It is incredibly difficult to escape the limitations of Cartesianism, arguably self-imposed, upon our minds when attempting to describe what is and isn’t. As we progress from hierarchically organizing and categorizing the flora and fauna based on phenotype to evolutionary relationship to one another, we reflect our tendency to describe based only upon what we can see and understand. While this is certainly a functional and defensible way of working out the world, it can provide an impediment to the incorporation of new information into a well-established way of thinking about a subject or category of things.
This has been an exceptionally salient pattern in the history of sexology. Much of this is outlined in Fausto-Sterling’s book, but I will draw from another example, which I am surprised to find she did NOT (at least as far as I’ve read) examine or refer to in Sexing the Body. The description and explication of transsexualism and gender identity disorders has had a tumultuous and fast-changing history in and of itself, but that does not mean that its thinkers are immune to thinking about the bodies and sexualities of this individuals in a rigid, unchanging way. Yes, we now accept that gender identity disorder is a legitimate experience of individuals, but do we accept that how they identify and their partner preferences can change?
Drs. Eli Coleman, Walter Bockting, and Louis Gooren examined the cases of nine female-to-male transsexuals who, AFTER undergoing gender reassignment surgery, became aware of attractions to other males. This change in partner preference, looked at through the lens of the man+woman=hetero, man+man, woman+woman=homo, trans=correction to man+woman=hetero from (wo)man+woman=homo in this case, does not fall into any appropriate category. Prior to this article, partner preference was used as an item to assess the appropriateness of gender identity disorder. These nine individuals then, according to the classification system in place, would have been wrongly reassigned, as they were male-identified women who became homosexual transmen, as opposed to heterosexual transmen.
The risk upon the acceptance and incorporation of this new knowledge into the existing system is the tendency to simply add a couple more categories on the right side of the equation male-identified biowoman=hetero transman to male-identified biowoman=hetero or homo or bi transman. While this includes a greater recognition of the gradations of human gender identity and partner preferences, it unfortunately still represents the linkage of partner preference and gender identity. This is to say, it engenders the assumption of a link between gender identity and partner preference. And that fixing a problem with the former will correct to a known and limited category of the latter.
Fortunately, the authors of this study recognized this problem, calling for reassessment or removal of sexual orientation/partner preference as an item in the decision regarding sex reassignment surgery and the classification of a gender disphoric individual.
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Elizabeth, this makes a lot of sense. I find it completely outdated that so many people consider that a criteria for gender identity in the first place. Identity has very little to do with preference. That term itself is quite complicated and vague. Preference can include the sexual, physical, or spiritual. On that basis alone, I would argue that people change genders almost daily.
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