Mindset Entitlement

When I was at school, we had a debating society. Whenever the motion was "x should not be compulsory", I would be in favour. And whenever I spoke in one of these debates, I would lose. Combined Cadet Force should not be compulsory? Nah, why not? You get to fly planes and shit. It's cool. Therefore everyone should be forced to do it. Sports lessons should not be compulsory? Nah, why not? You get to play hockey, and I like hockey. Therefore everyone should be forced to do it.

I always made the same points: something not being compulsory didn't mean that you wouldn't be able to do it if you enjoyed it; some people don't enjoy it and they should be spared that pain. And the debate always played out the same way: an audience where the majority enjoyed the activity under discussion sat, listened, and gave a collective "meh" of approval for dictatorship.

In my post reviewing three works of trans* literature, I touched on Julia Serano's theory of "gender entitlement" - the tendency (in trans* as well as cis people) to assume that everyone's experience of gender is the same as yours. I'm starting to wonder whether a lot of prejudiced behaviour in other contexts stems from a similar tendency to project one's own experiences onto everyone else - a sort of "mindset entitlement", if you will.

The most common examples of this tendency are relatively harmless. If, say, somebody really hates the idea of having to sing, and has gone along with some friends to a karaoke bar to be companionable and watch and drink and chat, it's really not fair for eir friends to start trying to coax em into doing a song. And because their mindset entitlement tells them that karaoke is fun, singing's not a big deal, they might compound eir discomfort by repeatedly trying to persuade em, or by incredulously asking em why ey doesn't want to join in, or - cardinal sin - by just ignoring eir protests and putting in a song request on eir behalf.

It's easy to fall into this trap of mindset entitlement - to kid ourselves that the odd-person-out wants to join in really, or that ey'll enjoy it when ey finally tries it (asexual people get that one a lot!), or that the enjoyment we feel from being part of a big group with everyone joining in with what we love has greater priority than the discomfort ey feels from being made to join in. And if ey points out to us how upset we've made em feel, it can come as a real shock.

It's understandable, it's only human, to feel shocked when we realise we've unintentionally been hurtful or disrespectful. Having one's mindset entitlement challenged can provoke painful cognitive dissonance - if everyone doesn't see things in the same way as we do, then perhaps we're the ones who are "wrong", or "crazy", or "mean". We set up powerful buffers of denial in our heads to try to avoid confronting these horrible possibilities; this usually results in us making matters worse by trying to protest our innocence (which, in these matters, implicitly means protesting the injured party's guilt), or by deciding that everyone is so damn over-sensitive and "politically correct" these days that it's hard to say or do anything without being lambasted for it, so we might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. (And thus a troll is born.)

Okay, it's hard to say sorry, and it's even harder to admit - to ourselves - that we might have done something wrong. But where mindset entitlement is coupled with privilege, it can have horrendous effects on the people who are further down the privilege scale.

Take "invisible disabilities". Someone who doesn't suffer from depression, Asperger's or chronic fatigue (for example) can't possibly understand what it's like to feel so down that ey literally can't get out of bed, or to find public spaces so overwhelming with stimulus that eir system basically shuts down, or to be able to walk for 200 metres but then be so exhausted by the effort that ey later on collapses immobile and sleeps for 16 hours straight. But there are two possible responses to not being able to understand something like that. You can accept that, although it's totally outside your experience, it's true for some people. Or you can let mindset entitlement instinctively kick in, decide that these people must be "faking it", and (egged on by the current Tory climate of "burn the benefit cheats") contribute to the massive rise in scapegoating and harassment of disabled people.

It's bad enough when this "entitled" view of other people's mental states just leads to ableism from the general populace, but when entitled people are put in charge of official bodies, that's when the issue becomes one of accessibility. Mindset entitlement creates accessibility problems when, for example, the people in charge of making forms, or arranging toilet facilities, have no idea of how much it hurts some people to be forced to choose a binary gender box. Everyone makes mistakes and it's hard to remember to consider every possible accessibility barrier all of the time; if somebody doesn't think to set up a ramp at a venue and a wheelchair user complains, you'd expect em at the very least to apologise and ensure that the (obvious, visible) mistake was rectified. But when a person's accessibility difficulties are not apparently physical or visible, it's easy to let mindset entitlement prompt you to tell em to just "deal with it" or "get over it". Like, for example, if ey requests that you use trigger warnings in things you post or share.

As with all the other examples, mindset entitlement leads people to think they can guess what it's like. When told that mention of certain distressing topics can "trigger" certain people, they imagine that being "triggered" is just like being offended or being nauseated or being scared - feelings that they've manfully (I use the term advisedly) learnt to sit through or push down, because nobody likes a crybaby, and it's just making a fuss over nothing, isn't it? They don't for one second imagine that being triggered can involve a full-blown episode of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's natural, when attempting to understand someone's feelings, to look for a probable analogue in feelings one has had oneself. But sometimes you just can't understand... and people who behave with mindset entitlement would much rather make false assumptions, and be offensive and disrespectful and dismissive and hurtful and mocking, than admit that there is something in the world that they can't understand. Sometimes you just have to look at a reported experience, and go "Huh, I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like," and take the reporter on trust, and support em when ey says that certain things, certain little things that you take for granted your ability to overcome, hurt em deeply.

And sometimes - often, in fact - that involves admitting you're wrong, and realising you've been an arse, and feeling like shit. Sometimes you'll be tempted to duck out of those painful responsibilities, and write it off as "just a little thing", you "didn't mean to", the other person "shouldn't have taken it so seriously". But remember that if you let yourself be guided by your mindset entitlement in the little matters, the seemingly harmless matters, you run the risk of behaving in an immature, entitled, privileged, prejudiced way where the bigger matters are concerned. Accessibility, ableism and acceptance shouldn't be treated like motions in a school debating society. We are old enough and mature enough to start trying to accept the mind-boggling truth: other people's perspectives can be different from ours, and just as valid.

Male Privilege for Speakers of Other Languages

It's difficult, questioning one's gender. So many different things are thrown haphazardly together under the label "gender" that it's hard to disentangle the parts that are really you. Is it in the way you behave? Does a long-held disdain for pretty clothes and dollies prove that you're "really a boy" - or does it only prove that you're scared to be seen to like anything "girly"? Does the fact that you are softly-spoken and sensitive mean that you could never become a "real man" - or does it just mean that you were never taught to choke back your vulnerabilities as a child? By the time you start to realise that so much of your "outer" gender was carefully, unconsciously constructed while you grew up, you can no longer tell which aspects of your character would have been different if you'd been encouraged to behave in different ways. You can no longer be sure where your "outer" gender ends and your "inner" gender begins.

So you conduct experiments. I've gradually been teaching myself male privilege. Since I began experimentally identifying as transmasculine, I've been experimentally adopting more masculine-coded behaviours. It's partly to see if I'll pass better, and partly to see if it feels more natural, and partly to find out just how easy it is to re-train oneself in all of these "innately" binary characteristics. And I'm inclined to conclude that outer gender - the way you behave and express yourself when you are conscious of other people's gendered expectations - is not innate, but learnt... and with practice, you can learn a new one. Having been taught "female" as a native gender, I'm slowly becoming fluent in "male".

The thing that's changed the most is my confidence - or, more specifically, my ability to act as though I am confident. I always struggled with a lack of confidence growing up, which was deeply linked to a fear of failure or criticism. Finally finding safe and supportive spaces went a long way towards mitigating these tendencies. But I still worried about what people thought about me, even within my safe spaces, surrounded by friends who loved me for who I was, whatever my flaws. I was still scared to behave in certain ways, selfish or careless or impulsive ways, in case people thought less of me.

It wasn't until I started consciously trying on some male behaviours that I found the freedom, the confidence, to do that - to be selfish, to say thoughtless things, to make jokes that might fall flat, and to not care. Obviously, these are character traits that aren't very positive if you take them to an extreme. But they're all about daring. If you dare to be selfish at the times when you really just can't cope with being selfless any more, you might save yourself from a breakdown. If you dare to make a questionable joke, it might fall flat, or on the other hand, it might get the biggest laugh of the evening through its sheer edginess. If you dare to do something impulsive, it might go badly wrong, or it might be a genius move. And, of course, it's about daring to be a flawed human being. We are all flawed, we are all selfish sometimes, we all say rude things or behave thoughtlessly sometimes, and yet the people who matter love us all the same. Not all of us have the confidence to believe that's true.

Who dares wins. And, in our culture, it's boys who are taught, gradually, incrementally, cumulatively, to dare. The proof is found in sociolinguistic evidence that male-assigned people tend to interrupt more than female-assigned people; in the overwhelming gender disparity in fields such as comedy or politics where the risk of being shot down is high; in the way that seminars about "unblocking creativity" and "finding your voice" are attended overwhelmingly by female-assigned people.

Some might see that as "proof that men and women are different" - proof that inner gender is binary in just the same way as outer gender. But would that make sense, given that I could never have found the confidence to risk behaving like a bit of a dickhead when I was presenting as female? Or that I, who used to be incredibly emotionally over-reactive, have drastically reduced the regularity with which I cry about things, simply by wondering what it's like to have internalised the mantra "boys don't cry" and seeing what happens if I don't allow myself to let go? (Compare the trans women who have the opposite experience, and find that, long before any hormone therapy, they are a lot more able to let themselves cry.) I've even had to stop myself on occasion from being borderline misogynistic: I could get away with idly objectifying female-presenting strangers, or steamrollering female-identified friends in lively discussions, just because it's expected of men and allowed for, and that's a temptation that's difficult to fight.

Try consciously learning to speak a foreign outer gender for a few months. See whether you manage to re-condition yourself; see whether that "proof" that inner gender is naturally binary still holds up. And if you don't manage it, ask: what's stopping you? Who's stopping you? The deeply-ingrained fear of social opprobrium is a very powerful force. People who don't live up to gender norms - men who don't dare, men who don't "banter", men who don't push themselves forward - are subjected to it. People who live up to the wrong gender norms - men who cry, women who interrupt - are subjected to it even more forcefully. And if you're a man who's crying, you're not just a person who's been overcome by a strong feeling (it might be justified, or it might be a bit over-dramatic, but it's generally acceptable) - you're a pussy. If you're a woman who frequently interrupts, you're not just a person who's a bit irritating (the interruptions might be amusing, they might just be asinine, but they're generally tolerated) - you're a ball-breaker.

Perhaps I would eventually have learnt to be confident, learnt to dare, if I had stayed thinking of myself as female. But it's easier to dare when you don't risk as much. It's easier to dare when you're expected to dare, and it's easier to cry when you're expected to cry. Both behaviours are healthy, but not all healthy behaviours are equally permissible to all people. And that's the injustice that I'm thinking about when I declare that I'm a feminist. That's the depressing reality that makes me want to "smash the binary". People can keep their inner genders, be as binary or non-binary as they want, be men or women or neither or both or manly or effeminate or butch or feminine or sensitive or selfish - but outer gender has to go.

Mx-ing it up

Mx (title, pronounced /məks/, by analogy with "Ms", or /mɪks/, as in "mix"): a handy alternative to those peskily gendered and status-specific titles "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Miss". Variant form: Misc (from "miscellaneous").

I'm due to give blood again soon. So, like a good person, I went to blood.co.uk and tried to book myself an appointment via the webform. Then I remembered what the webform looks like:

Note that mandatory field right there. If you want to cut down on faff (both for you and for the blood service) when you give blood, you have to - have to - be comfortable being addressed by one of Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss or Dr.

I think I'll just drop in and hope they've got a bed free. And so, I expect, will any Professors, Reverends, Sisters or Imams who turn up.

This might sound petty or facetious to you. After all, not many people feel distressed to the point of self-exclusion by being forced to identify themselves as either Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss (even if they're actually Dr). But I, as it happens, am one of them. We're a minority, but there's quite a lot of us. We even have our own national campaign.

Here's a fun fact: in the UK, your title has no basis in law. If you're male-assigned, you're not legally obliged to call yourself "Mr [Surname]", just like female-assigned people can request to be referred to as "Miss" or "Ms" according to their preferences; what's more, they can adopt the title "Mrs" even if they're not married, and vice versa. Therefore, all these thousands of organisations who have mandatory title fields on their webforms are gaining essentially zero information by it. I strongly suspect that it's only requested (or rather, demanded) so that they can painlessly auto-fill the greeting "Dear [Title] [Surname] on their automated email replies. This can lead to hilarity when an organisation tries to be inclusive but doesn't quite think about it hard enough: a (binary-identified, incidentally) friend of mine selected the helpful option "Other" on a webform once, and got the response "Dear Other [Surname]"...

Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms (etc.) are known as "courtesy titles"; that is, by saying "Dear Mrs Exampleface" instead of "Oi, Vera", correspondents (even automated ones) are supposed to be being courteous. But for many trans* people, it ends up being the other way round: we have to do the organisations the courtesy of selecting one of their woefully inadequate options. And while this is a minor annoyance on a webform, when individual correspondents know someone's trans* (like, for example, when they're the psychiatric "professionals" who are meant to be objectively reviewing someone's suitability for referral to a gender identity clinic), the "courtesy" title can become a vicious, disgusting weapon for making their prejudices clear.

The gender-neutral title "Mx" (or "Misc") won't solve all of these problems. But the more widespread and well-known it becomes, the more it can help English-speaking society to become more inclusive. Simply including it on a webform will help gender-variant people, or cis people who are uncomfortable with being asked for unnecessary personal information, to feel more accepted. Meanwhile, those people who are blithely ignorant of gender issues are more likely to learn about them, and become more sensitive towards them, if they regularly encounter this strange new option on the drop-down menu and it piques their curiosity.

And, importantly, "Mx" doesn't have to be - shouldn't be - a title reserved only for non-binary-gendered people. It would actually be an incredibly useful resource at times when you're corresponding with a stranger and you're not sure whether ey's Mr or Ms. (This happens an awful lot in my office, and some of my colleagues waste ridiculous amounts of time googling "[foreign first name] gender" just so they can send a flipping letter.) We've all had someone take a punt and address us as "Miss" when we're actually "Ms", or as "Mrs" when we're actually "Dr" (or as all manner of things if we're called Sam, or Chris, or Alex, or...), and we smile, correct em and move on. If everyone who was unsure defaulted to "Mx" on first contact, it would work exactly the same way, but with a lower embarrassment/faff factor.

What's more, the receptionist at the medical institution who loudly calls out "Mr [Patient]?", when ey knows full well that the patient is, or might be, a trans woman, would no longer be able to innocently declare that ey "wasn't sure" or that the patient's first name "sounded like a man's name". Because in that case, ey bloody well could have, and should have, defaulted to Mx. Out of courtesy. And everyone in the waiting room, and at the institution, and who responds to formal complaints against receptionists, would know that.

But this will only happen if the gender-neutral, status-neutral, assumption-neutral title "Mx", or its variant "Misc", or both, becomes more widespread. And as a linguistics graduate, I can assure you that the way to make a new word widespread is to use it. The UK Deed Poll Service has already started accepting it. The more examples we can give of it being used in official documents, like bank statements or council tax bills (I treasure mine proudly), the more leverage we have when trying to convince other organisations to include it in their databases.

I'm slowly beginning the long and irritating process of trying to get my title changed in all my records to Mx (and complaining when I can't). It's the teaspoon effect - it's a tiny action, and it's a drop in the ocean of the status quo, but every drop has ripples. If you're a binary-identified ally reading this, what are your teaspoon options? Well, there's a petition you could sign, for a start (incidentally, the petition claims that Mx is short for "Mixter", which many people dislike somewhat or suspect to be unfounded, but I'd sooner sign a slightly dubiously worded petition than none at all). But since you're not legally obliged to use a title which reflects your gender, or your marital status, or anything else, you could always consider doing the same as me.

Think about it. Think hard, and fully explore the vague, irrational discomfort you feel when you imagine calling yourself Mx [Surname], and getting letters addressed to it, and and having it called out in doctors' wating rooms. Now reconsider whether I'm really being so petty.

Transliterate

1. (v.tr.) To write or print (a letter or word) using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.
2. (adj., also "trans-literate") Well-versed in transgender theory and/or experiences.

OK, I made that second one up. I like wordplay. But it strikes me that trying to write intelligibly about trans* experiences bears some similarities to transliterating text between one alphabet and another. Being trans* is one of those ineffable personal experiences that are very hard to wrap one's head around without direct experience. More than that, there's such a vast range of differing trans* experiences (as I always encourage readers of this blog to remember: YMMV) that it's often hard for trans* people to understand each other's experiences. All one can do is try and decipher little snatches of one's own vast and indescribable depth of feeling, and then attempt to re-encode them in a way that speakers of a completely different language might possibly begin to understand.

Thanks to my excellent local LGBT+ library, I've recently been trying to improve my trans-literacy, starting with three books that between them emphasise the YMMV principle: Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man, Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw. These are the kinds of books that I wish (hope?) "gender professionals" would read, if nothing else so that they could recommend them to trans*/questioning individuals seeking counselling. It's vital (and difficult) to realise, as a trans* person, that there is no one way of being trans* - that one doesn't need to compromise or bemoan one's personality, sexual orientation, or even physical body, in order to accept and own a trans* identity.

Becoming a Visible Man is a "this is not just an FTM transition story" kind of book, written in an accessible style by a thoughtful, sensitive trans man whose experiences have fed into his belief in treating all people with dignity and respect. Whipping Girl, meanwhile, is a searing manifesto of trans-feminist theory, written with devastating insight by a trans woman biologist with a talent for seeking-and-destroying bullshit and hypocrisy. And Gender Outlaw is a form-echoes-content patchwork of ruminations, reminiscences and penetrating questions from a happily-transitioned MTF who is now coming to identify as genderfluid.

All three work hard on challenging and taking apart our tangled societal assumptions about all things gender, repeatedly making the point that physical sex, social gender, sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity are not necessarily connected. Many parents worry that because their son likes pink things he might grow up gay, and many adolescent FAABs who have a penchant for masculine clothing think that perhaps they must be lesbians (even though they're not actually attracted to women), and great swathes of people will boggle at the concept of an androsexual FTM or a gynesexual MTF. This assumption that gender expression = sexual orientation (= gender identity) is deeply ingrained into our culture, meaning that anybody who varies even slightly from the prescribed scripts of "manly straight man" or "girly straight woman" or "flamboyant gay man" or "ultra-femme 100%-androsexual trans woman" etc. immediately has a whole heap of internalised everything-phobia to deal with.

You don't have to have done a lot of untangling of all this bullshit in your head to become a happy self-accepting trans* person, but it helps. And it's exceedingly useful (to anyone who struggles with gender norms, not just trans* people) when such people write books about their untanglings that articulate what you were sort of thinking but just couldn't put into words. Serano insightfully pins down a widespread cultural devaluing of feminine qualities as being at the heart of a vast number of these assumptions and prejudices (from gay male fetishising of "butches" over "femmes", through feminist disdain towards women who enjoy expressing femininity, to the massive over-representation by science and the media of trans women over trans men). Meanwhile, Green opens with a knife-sharp chapter mischievously knocking down accepted ideas about "the two biological sexes" (a large portion of which is available on Amazon's "see inside this book" function, and I encourage you to have a read of that if of nothing else I review here).

What's more, you don't have to be a trans* person to have untangled some of this bullshit, but again, it helps: experiencing life "from both sides" (as it were), and needing to come to an unusually clear understanding of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman", have given these authors particular insights into the mechanisms of social, hormonal and psychological gender, and allowed them to think critically about which gendered expectations they do and don't wish to live up to. Or, sometimes, it doesn't: Bornstein struggled to understand the ineffable concept of gender all her pre-transition life, and although she loves her female body, and feels solidarity with those who experience the world as women, she still can't come to terms with gender other than as a social phenomenon, and a dubious one at best. Seeing it as a quietly insidious form of class-based oppression, she encourages us all (gently) to do as she does: to transgress it, thumb one's nose at it, ask it awkward questions, and point out that it (like the proverbial emperor) is wearing no clothes, at every possible opportunity.

I have great sympathy for Bornstein's position, which is why I was particularly intrigued to read Serano's theory of the "subconscious sex": an individual's mental sense of what form eir body ought to take. This subconscious sex is separate from the societal pressures that can affect a person's relationship with eir gender or gendered body; it is just there, effectively existing in a vacuum, a quiet insistence that there ought to be a vagina there, for example - whether or not there actually is a vagina there, or whether or not the person in question identifies as female-gendered. I'm not sure I have a subconscious sex, and it seems from Bornstein's writing that she probably doesn't either;. While people like us, the gender-bewildered, have many valid things to say about the negative aspects of social gender, we must remember that our insistence on destroying the binary can offend or alienate those people (cis or trans*) who do have a subconscious sex. In Serano's terminology, we must avoid behaving with "gender entitlement": the unconscious tendency to project one's own individual experience of gender onto everyone else.

In trans* people, the subconscious sex can be a massive source of physical dysphoria. In cis people, it can be a massive source of gender entitlement. Cis people, Serano reasons, usually have a subconscious sex - they just don't notice it, because it aligns more or less perfectly with their physical sex (and, to a greater or lesser extent, their social gender). Therefore, having no experience of gender dysphoria, they may be unable to understand or believe trans* people when they insist that they are a gender other than the one assigned to them. It can also lead to fractures within the trans* community, based on entitled assumptions of "my experience is the transsexual experience - your experience does not match mine - therefore you are not a true transsexual".

In both cases, the entitled behaviour can stem from an underlying insecurity in one's own gender, a fear that the way one experiences one's own identity might not be "valid". However, those who are brave enough to put aside these layers of defensiveness and try to empathise with other people's perspectives can gain a great deal from it. The initially reluctant Green gradually became deeply involved in the evolving FTM community of the 80s/90s, during which time he got to know (either face-to-face or via correspondence) more trans* people, each with a different trans* experience, than most gatekeepers would ever meet. The result is a text which is imbued with a deep consciousness of and respect for each individual's perspective on gender, and is richer for it. Very few of the (numerous) books, scholarly articles and scientific studies about trans* people have this level of real understanding of their subjects, Serano argues. Most of the "gender professionals", theorists or polemicists who wrote them didn't actually bother to properly get to know any trans* people, and this is why she feels that books like the ones I've discussed here, books written about the trans* experience by trans* people, are so important if we want to come to any meaningful conclusions about gender and those who struggle with it.

Transliterating between alphabets is not the same as translating between languages: all it does is make the words legible, rather than comprehensible. Some extra work is required by the reader if ey is to understand their meaning; ey must try to learn some elements of the writer's native language. Therefore, while I heartily applaud these three authors' prodigious efforts at transliterating their unique experiences into relatable stories, the onus is now on us to become trans-literate.

Gender in theory and in practice

Drafted on 26/3/12


My GP is an exceedingly nice guy, and he's not - can't be expected to be - a trans* expert. He performed the last(?) of his gatekeeping duties for me this morning with endearing humility, constantly apologising for being so "challenging" as he asked me probing questions. As he explained, in future referrals, people were going to be similarly challenging, trying to make sure that I wasn't making a bad decision.

Although I can just about get my head round a world in which this has to happen (so what if I made a "bad decision"? why would it matter if I stopped taking testosterone after a few months then spent the rest of my life as a slightly hirsute woman with a low voice and clitoromegaly?), I was somewhat perturbed by the thought that, in order to access treatment, I would have to have my identity, my confidence in myself, constantly "challenged", and to constantly defend it. No wonder the referral process is so emotionally draining for the more fragile of us (and bear in mind that our experiences are likely to have made us fragile).

But what disturbed me more was the idea that the healthcare "professionals" who stand in our way might have such a simplistic, unprofessional idea of gender as was displayed in his questioning. I have been thinking about my gender for over half my life, off and on; as remarked an FTM acquaintance of mine (who on the face of it is the most masculine-conforming obvious candidate for the treatment), you have to deconstruct the binary before you can work out where you stand within it (and then, if appropriate, you put it back together with yourself firmly in the "other" bit). I have read blogs, books, resources, theory; I have answered for myself to my own satisfaction nearly all of the questions that feel relevant connected to the decision to "change sex".

I do not count among them the question "so if you're not planning to have surgery, what would happen if you started a relationship with someone?"

I am a very lucky person. I have an "alternative" worldview and I live in an "alternative" world which supports, celebrates and nourishes it. Very rarely does the "real" world intrude, the one where people aren't broad-minded and over-intellectualising, the one where people eschew critical thinking in favour of shocked instinctive reactions when faced with a "she-man". I've brainwashed reeducated myself more than sufficiently in matters of queer, [a]sex-positive and feminist theory to conclude "instinctively" that all relationships are different, all people are different, all genitalia are different, and there are a million and one ways of having sex, or not having sex, or having a relationship with a person primarily and eir genitalia second. The "professionals" who gatekeep gender have, in many cases and within the confines of what their job description demands of them, thought about these things only so far as concluding that they don't want to accidentally create freaks.

Perhaps it's unreasonable of me to raise an eyebrow at the question; I'm sure there are plenty of candidates for medical transition who don't want to be turned into freaks, or who honestly haven't thought about these things, or who would respond with an "unhealthy" plan for how they'd deal with such matters. But I would really hope that, rather than just being rejected for referral (which might seem to the "professionals" like the "safer" way of dealing with "confused" people, but in actual fact might lead to much greater distress and confusion than an ill-advised partial transition), such people would be given access further down the line to appropriate counselling. And by "appropriate", I mean "grounded in queer-positive theory": giving them the tools to accept that their genital configuration (whatever it is currently, whatever they would like it to be, and whatever it's likely to actually end up as) doesn't make them "freaks", doesn't mean they won't be able to have successful relationships, and doesn't make it "wrong" for them to obtain whatever sexual pleasure is available to them.

Easier said than done, perhaps, if said people are surrounded by that tiresome "real" world in which acquaintances disapprove of their actions. But even if they come to an understanding of themselves, their genders and their bodies which the "normal" people around them will never take the time to understand, it might be the key to their own self-acceptance and self-confidence - things which, if they've reached a point of suspecting themselves to be trans*, might otherwise remain a lifelong problem for them.

I freely admit that I'm an idealist, and perhaps naive with it. But that's because, in some respects, I live in an ideal world. By lucky chance, I've landed in a life situation where, as yet, my trans* status has not once caused me to be harassed, lose a friend or family member, or encounter friction or prejudice at work or in other social groups. I hear about less fortunate people, am "challenged" by my GP to consider how I'd feel if transition led me to encounter one of these negative scenarios, and I'm determined to prove that trans* life doesn't have to be like that. Maybe it won't happen; maybe I will get knocked back by a homophobic (or acephobic, but I've had relationships with men, so in their eyes, who's counting?) consultant, maybe work colleagues will start to swallow their acceptance once they realise it comes with facial hair. But that's the "real" world, and I never liked the sound of it much. I've already proven that, with a measure of good fortune and some boldness in seeking out progressive people, a trans* person can build eir own little world in which ey can live out eir gender happily.

Who really lives in the "real" world, anyway? We must pander to its demands and live under its conditions, and we can desire to change it or try to change it, but all of our happiness and security, all of our meaningful encounters, all of our little everyday triumphs and despairs that together mount up to "living", come from our Own Little Worlds. And the best we can possibly hope for, regardless of what the "real" world thinks of us, is to seek out or build or stumble upon a little world which feels right. I like mine. And if one day someone wants, really wants, to come and live in my corner of it with me, I guarantee that ey will not care about the shape of my genitals.