Massachusetts’ Transgender Equal Rights Act became law on the first of July.
Even for the liberal-minded among us, especially those of a certain age, the transgender phenomenon (to which young people are apparently flocking) is one more item for the What- Are -We- Coming- To file.
It used to be, and it is still the reality of most of us, that gender “assignment” as it’s being called, was no more an assignment than eye color or height. It is one of the primary structures and most important realities of life, more important than rich or poor, tall or short, smart or not so much. Right up there with race.
Even when the secret came out of the closet that a substantial portion of the population had a sexual preference that went against the majority association with gender, the genders themselves remained rigid.
But of the LGBT “community”, the “T” stands out as from the others as something else.
“No individual should face discrimination because of who they are,” said Gov. Patrick on signing the new law. But A.G. Coakley says that the virtue of the same law is to protect “gender identity or expression.” Who you are and your expression seem quite different things. Young people should be allowed to “be who they want to be”, a parent of a trans is quoted in a recent New Yorker article.
Homosexuality has been shown to be a biology- based predeliction. Transgenderism seems ambiguous. Sometimes it’s a young teen discovering that he/she was “really” a boy beneath the female trappings such as breasts, which sounds like biology. But when it’s “identifying or presenting as” when gender is seen as “endlessly modifiable” as a mother worried in that article, a choice from a “gender rainbow,” it sounds less like biology than style,or lifestyle. And laws enacted to protect transgender rights seem less like those protecting the civil rights of lesbians, gays and blacks than those protecting freedom of expression.
According to the wikipedia article, a trans is someone “whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female roles,” or who feels that his/her genitally based sex is “ a false or incomplete description of themselves.” The assumption here is that most of us feel nothing but comfortable in our bodies with their male or female branding. But my impression is that few of us are unambiguously comfortable with our gender roles and expectations (war, childbirth) and don’t consider them as completely defining us.
To some extent we’ve always played around with our basic biological equipment, styled ourselves more or less macho or feminine with shoulder pads, falsies, codpieces, pushup bras, bodybuilding to enhance the shoulders and muscles.
In recent decades cosmetic surgery is an increasingly acceptable, even in some circles required, way of responding to dissatisfactions with our birth body. Not comfortable with your “assigned” nose, tummy or thighs, penis or breast size or shape, the bags under your eyes, your aging body? Hey, no problem. Why not celebrate the right of a young teen who identifies as a boy to have “top surgery”to remove his/her breasts?
No doubt there are situations in which cosmetic surgery is a merciful and important tool. But there’s still a good argument to be made against many uses of it—something about playing the cards you’re dealt– and I hope some of us are making it.
The new law permitting freedom in gender matters is a good thing as are all laws banning discrimination. But, that said, it should be recognized that in part the trans movement seems against not just people being trapped in the wrong package, but against limits in general. The wise parental advice is that simply being born into one or the other of the traditional categories of body is not in itself a bad thing, even if no doubt inconvenient at times. Finally the meaning of life goes deeper than style or preference, that it comes in working within and with limits, not from an illusion of limitlessness. (Assignment to our species can itself be mighty confining.)
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