, and the life that would have followed from it all. Since I can't have that, I want as much of it as I can have. That means not just to live as though I had been born a girl. It means pharmaceutical intervention to change my hormone balance, a change my brain and body thank me for every day. It means surgical intervention to turn the organs I don't want into the ones I have always wanted.

The key to this puzzle is really hormones. Hormones show the idea of gender as a social construct to be mistaken or at least incomplete. Gender roles are certainly a social construct. But the feeling that one is female, male, both, neither, or something else entirely is not. If my conviction that my brain is female were just part of a social construct, then I would feel fine on the testosterone my body produces naturally, and I would not feel significantly better when testosterone is suppressed and estrogen predominates. Yet I don't feel fine when testosterone dominates, and I feel outstanding when estrogen dominates. That's not a social construct. That's physiology.

The hormone change is more important to me than surgical modifications, but the surgical change is still important enough to me to go through considerable hassle to get it and keep it. The body map that we have in our brains is physiological as well, and I can't help that my brain wants a clitoris and vagina down there, not a penis and testicles, and refuses to change. I can bring my body in line with my brain. Therefore, I plan to.

Yes, it's all very conventional. And sure, some of my behaviour and appearance fit the stereotype of the North American notion of femininity. But I really don't care. I'm not conforming to a stereotype. I simply intersect with it in places by chance, because I'm doing what makes me happy. I'm not about to eschew what makes me happy just to conform to someone's idea of political correctness.

Thanks for the challenge. I'm looking forward to the next one.