I’ve struggled lately with my column on the GMP.
Why? Well, I’m not a man. I’m not non-binary. I’m a binary, female woman – or, in society’s eyes, a perfectly “normal” girl.
So I’ve been in trans* groups, as a transsexual. Especially when I was tormented by my male genitalia. I met some non-binary people that way and learned a lot about gender and sex. In most people, like me, these are tightly linked. However, in some other people, they aren’t.
I started out as a columnist on the GMP because I really like their vision. (Society’s perception of masculinity is what I hated most about being perceived as a man.) I saw a group of people trying to help men express other sides of themselves, without fear, guilt, or shame. Especially when I, myself, had the wrong body parts, I glommed onto their need to separate gender and physicality.
Then I got my biological sex changed, and it made such a HUGE difference in my life that I came to an ugly realization. For me, myself, gender WAS linked to my body. Everything that was a problem for that male alter-ego wasn’t at all a problem for me. (And we’re talking some serious mental disturbances; I’ll post more on that guy later.)
Suddenly, I was a new person. I was reborn. Even though I’d spent eight months in “transition”, presenting as a woman (and BEING a woman, albeit with a penis), I realized I hadn’t seen myself as a REAL woman before I got the right body.
But then what? I’m now a biologically female woman, like 99% of women out there. I’m seen by people on the street, and even the people I care most about who DO know my past, as only a woman and not “a boy who turned into a girl”. Transsexuality only left me with a few medical issues, like facial hair, infertility (which I COULD blog about, and eventually will), and a unique insight into sex and gender.
I started to question my place as a columnist on the GMP. What did I, Jane Sofia Struthers, have to do with masculinity? Or even destroying the gender-binary paradigm? I’d had gender issues, but those are in the past. I’d identified as trans*, but that was also in the past. What was my place here?
I spent a few depressed mornings thinking that I should just cancel my column entirely, back away from trans* issues, and let the people take care of it who aren’t so lucky as I because they’ll never fit squarely into one of society’s boxes. And then I thought this: I, although now a gender-binary woman, have cultivated a lot of insight into these matters.
What I have, and always will, is a very different outlook on gender than most people. And I DO believe I can use this to further the ends of the GMP. Maybe even help advance humanity as a whole 😉 So that’s what I’m settling for: to be the binary ambassador for people with gender issues. Maybe I’m not non-binary myself, and maybe I don’t identify as trans*, but I’ve dealt a lot with the issues around this stuff, and I know I can help.
Non-binary people need the help of binary people like me, to really understand their precarious and difficult situation. Because, unlike what I did, they aren’t trying to jump out of one box and into the other. They’re trying to disassemble the boxes altogether. And it’s binary people like me who’ve built and who (unwittingly?) maintain these boxes. Hence the need for intervention.
Just like how men need other men to speak out against things like toxic masculinity, binary people need other binary people to speak out, before anything really can change. I’m willing to do this.
So that’s the goal of this column. To expose gender, and people’s understanding of it, in whatever ways I see. Because even though I can now tick “gender: female” on government forms, the government has a lot of learning to do… “Female” isn’t a “gender”; it’s a biological “sex”!
Until the next time, some gendered misunderstanding gets my attention… 😉
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This post is republished on Medium.
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