Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On by Christine Benvenuto

Author:Christine Benvenuto [Benvenuto, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Family, GLBT, Marriage, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Relationships, Transgender
ISBN: 9781250018618
Google: woCwapsmJiIC
Amazon: 1250031605
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

TRANSWORLD

Once upon a time, I had no interest in “gender issues.” In my retro, Edenic worldview, I was content to divvy up human beings—at least, human bodies—into two neat categories. I knew not everyone fit the categories and felt vaguely sorry for their affliction. I had no particular curiosity to know more. When I was forced to accept the presence of transsexuality in my life, I felt that understanding it with my head wasn’t really going to help with what was happening in my gut. Actually, I was right about that. It didn’t help. After a while, I realized I’d better understand it as well as I could anyway. Raising three children who didn’t have the luxury of avoiding this terrain demanded it.

The literature on transsexuality is limited and contradictory and often seems to reflect the biases of those turning it out more than any sort of data. I had to overcome a considerable reluctance to delve into it. Which is a nice way of saying that once I was forced to think about Tracy in these terms, any reference to men in skirts made me feel faint. As faint as Tracey said he felt when not wearing them. To this day, a Scot in a kilt makes me a teensy bit queasy.

When I did take a look at the material on transsexuality, I brought three basic questions to my inquiry: What did it mean that Tracey felt he was the wrong gender? What had caused this mind-body disconnect? And, oh yeah—What exactly is gender?

Transgender is an umbrella term used to cover an array of gender stances. These genderful days, there are almost as many designations as there are transpeople. “If someone calls himself a tranny boy,” commented G, a transgendered activist I spoke with, “first of all what the heck does that mean? If two people use the term, it probably means two different things.” To name just three transgender subcategories: There are cross-dressers, formerly known as transvestites, people who don’t want to change their bodies but who dress up as the gender they aren’t for a miscellany of reasons from political shock value to sexual stimulation. There are gender-queer people who don’t feel they fit solidly into either the male or the female half of the great divide. And there are transsexuals, people such as Tracey who feel they were born in the wrong body. A transsexual identifies as the gender that doesn’t match his or her body—sexuality is an independent issue. That’s something a lot of people have trouble grasping. When friends heard that Tracey had proudly announced to my children that he was a lesbian, there was a lot of laughter and eye rolling. Some people reacted with a kind of outraged bewilderment. As one person expressed this (heterosexist!) view, “Why does he want to be a woman unless it’s to be with a man?”

No one knows what causes someone to develop a sense of him- or herself as male or female in contrast with the evidence of anatomy.

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