Again let me remind you, gentle reader, that this has not been updated in any way from when it was originally published more than ten years ago!
Before we can talk about 'gender identity' and 'transgender' you need to know how I use the words sex, gender and sexuality. (By the way, I am not very fond of the term transgender as an identity label because it is a word modeled after transsexual, and gender never has had the clear definition that people once thought sex had. But transgender is the word people use, so I will use it here.)
Sex is those biological, physical things one can see; internal and external organs, chromosomes, and hormone levels. These things do not always line up along strictly male or female lines, as is attested by the existence of a significant number of intersexed people, but biology is what most people are talking about when they say a person is female or male.
Gender is observable behavior; what gives rise to the idea that men and women think, feel, talk, react, play sports, nurture children, et cetera, in fundamentally different ways called masculine and feminine. Though this is a pervasive belief, everyone knows that exceptions are easy to find to any and all of these behaviors. Still, these stereotypes are taught and reinforced constantly from birth.
Sexuality is biological, behavioral, and political; to whom one is attracted, who in turn finds one attractive, and what one does about the attraction, is complex and for most people changes over the course of their lives. Terms such as heterosexual and homosexual are relatively recent inventions and are more prescriptive than they are descriptive of actual human sexual practice over a lifetime. The bottom line is that people simply are sexual.
Somewhat loosely we use male/female to denote sex, masculine/feminine to denote gender, and man/woman to denote the social role expected of masculine males and feminine females. Sexuality is assumed to be male/masculine/man paired with female/feminine/woman. The extreme effort with which the culture tries to teach that this is right and anything else is wrong indicates just how tenuous this model actually is.
We usually are not aware of the biology or the sexuality of the people with whom we interact each day. But we are very much aware of the gender of the people in our lives. The single most important thing to determine about a person we meet for the first time is their gender. We try to make this determination within seconds. (Try going through a day being conscious of doing this, and try to figure out why you peg each person as feminine or masculine. Be aware that sometimes your gender judgment is subtly at odds with your feelings about a person's biology or social role.)
Why is it critical that we immediately determine a person's gender? Until we do, we don't know how to address them, what to think of their clothes, what jokes to tell, whether it is okay to find them attractive, and a hundred other things. It is almost impossible to interact with another person in a non-gendered manner, and most people would find the attempt insulting and rude.
The store clerk does not need to know the shape of your genitals. But the clerk will be confused if it isn't obvious whether to use Madam or Sir when addressing you. The clerk may ignore you, make fun of you, or call the police if your gender is not clear.
The notion of transgender is based on the idea that a person's sex (male or female) determines their gender, social role, and sexuality, conflating the latter three into a simplistic identity called gender. So a cross-dresser (trans-vestite) tries to temporarily disguise their sex, act and dress like the opposite gender, and pretend to be in the opposite social and sexual role. A trans-sexual person does all that and also seeks to modify their body to make the change permanent and justified. The reality is nowhere near so simple and tidy.
One may cross dress to a lesser or greater degree. Social conventions are such that crossing in the female to masculine direction is more difficult to do in a manner that is seen as crossdressing. When an explicit sexual component is added, crossdressing becomes drag, which has a long history in theater and entertainment, often with a homoerotic connotation.
Most people who keep their eyes open are aware of a current or historical person who, upon mischance or death, was found to have been living a gender role other than the one assigned them at birth. (The jazz musician Billy Tipton is one of the more recent well known instances). Most of these historical figures have lived without hormones or surgery, and it is difficult to fit them into our current categories (which is itself an interesting comment on our current categories). Most of these people have been female-bodied persons living as men, which is easier to do successfully without body modification than the other way around, and has probably been done quite a bit more than most people think.
Transsexuality was invented in the twentieth century as differences from culturally taught sex, gender and sexuality became medical problems with medical solutions. The term itself denotes the idea that one's total identity must be congruent with one's genitals, that one is not truly a woman/man until one loses/gains a penis (has 'the surgery') and so can have 'heterosexual' relations in one's 'new' role.
Gender and role are not at all symmetrical in society, so it should be no surprise that people going in the two directions transsexually have little in common. There seem to be about as many people going in each direction, but transmen have been made all but invisible in most contexts.
The cliché of rugged man transforming into stacked babe is what the media push as the image of transsexuality. This image has some basis in the attempts of some MTF people to first drown their feelings in ultra-masculine activities or careers, and then way overshoot to the sexpot cliché extreme when they do transition.
Going the MTF route can include dieting, electrolysis, hormones, various cosmetic surgeries, and genital reconstruction surgery. Many people feel that 'having the surgery' and 'becoming a girl' is the goal of the process, though the everyday visible aspects of gender are much more important to a person's long term success and happiness in whatever social role they pursue.
In the FTM direction, breast reduction surgery is often critical to being able to pass, hormones usually have a swift and dramatic effect, and many FTMs go no further with body modifications. Castration (hysterectomy) for an FTM is major, expensive surgery; for an MTF castration (orchiectomy) is an outpatient or office procedure. Genital cosmetic surgery for the two are worlds apart.
MTF genital surgery is widely available for as little as $10,000 and is done in one or two surgeries. The result can be cosmetically very good, and orgasmic ability may be retained. Crudely put, the penis is emptied and pushed inside-out into a newly created body cavity. Lifelong dilation is required to keep the cavity large enough to receive a penis during sex. A number of complications are possible.
FTM genital surgery is much more difficult. The best result seems to be achieved through accepting the hormonally enlarged clitoris as a small penis, freed with a little surgery. If hysterectomy has been performed, the vaginal opening can be closed, and a scrotum fashioned around prosthetic testes. When one embarks on rerouting the urethra into the clitoris, or actually trying to construct a larger penis from skin taken from other sites on the body, one takes a serious risk of failure, loss of orgasmic ability, and many complications. It is easy to spend upwards of $100,000 on breast reduction, hysterectomy, and genital surgery (easy if one has the money, that is).
I hope it is now clear that there is no single procedure by which one may 'change sex;' that there is not in fact really any such thing as 'sex change surgery.' A transsexual person makes what changes they can and need make in the myriad of details by which each of us is pegged as man or woman. No two people follow exactly the same path.
Anyone who modifies their body to live out their gender and role is not doing so on a lark. This is serious, agonizing, life threatening necessity. Every transsexual person I know has weighed suicide as an alternative.
Is body modification itself so radical? I have before me an advertisement from a local lifestyles magazine. There is a photo of a woman wearing a bikini, her arms crossed under her ample breasts. The surrounding text reads, "I could have worn padded swimsuits. I could have learned to live with what I had. I had breast enlargement surgery instead." We cannot see this person's chromosomes, hormone history, genitals, or sexual feelings, but we all know what we're supposed to assume, right?
How transgender people see themselves is one thing, how they are seen by other folks is something else. When Transexual Menace (www.camptrans.org) staged a protest at the Michigan Womyns Music Festival to make a point about who qualifies for entry as a womyn, furious politics erupted.
Though one often sees the acronym GLBT, and recently GLBTI, these days, the folks denoted by those letters are a long way from being cozy with one another. G and L and B are anchored in a binary, biological definition of sex and tangled in the traditional implications of gender. Queer is breaking away from all that, and queer is where many trans (and intersex) people place themselves.
This sex/gender/sexuality stuff is a long way from being sorted out. Expect things to keep changing for quite a while.
Masculine to male, feminine to female, I-don't-know to what-the-heck. Many trans folk don't see sex, gender, and social role the way mainstream folks do. The label is not important; getting to a place of comfort so you can stop thinking about slitting your wrists is the thing.
Trans is not about men trying to be women or women trying to be men, it's about people being who they feel they truly are, reacting to other people and the messages of our culture in the way that works best for them. Short-haired women and long-haired men; men who use cosmetics, women who don't; men who stay home with the kids, women who drive trucks; people who do not let the prescriptive gender norms of the culture dictate how they live their lives.
Transgender is not simple. The only people I know who make a list of terms like crossdresser, butch, nellie, drag king, drag queen, femme, sissy, tomboy, transgenderist, transsexual and try to define them are people who don't know what they're talking about. Those words weren't thought up by trans people, those words were thought up by people who are scared of trans people. Sure, we've taken some of those terms as our own, but who we are is simply ourselves. So listen to us for a change.
The view that I present here of sex, gender, sexuality, social role and transgender is not the only view you can find on the 'net.
These are a few of my favorite books about gender identity. As you can see by the publication dates, this is a new field.
Kate Bornstein. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest Of Us. 1994. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90897-3. "I know I'm not a man—about that much I'm very clear, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people's rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other—a world that doesn't bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is."
Phyllis Burke. Gender Shock: Exploding The Myths of Male and Female. 1996. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-47718-X. "Looking through three lenses of gender identity—behavior, appearance, and science—Burke challenges the notion that men and women are from different planets."
Patrick Califia. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. 1997. ISBN 1-57344-072-8. Cleis Press, P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco CA 94114. "Who would you be if you had never been punished for gender-inappropriate behavior, or seen another child punished for deviation from masculine or feminine norms, or participated in dishing out such punishment?"
Loren Cameron. Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits. 1996. Cleis Press. ISBN 1-57344-062-0. "For the longest time, transsexuals and especially transsexual men (female-to-males) have been virtually invisible to the dominant culture. ... Body Alchemy is the first photodocumentation of transsexual men from within our community."
Jason Cromwell. Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders & Sexualities. 1999. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06825-4. A wonderful, myth-shattering, outspoken, truthful, honest, open exploration of the lives and experiences of transmen (and other transpeople). Not quite as good as having a few transmen in your life, but the next best thing.
Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. 1998. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-08927-8. "...takes us inside the doctors' chambers to see how and why medical and scientific men constructed sex, gender, and sexuality as they did."
Anne Fausto-Sterling. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. 2000. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-07713-7. An important book for understanding why we think about sex, gender and sexuality the way we do, and why we seem to find evidence to support our assumptions. (See also, "The Five Sexes, Revisited," the emerging recognition that people come in bewildering sexual varieties is testing medical values and social norms, in The Sciences, July/August 2000, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp 18-23.)
Kris Kleindienst, Ed. This Is What Lesbian Looks Like: Dyke Activists Take On The 21st Century. 1999. Firebrand Books. ISBN 1-56341-116-4. It's way past time to drive a stake through the heart of the elitist, separatist, supremacist thought that has characterized too much of gay and lesbian politics at the end of the 20th century. Some of this material dates back to the early nineties, so this book is also a record of a change that is taking place at the grassroots level and only now is affecting "the movement" in large visible ways.
Kate More & Stephen Whittle, Eds. Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle. 1999. Cassell. ISBN 0-304-33776-5. A collection of thirteen essays by trans writers who refuse to see gender through male/female glasses and who see much more to sexuality than heterosexism and its homo converse. Yes folks, trans is not simply a bus stop on the route to becoming the man or woman other folks want you to be!
Riki Anne Wilchins. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. 1997. Firebrand Books. ISBN 1-56341-090-7. "Perhaps a gay rights movement will be sufficient to change the whole structure. It is, doubtless, much better than nothing, and a worthwhile goal for many. At the same time I cannot escape the nagging suspicion that gay liberation has disregarded Audre Lorde's oft-quoted dictum that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,' and has, instead, contented itself with simply building a small, yet tastefully furnished addition out back."