Actually pretty interesting. I think we're starting to creep up on the actual numbers, as far as you can measure such a thing. I think comphet keeps a lot of people who would otherwise fall somewhere on the bi/pan spectrum from ever experimenting and realizing it about themelves, and I bet that population is actually quite large. As far as transness goes, I would be willing to believe a number within the realm of ~3% to even 5%. I think further complicating this whole thing is that human sexuality and gender identity is a lot more nebulous than the very rigid, medically-originated terminology we use implies. A lot of the identity labels we use (homosexual, transsexual/transgender, etc) were originally medical diagnoses that were later transposed onto cultural identities, which carries a lot of baggage that I think has been left unaddressed, such as the rigidity of their definition, but that's probably for a post for another time. Anyway, just thought it was neat neat, especially the state queerness leaderboards.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [S] 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Oh no, I shouldn't have said anything, you might be waiting a long time because I'm lazy as hell catgirl-flop

I also don't feel like it's a fully cooked up thought so I am hesitant to share but the tl;dr is basically that it's very hard not to notice that in pretty much every other culture in human history that the people we would today call transgender were integrated into society (because some cultures rejected us, but a lot did not) were given names/roles that were grounded within their culture, typically related to religion. This has been the "natural" state of trans people for most of our history until we get to what could very broadly be described as "Western culture" and the scientific revolution. Starting in the mid/late 1800s, medical scientists began probing the concepts of human sex, sexuality, and gender identity, and began studying queer people as medical subjects. Skipping over a LOT of history here, but eventually we arrive at terms like homosexuality and transvestite (which then is replaced by transsexual, which then much later is (mostly) replaced with transgender). These originated as medical diagnoses, which come with the implication of very strict and rigid boundaries like most other scientific terminology. Because of a tremendous amount of reasons I'm sure, but chief among them the lack of organization among the queer community before this transpired, these terms became identity terms. The baggage I'm referring to is that identity is very nebulous, and even fluid, and these terms are not. There were some attempts to create culturally grounded terms (see: Uranian, Eonism, and to a lesser extent Trans-sensible for examples, I have been meaning to make a trans mega about these), but they never caught on. So we end up with terminology that feels clunky and awkward for the role they're filling. For an example of a "culturally grounded" term, think lesbian or sapphic! If anyone passing by doesn't know, lesbian derives from the name for the Agean island of Lesbos, where the extremely gay poet Sappho lived, from which we get the term sapphic. For genders outside man and woman, it gets real bad (in my opinion at least). Nonbinary is a fucking awful term because it's just a negation of the binary gender system (which is made up, which is a whole other can of worms because gender was invented in an attempt to save binary sex from conceptual collapse, see Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson), and it just sound awful (though "enby" ain't that bad). In the words of sexologist Dr. Havelock Ellis, these terms "... even if acceptable as a descriptive term, still remains one of those hybrid Greco-Latin compounds which it is best to avoid." (I'll give a real citation if I make this a real post but he said it in Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies, page 28.)

I guess I'll split off from that run-on paragraph to conclude that the other problem with all this is that transgender is actually a fantastic term for the phenomenon itself, but we're unfortunately in a situation where that is also the term for the "Western" expression of it, which makes applying that term to other cultures and times problematic to varying extents. Anyway, I guess that's not so much of a tl;dr but it's my unorganized, half-baked thoughts on the matter. Some day I'll sign up for a few trans megas and yap in a much more coherent way about all this.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • it's very hard not to notice that in pretty much every other culture in human history that the people we would today call transgender were integrated into society (because some cultures rejected us, but a lot did not) were given names/roles that were grounded within their culture, typically related to religion.

    Or to sex work, begging, or to positions where us not being able to start a dynasty after an orchi was seen as politically advantageous. What a lot of these roles share is that gender variant people were relegated to a role that was in some ways removed from society at large. That does not mean we were always relegated to the margins, and being on the margins could mean something like "living on the outskirts of the village as a feared but respected shaman", but that was still a form of othering. Most of the societies that recognized there are more than cis men and cis women still were patriarchal, that is something that just arises very frequently from divisions of reproductive labor and patrilinear transfer of wealth. Western society was just uniquely fucked up in how it treated divergence from such a division by total erasure. Having 3, 5 or more genders still means they can be fit into some sort of restrictive superstructure that facilitates extraction of their labor, and they frequently are.

    The third gendering inherent in these categories is also something not all trans people are comfortable with. Serrano has an entire chapter about transmisogyny from terfy cis anthropologists in Whipping Girl. As fitting as it sounds that my orchi would qualify me to be a huge dork advising the political class, i do have a certain problem with that being my only option when that class is the imperial court of pre-revolutionary China and i would also really object to being called a eunuch instead of my friends calling me a hot milf, my neutrals calling me a woman and my enemies calling me a horrible, wretched, man-hating and venom-spewing witch, so i'm with Serrano on that. And there are people in communities in the global south that reject labels like hijra or muxe and prefer trans woman. I get that it's a double edged sword in many ways, i get that we need to keep the constructivism angle in mind and also have to be mindful of the postcolonial and exorsexist pitfalls that can come from projecting our ideas of transness onto other cutures, but i honestly do not think it's up to me to tell an indiginous person not to use the same labels as i do just because there is a traditional label in their own culture. As with medical transitioning, always having the option is just a necessity for many of us even when it has historical baggage attached to it. The way forward is to remove that baggage, keep the parts that work for us and universalize access to them.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 12 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I am also patient and willing to wait catgirl-salute

    I see, though, I see. I'm aware of the concepts you discuss, (albeit I was baffled when I first saw "Uranian" anywhere) in fact a New-York-Times-bestselling author planted in my mind long ago that "transgender" is a term coined by the american CDC and is therefore scuffed as fuck. The medicalisation does make me frown a bit, although I also realise that it's probably at least 10% due to hormone replacement therapy as a medical thing, which is a recent development right? Not every day I see someone cite Jules Gil-Peterson though. Mostly this sounds like I have a lot (more) cool reading to do.

    gender was invented in an attempt to save binary sex from conceptual collapse,

    I know this but have never seen it put just like this, I think it rocks.

    Alright well good halfbaked post, thank you for posting. Very chill.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 9 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    [HRT] is a recent development right?

    Depends on how you define recent. The earliest studies on the effects of "cross-sex" hormones happened over a century ago. I think there was some stuff done before him, but the big name in that area was an Austrian doctor named Eugen Steinach. In the early 1900s/1910s he experimented with implanting rats and guinea pigs with ovaries (into males) and testes (into females) and observed the corresponding physical and behavior changes. Sex hormones had not been isolated at this point, so it was only understood that these sex organs contained what they termed "glandular juices" which was having these effects. In 1923 he produced Der Steinachfilm (trans. The Steinach Film) which, along with a 68 page pamphlet published in 1920, popularized his discoveries to the lay public. These results were interpreted in some crank ways, like the belief among some people, including Steinach himself, that homosexuality could be "cured" by giving gay men a testicular implant to boost their "male glandular juices" (testosterone), but the trans implications were picked up by other people.^[Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, (Random House, 2014), 173-175.] Apparently a trans woman read about these developments and wanted the prodecure for herself, quoting from Gay Berlin with editted pronouns,

    The pamphlet was mentioned by one young [woman] who wrote [sexologist Magnus] Hirschfeld in 1920—a rare surviving letter preserved at the Kinsey Institute—explaining that [she] was "more woman than man." This correspondent also described that [she] had just had the chance to read about "the book about artificial rejuvenation and sex change," a clear reference to Steinach. The promise of hormone therapy inspired [her] to write Hirschfeld: "[W]ould it not perhaps be possible to remove my testicles and in their place insert an ovary, and then in this fashion I could become a complete woman. . . . I trust you completely Herr Dr., and perhaps I could serve science as an important experiment." Included in this missive was a small photograph of [the woman in women's clothing].^[Ibid., 175]

    There are other reports of people receiving a very primitive version of HRT around this time as well. In 1916 a 36 year old person known only as "Herr. A" in the historical record approached a Berlin doctor named Max Marcuse about an orchiectomy and hormone treatment. Marcuse denied the request for surgery on the grounds that he deemed the patient mentally ill, but gave them an unspecified "ovarian preparation" which seemed to calm their distress. One of the first surgical sex reassignments was undertaken in stages over the course of 1920-1921 on a 23 year old military officer. They received an orchiectomy, a primitive sort of vulvoplasty while keeping the penis intact, and an implanted ovary for hormone treatment. Though this person later requested the reversal of some of these surgical procedures and then lived out the rest of their life as a man.^[Ibid., 176-177]

    According to Julian Gill-Peterson, synthetic hormones were available in the United States by the mid-1930s, though trans people's access to them were obviously extremely difficult, if not impossible, though not for a lack of trying. Gill-Peterson relates a story of a trans man known to us only as "Bernard" who was well read in the sexological developments of the time and attempted to convince doctors at John Hopkins Hospital that he was actually intersex and needed surgery and hormones to "correct" his supposed birth defect. Unfortunately he was ultimately unsuccessful, though he did manage to fool the first doctor he saw, but that doctor sought a second opinion and Bernard's ploy was seen through by the second one.^[Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 83-85.] So that all said, the most primitive forms of HRT have been around for just over a century now, and synthetic HRT has been possible but not nessicarily available since roughly the middle last century. I don't have any citation for this but I remember hearing way back in the day that spironolactone was originally prescribed as a blood pressure medication for men in the 1950s until they all started growing breasts because of its anti-androgen effects. So the past 70 or 80 years have mostly been about increasing access moreso than novel developments in HRT.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Yeah 19th century is what I mean by "recent", as in there weren't people in ancient Greece or whatever doing the horse urine thing. Relatively new.

    Some of this early stuff I'd heard of from looking into Lili Elbe and related things, but... damn I'd never heard about that 23yo military officer, that's unusual lore. The story of "Bernard" is also new to me. Ty for the info, I had Gay Berlin on my TBR but not Histories of the Transgender Child.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] [S] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    If you want to bend the definition to include orchiectomies then gender-bendy people have been doing those in religious rituals across all sorts of cultures since the Bronze Age or even earlier. Those people must've been fucking gnarly to just tank that kind of pain without modern opiods or anesthesia. Our trans ancestors were of a different breed, I can't even imagine.

    Anyway, always glad to share trans history! Truly, we have always been here, and I desperately wish more people knew that.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    or genders outside man and woman, it gets real bad (in my opinion at least). Nonbinary is a fucking awful term because it's just a negation of the binary gender system

    we don't have cultural associations for specific additional genders, and we may never collect enough enough people of the same kind of nonbinary to develop one. I'm not even convinced all of us agenders are sharing an interiority.

    one thing we could do is balkanize the binary but the social inertia of it all would make it like how blowing up the moon would give you a pile of rubble where the moon used to be instead of giving the earth a ring.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 days ago*

    Yeah I guess I should've added that I don't really see a fix for this problem, it's just something I've noticed. For better or for worse, nonbinary is the term for third and beyond genders, at least at legal level in the US. We're kind of stuck with it unless a drastic change in the culture happens or something along those lines. The real time to have solidified other terms was roughly the period between 1870-1930 when the medical terminology and categories were being worked out. Queer people would've had to have organized a unified front and hammered this stuff out, but the community basically didn't exist or was extremely fragmented at that point. Ironically these medical terms, particulary for trans people, are what helped trans people discover that there were others like them and gave them language to rally around. So I'm not saying it's all bad, and I've certainly benefitted tremendously from gender affirming care. It's just an unfortunate historical consequence that I don't see people talk about is all.

  • source
  • parent