Gender identity encompasses a broad spectrum of expression.
Caitlyn Jenner made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair yesterday. The magazine tweeted the cover featuring the former Bruce Jenner, who announced she will now go by Caitlyn. Last April, Jenner sat down for an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer about the decision to transition from male to female.
“For all intents and purposes, I’m a woman,” Jenner, 65, told Sawyer. “People look at me differently. They see you as this macho male, but my heart and my soul and everything that I do in life, it is part of me,” Jenner added. “That female side is part of me. That’s who I am.” Moving forward, Jenner wants to be addressed as Caitlyn and with female pronouns.
For many people, gender identity is as clear as a clean glass pane, their preferences expressed by their behavior and dress match the gender they were born with. But others may be deeply unhappy with their biological gender, sometimes to the extent that they want to live as the opposite gender entirely. All those who question the expression of the gender they were born with find themselves in the challenging world of transgender living.
"Our culture teaches children what the appropriate behavior, clothing, and romantic objects are for their gender starting at a very young age," says psychologist Melady Preece, PhD, a clinical assistant professor in the department of family practice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
When conflict occurs between birth gender and a person's preferences in this regard, possible outcomes include:
"Much of the negative attitude toward transgender individuals can be traced to the belief that gender variance is related to sexual interests, which it is not," she says. Rather, the issue is the way in which one's own sense of gender is expressed in the world.
Gender Expression
Among people who are uncomfortable with the way in which society says they must dress and behave, there are a number of different ways to express gender. These often come with labels, but Preece stresses that these labels do not have strict and consistent definitions.
"People in a marginalized community who are uncomfortable with the way society defines them will try to find new labels to describe their experience. However, one person who uses that identification may disagree with another person regarding the precise meaning," says Preece.
These labels include:
- Transgender: people who do not identify themselves with their birth gender.
- Drag queens: often associated with entertainment or theater, men who portray themselves as women by dress and behavior.
- Drag kings: women who portray themselves as men for the purposes of entertainment or theater.
- Transsexuals: people who identify with the opposite sex and want to live as that gender, such as men who want to become women as completely as possible.
- Cross dressers: generally men who dress as women occasionally for fun, but also includes transgender individuals who are moving toward living as the opposite sex full time (typically this category does not include all women who dress in a masculine fashion).
- Transvestites: men who dress in women's fashions for erotic reasons (transvestic fetishism is a diagnosis for these individuals, says Preece, however many find the term derogatory, as it implies that gender variance is a sexual perversion).
- Gender queer: This is a loosely defined category, which refers to people who resist gender role expectations and tend to dress in a way that is not gender-specific; many of the individuals in this category are teens or young adults. Some people in the LGBT community find the word "queer" derogatory yet there are many who feel it is important to proudly reclaim use of that term.
Saturday, 22 September 2018