Monthly Archives: May 2008

From Julia Serano’s website:

subconscious sex

A subconscious, intrinsic, self-understanding that all people experience regarding their own sex embodiment. Cissexuals tend not to notice or appreciate their own subconscious sex because it is concordant with their physical sex (and therefore they tend to conflate for two). In contrast, trans people tend to be excruciatingly aware of their subconscious sex (as it is at odds with their physical sex). Trans people most often describe their subconscious sex as an intrinsic, inexplicable, deeply felt understanding that there is something “wrong” with the sex they were born into, or that they should be (or wish they could become) the other sex.

That nicely sums up some of my more current theories about myself.  Namely, I don’t feel like I have any sort of gender trouble whatsoever.  I’ve never had a particular attachment to any gender identity; my gender expression hasn’t changed in any meaningful way since I was first able to pull on my own shirt.  I was no more or less fine being treated as female than I am being treated as male–which is to say, I think that the social roles that men and women are expected to occupy are largely bullshit, and I intend to ignore them completely, except to challenge misogyny where I find it.

That’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed lately–that the trans people I know haven’t changed, and don’t intend to change, their gender expressions.  As a female-assigned person, people saw me as fairly “masculine”.  These days I’m perceived as an adequately (if not particularly) masculine man.

I’ve noticed that I’ve tended to describe my experience as “body dysphoria” rather than “gender dyshoria”.  My gender is still pretty stable–it doesn’t amount to much of anything, and I don’t really care too much one way or another.  But mybody is the problem, because my very visceral sense of myself, and of my internal rightness, is male.  My embodiment feels wrong.

I definitely can’t say that I wouldn’t have a problem if I had a male body but continued to be treated as a woman.  But that’s only because people aren’t treated as women for the hell of it–they’re treated as women because their bodies are perceived as female.  And for my dysphoria to be mitigated, I feel like I need to perceive my own body as male, and have other people treat my body as male..