She's Not THAT Different: Gender Identity-Part 3

When I was 14, I went on vacation with my parents to California. We visited San Francisco and while walking through a plaza we passed a person sitting on a bench. I’m not even sure I would have noticed, but my parents were obviously looking at this person.

I recall my mother saying something along the lines of “oh mercy.” At first glance it appeared to be a woman, then after a second, it became very obvious it was a man dressed as a woman. (Those of you following these posts now know it’s way more complex than that!) But it didn’t bother me the way it did my parents. I found it to be exciting – the reason you go on vacation in the first place, to get out of your ordinary routine daily element and see what’s out there in the world. And growing up in a small town of 5,000 people in southeast Arkansas, I can tell you I never got much real world exposure.

I wanted to include an interview in this blog project. I’d been familiar with Jami Ward of Houston from her comments on other blogs and via her own blog: Not THAT Different.

I approached her about 2 months ago with this interview proposal and she cheerfully accepted the offer. So, without further ado, off we go:

“Transgender is a term that came into usage a decade ago and covers cross-dressers, transsexuals and others whose outward appearance doesn't match their gender at birth.”

I found that sentence in a recent newspaper article. I’d first like to get some clarification on cross-dressers. I didn’t realize they were included under the trans banner. I thought cross-dressers just had a fetish for wearing women’s clothing as opposed to having a gender identity issue. After all, there are lots of married men who secretly wear women’s clothing occasionally. Jami, in your opinion, are they part of the trans community?

Yes, I do because it’s my opinion – backed up by nothing but completely unscientific personal experience – that crossdressers are just transsexuals who haven’t learned to tell themselves the truth. A lot of transsexuals start by telling themselves they’re “just crossdressers”. Ultimately, that turns out to be an inaccurate assessment of their gender identity. Also, not all crossdressers dress up for fetishistic reasons, although some do; some of them genuinely feel more comfortable that way, some of them dress as a stress relief or coping mechanism, some do it to escape from everyday expectations placed on men that they aren’t able to deal with. But essentially, anyone whose gender and sex don’t match in the manner that society prescribes should probably be included in the “transgender” category.

I actually have known a few drag queens. I lived with a guy in Little Rock who could do an amazing Grace Jones – and he was white! He had friends who were regular drag queens at the gay bar and they would sometimes come over to get dressed up at our house. But I learned very little about why they enjoyed doing that – I was a little too preoccupied with my own coming out at the time.

This may sound like a silly question, but I honestly don’t know the answer. What’s the difference between a cross-dresser and a drag queen? Is it that one is ashamed of it and the other proud, but they do it for the same reasons?

Well, drag queens are usually a lot more out front about dressing up in women’s clothes, but I know a great many crossdressers who aren’t ashamed of it at all. Typically, drag queens are gay and dress as women for show business. Crossdressers are typically straight and dress as women because that’s how they feel they should look … sometimes. And yes, there are exceptions to everything, so there are straight drag queens who might not be in show business and gay crossdressers who are.

Just no straight ones doing Streisand! I understand now that sexual orientation is a separate issue from one’s gender, but what I find interesting is that there are as many variations of sexual orientation in the trans world (that sounds like I’m talking about an airline) as there are in the rest of society. Until I started really thinking about all this, I just assumed transsexuals were homosexuals with gender issues, and with the occasional heterosexual thrown in for good measure.

Can the straight ones do Judy Garland then? Seriously, sex, sexuality and gender are three distinct things that our society tends to just lump all together. Sex is between your legs but the other two are between your ears.

My very simplistic explanation of the differences goes like this: sex is the plumbing you have (whether it came with the house or was installed later), sexuality is how you want to use that plumbing and gender is how you want to decorate the bathroom. So, a person can have a penis, prefers sex with men and looks and acts like a woman. It’s a real mix and match world and just because someone has a vagina does not mean that they want to have sex with men or identify as a woman.

That’s an excellent explanation! This is far deeper than most people realize. I never doubted I was male, but it took me awhile to come to terms with the fact that I was attracted to other males, and not women. I can’t even imagine what goes on in the mind of someone who is equally certain they were born into the wrong sex.
Did that realization also create any confusion for you about which sex you were attracted to?

I’ve known that something was wrong with my body since I was very young and it really came to the forefront when I hit puberty. I knew that I was attracted to girls, but I also knew that I wanted to be a girl and that I was attracted to boys, too. Yeah, I was a pretty confused kid for a long time, but I now think a large part of that was ignorance. I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going in my head because I had no references, again because of the way our society lumps all those things together. Thankfully, I think that today things are a lot better with the wide dissemination of information, but it can still be confusing for young people.

Jami, how old were you when you were first aware that something wasn’t quite right? Tell us some of the thoughts you were having.

I was probably 8 or 9 when it started to really dawn on me that I wasn’t a girl. My friends were all girls, I didn’t like to do a lot (but not all) of the “boy” things and I realized that my solitary imaginings – which included flying a personal rocket ship and growing up to be a beautiful woman like my mother - weren’t really going to come to be. I struggled with that realization but sadly came to understand that that’s just how the world operated. No rocket ship, no breasts, no dresses for me. Then when I hit puberty and realized that I was sexually attracted to both men and women, I learned to lie. I lied about wanting to kiss boys and I lied about the fact that “wanting to get into her pants” had an entirely different meaning for me. I lied to myself for a long time about my being anything other than a red-blooded, heterosexual juvenile delinquent boy who chased girls.

I’m convinced that transgendered people are the best liars because they have learned to lie to themselves and to make themselves believe it. Other people are easy to lie to once you master that.

I can certainly understand confusion growing up. When I was about 12 or 13 I kissed my girlfriend for the first time and really enjoyed it. I had a boyfriend at the same time and we were quite active sexually, but had never kissed. As it turned out, my “girlfriend” was a lesbian, and I often joke about the fact on blogs that all the girls I were “attracted” to were lesbians.

I am assuming you went the “full distance,” with the surgery, to correct your sex? Can you give us a brief chronology of events leading up to that?

I’ll start by asking if you generally question other people about their genitals. Like, “How big around is your dick? Are you circumcised? Does your pussy have big lips? What does it smell like?” and so on. Most transgendered people don’t feel that their genitalia are a subject for public discussion, any more than non-transgendered
people do.

Fair enough. That’s quite understandable. Let me rephrase. I guess my understanding of this is clouded from watching that Sundance Channel documentary called Trans Generation. It was very educational and I found the process leading up to the surgery to be quite lengthy and torturous, as well as explicit, but those people did volunteer to be on national television. Not everyone would want to expose such a private part of their life. Could you summarize for us in non-personal generic terms, that process, the counseling required, etc.?

THE surgery involves the creation of a functional vagina and labia for someone born with a penis and is often referred to as Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) or Gender Realignment Surgery (GRS). (My personal preference for the term is Genital Rearrangement Surgery, which is still GRS but more indicative of the process, I think.) Now, that’s just for those born male who wish to transition to a female gender identity and genitalia. For those born as females who want male genitalia, surgical construction of a penis isn’t very advanced … yet. There’s a long, standardized approach that leads up to surgery that involve examination, diagnosis, counseling and therapy by specified medical professionals.

Nowadays, though, there are more and more folks in the trans community who disagree (some strongly) with letting a group composed largely of heterosexual, male, white, cisgendered shrinks dictate which hoops have to be jumped through in order to finally be "certified" for surgery. Yes, the group that revises the Benjamin Standards (Google it) now has some diversity on the panel but the feeling still remains that we're not psychopaths who need to be looked after or to have a "gatekeeper" to keep us from hurting ourselves.

Exactly! I do remember sensing some of that frustration in the documentary series.

One of the big problems I have with the right-wing arguments about same sex marriage is all the constant “marriage is between a man and a woman” crap. One of the reasons I have never had a problem with the concept of transexuality is because I don’t believe anyone is either 100% male or 100% female because gender is not exclusively a physical attribute. Like a unique fingerprint, each person had a unique different mix. But this view of mine also contributes to an opinion I have had in the past about people who make that choice to have corrective surgery.
Obviously it would be easier to just cross-dress, live your life as a woman, despite the presence of the incorrect genitalia. Do you agree with that assessment?

Simply cross-dressing probably wouldn’t be sufficient to alleviate the gender/sex mismatch that transgendered people experience, although it might be enough for some. How much more than just wearing clothes of the opposite gender IS sufficient obviously is going to vary widely. There will most likely be some modifications to one’s body in order to make it conform more to the internal image of what it should be. These modifications typically include taking hormones (estrogen or testosterone) and cosmetic surgical alterations (facial feminization, hair implants, mastectomy, etc.).

Also, as I mentioned before, for Female-to-Male (FtM) transsexuals, the surgical science of constructing a functional penis really isn’t nearly as advanced as that for constructing a functional vagina/vulva for Male-to-Female (MtF) transsexuals. Most FtMs live without having GRS simply because it’s usually not available. For many MtFs, however, not having GRS is not a question; it’s a given that the surgery will happen because having “correct” genitalia – as well as all the other secondary sexual characteristics - is what’s necessary to bring sex and gender into congruence. I have MtF friends who have had GRS who identify as lesbians and are in committed relationships with other women. They never had any intention of using their female genitalia to have sex with men, but they still had GRS because that’s what they needed to make themselves right.

The bottom line is that it’s not about convenience or sex or anything else other than bringing the body into line with society’s perception (which is, let’s face it, the perception we all have) of what a male or female body should look like.

As for the right-wing definition of marriage as “one man, one woman”, the biggest monkey wrench in that particular machine is that so far we don’t have a legal definition of “Man” and “Woman” that encompasses all the forms and flavors that people are packaged in. Transsexuals are one of the most visible aspects of that, but there are also intersexed people and people whose chromosomes don’t necessarily fall in line with the standard “XX=woman, XY=man” definition. In order for a ban on same-sex marriage to stick, some governmental entity is going to have to define just what it is that legally defines one’s sex and do so in a manner that will be medically consistent with the myriad ways humans are built. In the long run, I think that the “man/woman” definition of marriage will fall apart for just that reason.

People just don’t fall into neat categories. Transsexuals who appear to all intents and purposes to be women yet who still have their original XY chromosomes in some jurisdictions can legally marry someone else who also appears to be a woman but who has XX chromosomes.

I like what you said about “society’s perception” of what a body should look like. Aside from the perception of what it should look like in its naked state, there’s the equally large perception of what it should look like in the “dressed” state which really is absurd. How long do you think it will take society to no longer care what clothes people are wearing – and assuming that happens, what impact would that have on gender identity, only in the sense of dressing more masculine or feminine? It seems to me the expression of gender through garment choices would just vanish.

Possibly, although I’m not sure of that. There are still way too many ways that women “dress up” that don’t involve clothes: hair, nails, makeup, jewelry, perfume, etc. There’s a relatively old thought exercise that asked the question, “What would a transgendered nudist wear?” My answer was mascara, lipstick, a great manicure and pedicure, gold sandals, a big red straw hat and a pint of sunscreen with maybe a dash of perfume.

Yes, without clothes none of the other things would be needed to know the sex of the person wearing them, but those things help in defining the gender of the person. Besides, if everyone dressed (or didn’t dress) alike, wouldn’t that be boring?

In the Catholic school uniform sense, most definitely!
I’m going to assume you have experienced some discrimination in your life. Tell us about that.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful! Seriously, I’ve not really experienced a LOT of discrimination, but there has been some. I’ve been called a faggot by a drunken teenager, I’ve had men look at me with disgust, and similar things but there has never been anything that I couldn’t deal with. Although both men and women have hit on me, I’ve never been physically attacked or assaulted. I don’t know if that’s because I carry myself with confidence, because I tend to avoid possibly dangerous situations, because I don’t look like a guy in a dress or simply because I’ve been lucky. There’s a possibility I got laid off a while back because I was starting to make some noise about a corporate non-discrimination and diversity policy and had started looking more than a little girly on the job, but I can’t prove that because I was not the only senior person who got laid off. To be honest, I’ve probably experienced more discrimination as a woman than as a transsexual.

That is quite a statement. It says a lot about being a woman. Do you have any insight into women crossdressing as men, and is there more to it than what I’m perceiving? What I mean is, I don’t really perceive anything because so many women wear “manly” clothes that society seems indifferent to it. And yet I’ve read that some women enjoy it and actively think of it as crossdressing.

I know a couple of drag kings and a number of FtM (Female to Male) transsexuals, and their desires to align their appearance and their gender identity pretty much parallel that of MtF transgendered folks. Let’s face it; it’s a whole lot easier for women to move into a masculine appearance in our society than vice-versa. If a woman doesn’t want to wear any makeup, have short hair, wear a flannel shirt, jeans and work boots, no one thinks much of it, other than to possibly start labeling her as “butch”. But if a man wants to wear makeup, high heels with a dress and have long hair and nails, the world comes to an end! So, there may be a lot more crossdressing women than men, but they’re simply not noticed as such. Also, when a transman starts taking testosterone, he quickly takes on all those physical attributes we associated with masculinity: a deeper voice, facial and body hair, muscle mass and baldness. They still have breasts and don’t get taller, though.

I know from previous discussions that you have kids. Were they from your current relationship or a prior marriage?

No, they’re adopted. I’ve been with the same woman for over 30 years and we wanted children, but despite years of trying we never had any biological kids. But our children ARE our children, and I cannot imagine loving them any more than I do just because we might not happen to share some DNA.

And what sort of challenges have you experienced in raising young children? Particularly with the 10-year-old?

My kids have always known me as their Daddy. They’ve also always only known me to be physically the way I am today with breasts and long hair and skinny eyebrows and all those other trappings. They simply accept the fact that I’m physically not the same as their friends’ Dads, but they also know that no two people are alike and that stereotypes are meant to be disproved. Some men are small, some women are large, etc. The main thing that they know is that I love them unconditionally. How I look is immaterial.

One thing I did want to delve into was your work situation, as well as how old you were when you finally said to hell with “men's”clothes.

In actuality, I never really did say good-bye to men's clothes entirely, although I don't really have very many left - socks, a couple of pairs of sneakers, a bunch of Hawaiian shirts, t-shirts. For my kid's sake, I wear something approaching "Daddy" clothes around the house: basically, jeans or pants (both women's) and a shirt (or shirt-y blouse) or t-shirt with sneakers or flip-flops. At work, it's usually something similar: a rather ambiguous look of pants, shirt, shoes, no makeup, simply because it's easier to get dressed in the morning that way and easier to pick up kids after work. I've gotten over being looked at strangely, and I still get addressed as "M'am" about 95% of the time when doing the "Is that a man or a woman?" androgynous look. But I clean up good, too, when I have to.

That’s hilarious. I just never even think about those things in male or female terms, per se. Socks?!
Actually, as far as men go, about the only thing I ever equate as being really manly is the business suit and some styles of shoes. But technically, I guess if they come out of the men’s department, they’re men’s clothes. I can visualize a scenario in which someone now will try to examine a woman (or man) in jeans to figure out if those jeans came from the men’s or women’s department in order to determine if you are trans!

Well, the socks came from the men’s department and I can tell you for certain that men’s and women’s pants and shirts are definitely built different. Underwear, too, now that I think of it. By the way, I used to do a whole seminar for transman called “Male Presentation”. I even transcribed my lecture notes and posted them on my blog some months back. If you’re interested it’s at male presentation.

I want to ask you about media, particularly films that involve gender identity. I saw “Victor/Victoria” when it first came out – primarily because I was a huge Julie Andrews fan, not so much for the subject matter. The film really appealed to me because at the time, while I wasn’t confused about my gender, I was still struggling with accepting my orientation, and that film really made me feel better about myself, because I didn’t have to deal with the added dimension of gender identity. Did
you see the film, and if so, what did you get from it?

I liked it but not as any sort of transgendered revelation film. Like “Some Like It Hot”, it was a comedy that happened to have crossdressing in it.

Are there any films out there that you could recommend which you believe accurately portray the struggles of someone who is transgendered?

Sure! I’ll offer up some other titles (in no particular order) without comment and just let you and others watch them (or look them up at imdb.com) when you can and make your own decisions. (These do not include, by the way, films that you find at the “Adult Video and Peep Show Emporium”.)

“Transamerica”, “Boys Don’t Cry”, “Different for Girls”, “Just Like a Woman”, “Southern Comfort”, “Ma Vie en Rose”, “The Crying Game”, “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”, “The World According to Garp”, “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Soldier’s Girl”, “A Girl Like
Me: The Gwen Araujo Story”, “Glen or Glenda”.

I’m sure there are more, but my brain has just run dry.

And we can’t forget “Trans Generation”. Anyone who could watch that series and not feel certain that the process is driven by biology is pretty hopeless in my opinion.

Yes, there's more and more evidence that there's a large biological component to being transgendered. It's a pretty strong drive to bring sex and gender into congruence, and as I alluded to before, I don’t think people who embark on this journey do so on a whim. We do it because we have to and we don’t really need someone else to decide if we’re worthy enough to make the trip.

In order to better inform those who are reading this, could you point us to a vocabulary or acronym list related to transsexuals?

Instead of turning this into a vocabulary lesson, how about I point you in the direction of some information on the Web? I’m pretty sure the folks reading this will have access.A good glossary can be found on The TSRoadmap.

Give me some other websites that provide good information on transexuality and I will be happy to link to them here. I did link to one in a post earlier this week,
the National Center for Transgender Equality. I just ran across it in doing some research.

I would recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on "Transgender" as a kind of starting point. It’ has some good links to other places. You might also want to go to another Wikipedia entry: List of Transgender-related topics.

I’d also recommend Susan’s Place as a another place to find all kinds of transgender links. And if that doesn’t overload folks, they can always just Google the term “Transgender”. I think that will get you like 20 million hits or more and that should keep you busy for a while.

I did a lot of research and I can vouch for that!

Jami, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. The sharing of your experiences as well as your insights are greatly appreciated.

Note from your blogmeister: I apologize for the varying fonts which appear in this post. I started out doing this interview in MS Word, saved as html, then cut and pasted the interview into Blogger. I've tried a number of times to get a consistent font to save prior to publishing and it just won't, so I give up.

It's not THAT distracting... is it?