One of the truly weird things about 'changing sex' is the way other people react to what you're doing. The reaction runs the gamut from, "Wow, far out!" to, "Go, and never darken my doorstep again!"
Yeh, the same to you, too. What really gets me, though, is the people who say with a serious face that they feel the person they once knew is now dead, so they must grieve the loss, and they're even angry with me for killing off the person I was.
Excuse me, but I'm not dead quite yet.
What's the deal? Yeh, I changed my name. So did Cat Stevens. I had some surgery. Lots of people have orchiectomies, breast implants, radical mastectomies, hysterectomies, nose jobs. I take hormones. So do many people my age. None of these things is considered, ipso facto, fatal to one's person.
I changed my gender. Ah, the kiss of death. Smack!
People are conditioned from day one to believe that if there is any line one cannot cross, it is the line separating male and female. But that's a lie, folks, and it isn't my fault that you believe such simplistic nonsense!
The 'person you once knew' has always been transsexual. If you were my friend, my relative, my coworker, or my lover, guess what? You had a relationship with a tranny pervert queer! So go wash your hands really good.
Maybe it pisses you off to realize I lived a lie that took you in hook, line, and sinker? Maybe it makes you sweat to know that gender isn't even skin deep and you can't ever trust anyone, including yourself, again? Or maybe you can't quite handle the fact that biology truly isn't destiny?
I know transsexual people who graduated from West Point and had military careers, who birthed and nursed children, who did any sex or gender stereotyped thing you can imagine; before they transitioned to the 'other' sex/gender. I know transsexual people who are straight, lesbian, gay, bi, pan, drag, leather, and any thing you can imagine; before and/or after transition.
Get it through your thick heads: sex, gender, and social role are not absolute, not defined in the fabric of the universe, not the creation of an unimaginative anal retentive god, and sure as hell cannot be mandated by human law.
The biological reproduction thing, where the 'men' get the 'women' pregnant as soon as they bleed and keep them that way until they die, has like run its course, dig? The population of the world just hit six billion, up from three billion in 1960. Anyone born today (in a good economic class) can expect to live to an age of at least 100. Reproducing the species is so not a problem it makes my head ache.
So, bucko, why should any thinking person give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys for a definition of personal identity based in biological reproduction? We have evolved past that point. Yes folks, our minds are part of what we are, as are the tools we make and the uses to which we put those tools.
Without eyeglasses I walk into walls. Allergy medication lets me survive May and June. My children have had to suffer none of the 'childhood diseases' my mother watched for and gave thanks that I survived.
We are not limited by our bodies. We are limited only by our imaginations.
What is our future? To die an ugly death on an overcrowded planet? To escape out to the stars? To evolve beyond the confines of our obsolete bodies?
What would you be if you could change your body any way you wanted? Would you choose to live in the ocean? In the air?
If you could define your sexual anatomy completely, what would it be? How much sense does this question make? What does it mean to be a sexual being?
If you really take the reproduction out of sex, if you think about what it would be like for, say, two robots to have sex, maybe you're getting close. Sex as communication. Sex as a feeble attempt to extend your self to another being. Sex as abstract pleasure, as art, as recreation, as sport, I dunno, I'm just babbling.
Arghh! Everyone is stuck on working out what it means to be male and female, and it doesn't make any difference any more! It is so boring I just cannot stand it! Just shut up and do something truly different for a change!
Note: Lisa no longer works at MSU. To get in touch with hir (remember to wash your hands afterwards)....
[Published in the late fall 1999 "Anger" issue of Q-News at Michigan State University.]