Something that was important to learn growing up was organizational skills. Although there is a part of us that organizes categories in our head naturally, there are also the organization skills that are taught to us. Humans do this to help keep information organized mentally and to simplify the way we think of things. At first, you can’t think of any negative effects these organizations would have. If you step back and look, those organizations have become labels and now we live in a world run by labels. The first label we take on is the label of our sex from the moment of birth and from then on the labels flow freely through our society with intent to help us “better understand” the world. More recently I think a few of us have had a conflict with labels diminishing our understanding as opposed to actually aiding our understanding the topics we have recently discussed.
The term “transgender” was discussed in class for an entire class period and most of us were still trying to unravel the meaning. Now think about this: we are a part of an educated community and we actually study the meaning of phrases such as “transgender” and we struggle understanding it fully. How informed to you think the more general public is? Not very. Valentine focused a lot on gender being how a person visually looks in regards to what they wear, their hairstyle, and the way they carry themselves. After discussing what gender is my own definition is: gender is determined by the person’s feelings of femininity or masculinity and they choose which characteristics they will take on based on the feelings they have about themselves. The part I don’t fully understand is when we fulfill our gender, part of that is filling the stereotypical roles that gender would have. An example is: a biological male feels “he” is a “she”. To portray that “she” feels this way “she” would perhaps dress in feminine clothes, grow “her” hair longer, perhaps take hormones etc. So they just take on a different stereotype/label. (I put the pronouns above in quotations so the reader could follow what I meant, but Serano notes that society has a problem with the use of pronouns with transgendered people.)
The transgendered umbrella term used in Valentine (37) keeps the definition so wide open that it shouldn’t even be considered a definition. While discussing Valentine’s work in class my group had come up with so many situations that we have encountered and labeling the situation “correctly” made our heads spin. I actually caught myself saying “that blows my mind”. Here’s an example: Born a biological female, dresses and is perceived as a “preppy” male, sounds like a male, identifies being a girl, loves being a girl, and id attracted to girls. WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND THAT and start trying to label the situation. It seems funny that something that was supposed to help organization in out head is only causing a problem in this circumstance. Who is the one to determine the final label of what you really are anyway?
Serano said “to be male is to have something and to be female is to not have” (240). This is probably the most off-the-wall connection I could make but, my roommates and I were on the dominoes website ordering pizza the other night and when you click the toppings menu the categories were “Meats” and “Non-Meats”. So you could either have meat on your pizza or the absence of meat. Like I said, it is a weird connection to make but never-the-less it is exactly how Serano believed our sex was organized. Labels have good intentions but when dissected, labels can certainly cause more confusion than organization.
Our world is definitely made up of many different labels. Every type of category you could possibly think of has a number of subcategories to be labeled underneath. I like comparison of the meat vs. the non meat pizza, as if meat is the way to go, but I guess you could have a vegetarian pizza if you really wanted to. The hard part about transgender, especially the way that Valentine referred to it, is that you're really not supposed to define it. I'm still struggling with the definition too, and it would probably take more then the two class periods we spent on it to understand it fully. Either way, I absolutely know more than i did before.
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