The is the first installment of a new series from Pacific Standard called The American Man, written by Thomas Page McBee, author of the forthcoming title, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man (City Lights/Sister Spit, September 9, 2014).

This article looks at tattooing as a male bonding ritual. His perspective in these articles (and likely his book as well) is sure to be more interesting than some other male writers on gender - McBee is a transman, and therefore has had to manufacture a sense of masculinity in ways many cis-males have never even considered.

The American Man: A Late Night at Magic Cobra Tattoo

By Thomas Page McBee • June 19, 2014


(Photo: Susan Law Caiz/Shutterstock)

Our constant exploration for a sense of belonging is just about the only thing that could bring Brooklyn hipsters, queers, and a Christian couple from California all together for tattoos in the middle of a full-moon night. That and the $13 price tag.

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The plan was for the scruffy lot of us to line up at midnight on the 12th outside Magic Cobra Tattoo in Brooklyn to get Friday the 13th tattoos—an underground tradition in shops across the country where $13, tenacity, and whiskey (recommended, not required) gets you a date with a piece of flash chosen last-minute off the shop’s board: a skull with “13” for eyes, a dagger, a toilet on fire.

My two buddies and I have dozens of tattoos between us, and there was talk of all three of us getting the same one. A crown, I figured, though I’d go for the owl or a dagger maybe, too. I love my friends, I love reclaiming masculine ritual, and I love tattoos.

What could go wrong?

Male bonding traditions are strikingly consistent and problematic in many cultures: often simultaneously homophobic and homosexual, pervasive, historic, and even animal—from skin cutting in Papua New Guinea to foreskin suturing by the Romans to bullet ant-sting initiation in Brazil—they’re also stunning in their commitment to pain and power as a way to mark a masculine coming-of-age.

One dark, modern side of such rituals is hazing—of particular concern in the military and college fraternities. The Army, which defines hazing as “an activity typically steeped in tradition, bound by silence, and ritualistic in nature” that “is thought to mark a transition, celebrate an achievement, or bring someone into a social or professional circle” has a zero tolerance policy for such activities, and the “deadliest fraternity” has eliminated pledging altogether.

I think that’s wise, and the fact is, ever since I began injecting testosterone three years ago, I’ve been drawn to ritual. I didn’t have a boyhood, never stayed up all night at summer camp engaging in harmless pranks like writing “butts” on some poor sap’s forehead, and—like a lot of modern men—I walk a knife’s edge between nostalgia for a true straight razor shave and a gratitude that I can be my tight-jean, literary self without much worry. I’m turned off by the endemic sexism, violence, and homophobia peppering locker room and barbershop talk, and—since I never felt an affiliation with my birth gender—I’m 33 and, for the first time in my life, I experience gender affinity with every toll booth ticket taker who calls me “brother” or “boss.”

Men are taught that power is the key to relationships, which is where a lot of troubling behavior starts. But an instinct to ritualize bonding may come from a need for healthy belonging. Contrary to popular belief, studies show that under stress that results in vulnerability groups of men (like women) demonstrate cooperative behavior that leads to less aggression and more trust and compassion. So Friday the 13th tattoos with my buddies felt more goodtime portside sailor than, you know, frat nightmare kidnapping and death. That was the idea, anyway.

It was only right that the night started off with my good buddy’s first trip to Shake Shack. We ate burgers and talked about this horrible dude we both want to punch in the face and the women we love, tenderness and red meat and elaborate fantasies regarding this guy getting his comeuppance. Then he bailed on the idea of tattoos so he could get up early enough to meet his fiancée in Philly (“I get it,” I said, because I did), and I took the G to hold a spot in line for my other friend.

The parlor line was a culture all its own. Hardcore old tattoo dudes; Brooklyn hipsters; and a mishmash of twentysomething hip-hop heads, and wide-eyed first-timers drank beer out of coffee cups and smoked joint after joint. A kid I knew from queer dance parties showed up, read my astrological chart, and hit on the straight girl in front of us who planned to get a UFO inked on her neck. She was with two doofuses, one of whom announced that he was “just here to meet bitches,” which drew a look from pretty much everyone around him. “Sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t. Later, I felt a twinge of victory when the straight girl ordered him to buy her cigarettes and he was gone, hitting three stores and returning to her with his hands outstretched, like an offering.

My friend showed up late and got in line with someone else, leaving me with no plan and a ragtag group—the straight Queens guys up-talking peyote with blustery bravado while holding an umbrella over my head, the queer kid smoking endless kush out of a vaporizer, and the Christian California couple behind me who went and bought me beer and snacks at 3 a.m. but stared at me, wide-eyed, when the queer kid announced that we were “all gay”—which wasn’t really true, I sleep with women, but whatever, close enough.

“You people might not like this,” the Queens guy just here to hit it with the ladies mumbled to us drunkenly around 4, “but there’s this reggae dance night in the Rockaways you should check out.” Kush Queer smiled politely, while I tried to understand whose people he thought I was exactly—gay ones, I guessed. It occurred to me that, as usual, I straddled the world in which I passed and the one in which I didn’t.

I can always bond, but never commit, to one way of being a man: I belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

Maybe that’s the reality of a lot of my brethren. Younger men aren’t as hampered by social constructions of masculinity, and though we may hunger to reclaim some aspects of it with our boxing clubs and barber shops, we have less of a need to codify what being a man means in primal, no-pain-no-gain terms. Generation Y men do more housework and are more engaged fathers than any generation before. Despite the need to be better feminists, many of us—contrary to what Pharrell thinks—use the term to define ourselves.

I caught sight of my friend after he got a knot tattoo on his arm, and we hugged and then he took off. I’d decided to go my own way with the log cabin, but by 4 I’d lost steam. It had been five hours, someone said the tattooists were drunk, and I felt a little hungover. When the rain kicked up, I told my new friends I was out, collected pounds from all of them, and hopped in a trolling cab.

It was the ride home that, surprisingly, offered me the fraternity I’d spent all night seeking. The driver, a Nigerian man with bad hearing and alarmingly erratic steering, couldn’t find the bridge to get me back to Manhattan. After a few minutes circling the same three blocks, I asked if we were lost. “Yes,” he said, pulling over, actually holding his head in his hands. It was 5 in the morning on a Friday, the salmon sunrise making everything a little sparkly. “I’m so ashamed,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I told him, because it was. He’d turned off the meter, I had nowhere to be, and the rain made the light look magic.

After getting back on the road and asking another cabbie for directions, my man turned around and faced me. “Have you ever been lost?” he asked, his eyes pleading, and I knew that what I wanted was this: a kindness to sand the edge off days filled with tiresome bravado, electric moments of near-violence, shit talk and flexing and avoiding a mysterious fight on Canal with a guy who accused me (wrongly) of “taking pictures of his car.” This moment wasn’t a ritual or a test, but when I answered the cabbie, I felt fraternal.

“I’m always lost,” I said, and we both laughed, two strangers in fragile bodies, connected in our liminal crossing of the bridge, under the sun that just kept on rising over our journey home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The American Man is a new semi-regular series from Thomas Page McBee that features gonzo reporting from barbers shops, boxing gyms, frat houses, and other bastions of masculinity in an effort to define what makes a modern man.


Thomas Page McBee is the author of the forthcoming book Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man. He has written about gender for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Vice, Salon, and the Rumpus, where he pens the column “Self-Made Man.” Follow him on Twitter @thomapagemcbee.

What Makes a Man? - UTNE Reader

This is a cool article from the new UTNE Reader about the notion of What Makes a Man - and because it is written by an FtM transman it carries a lot of weight. How better to look toward for how to define manliness or masculinity than someone who was not rasied (embedded) in masculine culture from day one?

Having worked with several transmen, I am consistently amazed by their ability to grasp the deeper qualities of masculinity in ways most cis-men never even consider. Not only that, I am also struck by how they have always experienced themselves as men. These guys also express themselves in ways every man is familiar with, often even before beginning testosterone therapy.

The experience of transmen shows that masculinity and manhood are not defined by having a penis. These guys are guys - and they have always been guys, despite their biology suggesting otherwise.

What Makes a Man?

March/April 2013
By Thomas Page McBee, from The Rumpus

I didn’t want to be a real man if what was meant by it was the hypermasculine ideal or the reactionary response.

Illustration By Toby Thane Neighbors

If masculinity could be defined by a quick Google search or a drive down a billboard-studded highway, then a “real man” is a paradox, captured crudely at the uneasy intersections of faith, love, public service announcements, politics, and advertising. Real men love God, buy American, work hard, don’t hit women, have integrity, stay faithful, wear pink, don’t wear pink, are kind to animals, fight to the death.

What makes a man? When I started testosterone, I posed this winking refrain, but the notion of “real men” still stung, each joke T-shirt and black-and-white bus-stop admonishment a nick on my heart. No one’s a “real man,” I figured, but most definitely not me, with my weekly shot and unique plumbing.

What makes a man? As I grew stronger and more confident, the question remained the crux of my core anxiety. I didn’t want to be a “real man” if what was meant by it was the hypermasculine ideal or the reactionary response. I’d spent 29 years struggling against a bad translation. I wanted to be my own man, to comb my hair with Brylcreem, to tailor my jeans, grow a beard, wear a shirt: This is what a feminist looks like. 

We all get the message of what a man is meant to be but, unlike feminism’s unbraiding of the ideal feminine, hypermasculinity sits like an elephant on steroids, stinking up the living room. It’s complex to examine what being a man means because most of us, whether we realize it or not, are committed to a monolithic answer.

We might pretend we’re not all engaging with the mixed-message at the heart of our every interaction: we value masculinity in all bodies because we value men more than women. Conversely, those of us who’d like to disengage with patriarchal, problematic stereotypes of maleness, even a little bit, are undermined and satirized, bullied and belittled. Every man I care about is troubled by other men, but there’s still a Stockholm-syndrome-feel to the framing: a shrugging, “That’s just how guys are.”

That’s just how guys are. 

I’ve been on testosterone for 16 months. After the muscles bloomed, after my beard began to appear, after my calves widened and my jaw squared, after I mastered the politics of the men’s room, after I learned not to take personally the newly cool greetings of women strangers; a pattern began to emerge. The elephant was real, trumpeting its answer to what makes a man? Here I was, becoming one, forming at bars and backyard barbecues and work meetings; confronted at every turn with an expectation and whether or not I would meet it.

What makes a man? Here I was, not the question but the answer.

My brother and I grew up in a house where one man’s failure defined masculinity for both of us. Our father, who abused me, was domineering and manipulative, double-crossing and compulsive. Later I would come to see that he was also lonely, lost, and scared, a link in a chain of male violence that ended, turns out, with me.

“Men!” my mom would say, a single word that held the universe of her rage, everything we needed to know in the way it was bathed in acid. In elementary school, my little brother would sometimes tear up his room, blank-eyed and sleepwalking. After years of bullies, B went to the gym and grew chiseled, played varsity hockey, then American Dreamed his way into a dot-com. In college, he made a bronze sculpture of a grown man crouched with his arms around his knees. “You remember?” He asked me once, and it was the kind of man he became that allowed me to believe in something better than our father.

Now he’s sensitive and muscle-bound, successful and stylish and, like me, a little brooding. I told him last April, in a bar in the Mission, of my plans to take testosterone, back when I also lived in San Francisco. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was more nervous to tell him than anyone else. That’s a lie. I was nervous to tell him for the ways I’d grown up projecting my father onto his little-kid frame, seeing their similar grins as proof of something dark. We’d thrown around a baseball, beat each other up, gone to the movies, but we’d also fought bitterly. I sat in that bar waiting for his “I told you so.” He knew intimately the ways I’d misunderstood myself.

He smiled wide, shrugged. “I’ve been saying my whole life that you’re a guy,” he said.

That was that. We ordered another round, he reported some work trouble, and we were like the brothers we were meant to become, if I’d only been paying attention.

Last I saw him, this summer at our grandmother’s funeral, B looked at me meaningfully and said, “Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t look totally different.” I swear he was teary eyed.

Still, a sticking point for us is his interest in the destiny of biology, the reassuring, essentialist refrain of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Sometimes his understanding of me feels limited by hormones and science, the framework that helps him understand his maleness. But as he tells me how terrified he was of becoming a “monster” growing up, I begin to understand the comfort of biology. Being a boy, the strange rush of testosterone, the two-faced dad: he worried he was broken, much in the way I did. In his worldview, there’s room for me, and he’s eager always to compare lifting strategies. “You’re cut like a Band-Aid!” he joked on a recent picture I posted on Facebook.

I feel it, too, the need to make muscle to guard the pinkest, most scared parts of myself. I watched him spend hours at the Y and come home calmer. There’s something to pushing all that anger and confusion into a weight that can bear it.

“I felt this shame growing up,” B told me a couple weeks ago, when I told him I wanted to write about us. “I remember sitting in the van with you guys when you told me what Dad did to you, and I felt dirty. I felt, ‘That’s my father,’ one; and two, ‘I’m his son.’ It was the beginning of this whole thing for me when I felt ashamed.”

“I struggled with the fact that I was a guy. I think it’s been a lifetime struggle,” he said. It makes me curious how many men are fighting similar fights, shadowboxing the worst aspects of maleness, trying to grow something sweet from the toxic waste of inheritance.

I asked him how he feels about other men, if he’s suspicious of them in the way the world has taught us to be suspicious of ourselves.

“A guy that doesn’t show any emotion? That’s scary.” I think of our father, his silence, his far-off stare. I think of how, almost always, naming what scares you is the primary way to avoid becoming it.

“I’m very up front with people,” B said, as if an answer. “They know how I feel.”

Before I transitioned, the struggles of the men in my life felt gritty and strange to me, a little unwashed. They’d get uncomfortably vulnerable over beers, easily crushed about fathers and exes especially, like animals without shells. It was a little foreign and often so raw I’d leave wondering how it was possible that the young women I knew seemed so much more resilient in reclaiming their identities in a world of intense violence and inequity, while the men seemed genuinely baffled as to how to make it all add up to something meaningful.

How naïve, I see now, to think the crush of gender expectations only affects the most obviously oppressed.

My best friend in high school, a wiry eccentric whose religious parents didn’t know he was gay, was my first exposure to a man wrestling with masculine expectation. Late at night, stoned in his beat-up Camry, he said he felt alien next to his jock brother, afraid to disappoint his father. He was hilarious and well-liked, John Waters meets Robert Smith, but it was clear that a girl of a similar stripe would have an easier time finding a template through which to translate herself. Hell, even before I was on testosterone, I was treated by pretty much everyone as a dude without much issue, while the many interesting and sweet men who marched through my life, arriving on cue in Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, seemed to always be head-butting masculinity’s brick-wall boundaries.

So the crushed-shell seemed to me, eventually, to be about claustrophobia, the way that the sexism underpinning hypermasculinity is a vice grip on even the most rebellious among us. To be your own man is to acknowledge that you’re not “real” unless everyone’s “real,” that all the power located in a monolithic masculinity is a house of cards built on your back and you, pulling yourself out of the stack, are helping to upend the whole foundation.

What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay.

We eat peanuts, drink beer in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston. A guy tells me, upon his marriage, that his mother reminded him to be good to his wife. A real man respects women, says the ad campaign, which only exists to tell us exactly what real men have failed to do, a reminder of what isn’t expected.

A memory: in Napa for his birthday a few years ago, before I was on testosterone, I looked up my brother’s astrological chart. This is a thing I do, inevitably, at parties and birthdays and long car rides. Anyway, I told him he was a Cancer rising, started to read the description off my phone as we drank coffee near the French Laundry, surrounded by tourists despite the drizzle.

“What does that mean?” he asked, his aviators mirroring myself back to me.

“It says you’re imaginative,” I told him, “and sensitive, and nurturing.” He looked chiseled and young, a little out of place still, living in a city after so many years in wintery, industrial towns. I could see, in the months since he’d arrived, that he was becoming himself.

“I’m nurturing!” he echoed, his thick arms crossed across his chest. He turned to his girlfriend. 

“I’m nurturing,” he told her.

Since I’ve transitioned, I’ve revisited that moment: my surprise at his enthusiasm, the emphatic way he announced it, the pride in his voice. What a reward it must have seemed to him to be seen as the man he was, not the father he was afraid of becoming, but the person he’d grown out of thousands of reps and all those cracked-shell moments when the vice squeezed too hard. Here he was, the person he’d been all along. 

“I’m nurturing,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you know that about me?” We were leaning against a car, the two realest men you know, and of course I said yes.

Thomas Page McBee writes about gender and culture for TheAtlantic.com, Salon, the San Francisco Weekly, and the Phoenix, where he is an editor. Reprinted from The Rumpus (October 12, 2012), a literary website with a focus on publishing good writing. 

Patricia J. Williams - Gender Trouble - Plus: A Whole Lot More on Transsexuality and Transgender

It's unusual to see a story about transsexuality in the mainstream media, but The Nation ran this story by Patricia J. Williams recently - specifically on transgender people as targets of harassment and assaults. She examines the ways in which transgender identities challenge our accepted gender norms.

Below this piece I am also including a couple of other articles that have been in the news recently on transgender and transsexuals.

Gender Trouble

Patricia J. Williams

May 4, 2011

Over the past few years, attacks on transgendered people in public places have been on the rise. In 2009 a transwoman in Queens was pelted with rocks, beer bottles and misogynistic slurs. Just weeks before in the same borough, two men used a belt buckle to beat a transwoman named Leslie Mora. In late April a widely disseminated video captured two teenage girls punching and dragging Chrissy Lee Polis from a women’s room to the front door of a Baltimore-area McDonald’s. That video, made by an employee, shows bystanders just watching, with little move to aid her.

Crimes like these often stem from simple homophobia; but they reveal a more specific discomfort with the ambiguity that transgendered people embody. The intensity of that discomfort extends to many situations that fall short of violence. Insults and isolation in housing, the workplace, gyms, schools and always, always in public bathrooms—premised on resolute gender binarism—leave transgendered people forever making the “wrong” choice. There are, for example, queasy debates at Smith and other women’s colleges about how to negotiate the presence of students who are admitted as women but graduate as men.

Transgender identities challenge us to think about the morphisms of “sex” and “gender,” “woman” and “man,” “real” and “not real.” This is a hot topic in academic circles: for example, attempting to disambiguate the notion of “identity” as a matter of legal subjectivity, when, say, a man with a heap of warrants is finally arrested—but by the time the police catch up, he has become a she, and in the name of that transformation asserts as a defense that “he” was a different person. It’s easy to dismiss this sort of discussion as funny or unimportant, but I think it’s necessary, not merely because it directly affects the lives of the transgendered but because it tests and expands the thinking of those of us who are not transgendered yet whose collective responses shape the social environment.

Take Smith. Its administration has said it welcomes trans students as part of a diverse community, but apparently not all students and alumnae agree. For some, a commitment to remaining a women’s college rests on assumptions about what a woman is as a biological matter, what gender is as a social construction and why a woman’s experience is, or is deemed to be, different from that of a man. Trans students evoke squeamishness particularly among older alums, as well as among those who come to a “single sex” school for its white-glove, ladylike connotations, or perhaps out of commitment to women’s education as a form of empowerment (Gloria Steinem went to Smith, after all). This contentious conversation scrutinizes not just the gender of individual students but overall institutional identity. The debate at Smith brought to the fore, for example, those who were unhappy to see their school’s feminine image newly shared with transmen.

The debate is difficult precisely because it feels so new—and in some ways it is. Sex reassignment technologies are so novel that the accompanying medical discourse still conflates those who have ambiguous genitalia; those whose endocrine systems are ambiguously skewed; and those whose psychology is felt to be at odds with their biology. And what about the culture of elective cosmetic surgery, or the cult of physical perfection that drives even normatively gendered people to feel “not normative enough” and so seek to become “more feminine” or “more masculine” through the wizardry of nose jobs, labial stitching, liposuction, pectoral implants and breast enhancement?

So what do we mean when we ask a pregnant person if “it” is a boy or a girl? The inquiry seems permissible only in utero. We get edgy when we don’t already know the answer when encountering a full-grown adult. Do we expand our meaning so that “woman” includes those who may have been born with uncertain genitalia but who grew up being dressed, viewed, identified as female from birth? Do we include that category of people who regarded themselves as men from the very beginning of childhood consciousness yet who, in asserting that sense of self, are not privileged with the perquisites of (white, straight) masculinity but are instead branded as freaks or frauds?

Most difficult of all, what might it mean to explode the entire category of “woman” as anything like a stable designation? What does that mean for the status of women’s colleges, women’s sports, to say nothing of the proverbial ladies’ room? After all, it’s not as though men have never been on the campuses of women’s colleges. I went to a women’s college, and “gentlemen callers” were everywhere—at meals, in seminars, in bedrooms and bathrooms, all but climbing in the windows on weekends. But those were “men” defined in a clear, binary and thoroughly heterosexual context.

To engage in gender-bending means that we are thrown into confusion with regard to everything from Title IX to the college rankings of U.S. News & World Report. Rightly or wrongly, women’s and men’s identities are still largely linked to the preservation of images of good wives in pearls and husbands in spats or, as one of the teenagers in the McDonald’s assault put it, to literally beating back competition for the affections of “my man” (or “woman,” as the case may be).

There are lessons to be mastered in all this, about principles of antidiscrimination and freedom of expression; about the complexities of perceived reputation (“I don’t want to be sneered at for still having a woman’s body,” said a Bryn Mawr student in the process of changing genders); and about institutional investments, dependent as they are on assessments of risk (Smith’s endowment managers are no doubt sweating bullets, given the power of alums as donors). Resolving these conflicts with dignity and thoughtfulness is no less important than educating and prosecuting those who use sticks and stones to beat away their terror of humanity’s infinite variability.

Patricia J. Williams

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This is a call for participation in a survey (for members of the trans community) being conducted by Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell, & Dallas Denny. I don't know the last two names, but Jamison Green is rather well-known author on transmen. I found the announcement at en|Gender.

The survey is open is open until June 28th - it takes about 20 minutes - please forward it to any any trans friends, family, or acquaintances.

Survey on Trans Language: 10 Years Later

Posted by helenboyd – May 1, 2011

Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell & Dallas Denny did a survey on trans terminology 10 years ago to try to educate people who were writing about trans issues. It’s a whole decade later, & they thought it needed an update, so they’ve created a survey for those of us in the community to weigh in what terminology doesn’t suck and what does. Here’s their letter:

Greetings!

Ten years ago, we conducted a short survey of our community’s reactions to the use of descriptive terminology in the professional literature of gender identity issues. Basically, we were interested in reforming the literature so it could speak respectfully about transsexual and transgender persons. To do that, we wanted to find out which terms transsexual and transgender people liked, and which they didn’t like. The results of our study were reported at the 2001 scientific symposium of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), and had an immediate impact on the hundreds of medical and social scientists who were present.

A lot has changed since 2001, and we thought it would be interesting to re-open the survey, collect new data, compare the results 10 years later with the original results, and present our analysis at the 2011 scientific symposium of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly HBIGDA) this September.

We are asking community members to rate and give us their opinions of certain terms which have been used in the literature, and some of the terms put forth by the community itself, so we can communicate the community’s opinions to the members of WPATH and (we hope) more widely in a subsequent academic publication.

There are no physical or psychological risks associated with responding to this survey, and there are no age restrictions for respondents, though we caution participants that some terms offered for your evaluation may be offensive to you or other individuals. The survey has only 8 questions (though most questions have many options to choose from) and should take less than 20 minutes to complete. Please complete it all in one sitting – if you exit the survey before you complete it, your answers will not be saved. The survey is scheduled to close June 28, 2011, so please respond soon!

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the paper which will eventually come from this, you will be given an email address at the end of the survey so you can contact the researchers separate from your responses to this survey. Any communication you initiate with us will not be associated with your survey answers, and no identifying information will be retained. We will treat your email address as confidential and will use it only for distribution of the paper to you. Your answers to the survey also will be treated confidentially, and no data reported in our analysis will be traceable to you.

Here’s the link to the survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8RGBH25

Thank you VERY MUCH for participating in this survey and helping us with our research!!

With Gratitude,
Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell, & Dallas Denny

Let them know what you think. The paper will be published this fall.

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From Safe Space Radio, this show looked at being the parent of a trans child.

TransParenting, or Parenting Trans Kids

An interview with sexuality educator and mother, Sandy Lovell about parenting a trans son. Sandy shared the story of learning that her daughter was becoming a man. She described her son’s childhood and the very early ways he was drawn to play with more stereotypically masculine toys, and said he felt “in the middle” between being a boy and a girl. As a feminist mother she celebrated his gender non-conformism, although 23 years ago it had not occurred to her that he might be trans. Sandy named parental concerns for her child’s safety, his ability to find love, her grief over losing the daughter, and her struggle to accept that the transition was really necessary. Sandy also spoke movingly about how her son’s courage to be himself has inspired her to live her most authentic self, and that in many ways his transformation has been a gift to their family.

Standard Podcast: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

This show aired on April 13th, 2011

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Finally, a new study suggests that female-to-male transsexuals have brains more like cis males - which means they are more prone to autistic traits. This is one of the first definite biological links for transsexualism. Glad to see research beginning to support what transmen have known since early childhood - their body does not match their brains.

Citation:
Rebecca M. Jones, Sally Wheelwright, Krista Farrell, Emma Martin, Richard Green, Domenico Di Ceglie, Simon Baron-Cohen. Brief Report: Female-To-Male Transsexual People and Autistic Traits. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2011; DOI: 10.1007/s10803-011-1227-8

Female-to-Male Transsexual People Have More Autistic Traits, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2011) — A new study from Cambridge University has for the first time found that female-to-male transsexual people have a higher than average number of autistic traits.

The Medical Research Council (MRC) funded study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, has important implications for the clinical management of biological girls with gender incongruence that persists into adulthood, and for the 'extreme male brain' theory of autism.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at University of Cambridge, led the study with Rebecca Jones, now at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. The team included Professor Richard Green and Dr Domenico Di Ceglie, world experts in transsexualism and gender incongruence in young people respectively, and by Emma Martin, a clinical psychotherapist and herself transsexual.

The researchers measured autistic traits using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), and compared AQ scores from five groups: 61 transmen, 198 transwomen; 76 typical males; 98 typical females; and 125 individuals with Asperger Syndrome (AS). They found transmen had a higher average AQ than typical females, typical males and transwomen, but lower than individuals with AS.

Simon Baron-Cohen interpreted the results as follows: "Girls with a higher than average number level of autistic traits tend to have male-typical interests, showing a preference for systems over emotions. They prefer not to socialise with typical girls because they have different interests, and because typical girls on average have more advanced social skills. Both of these factors may lead girls with a higher number of autistic traits to socialize with boys, to believe they have a boy's mind in a girl's body, and to attribute their unhappiness to being a girl."

Rebecca Jones added "If such girls do believe they have a boy's mind in a girl's body, their higher than average number of autistic traits may also mean they hold their beliefs very strongly, and pursue them to the logical conclusion: opting for sex reassignment surgery in adulthood."

Domenico Di Ceglie, Director of Training and Research at the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London, commented: "These are important findings in the field of gender incongruence, which need to be replicated. The awareness of the presence of autistic features may help these young people to explore the reasons behind their perceptions, and help them make more informed decisions about treatment."

Emma Martin, who runs a Gender Identity Support and research group in Little Downham, UK, welcomed the new findings, and added two important caveats: "This new research reminds us that gender incongruence is incredibly complex. Every possibility should be discussed with new clients, but should not delay what can be a painfully slow process for those affected."

Tags: transgender, transsexual, transmen, psychology, brain, culture, identity, gender identity, survey, trans language, autism, ftm, female-to-male, Simon Baron-Cohen, transparenting, safe space radio, Sandy Lovell, Gender Trouble, The Nation, Patricia J. Williams

Can Integral Theory Account for Transsexual Experience?

In my research on female-to-male transsexuals (FTM, transmen), one of the stories I read over and over again is how these men felt that being born in a female body was some form of mistake or accident.

Henry Rubin's Self-Made Men (2003) offers a great look at the issue of embodiment in FTM men - most of the men in his study offered different understandings of why they were born into the wrong bodies - some are creative, some are biological:

Whereas most individuals feel that they have bodies that adequately express their true selves, these FTMs all feel as if their bodies are erroneous expressions of their core selves. Their bodies fail to express their internal male identities. An expressive error occurred, severing the link between their body and their identity. The men in this study describe a variety of possible errors, ranging from the belief that God had made a mistake, to genetic mutations, to chemical imbalances, to underdeveloped or hidden male anatomy. One man believes he was reincarnated in a female body so that he could avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. This occurrence would be fortuitous, but most of the other men are less than thrilled with the mistakes of God or nature. They have always been men, albeit men whose bodies fail to express this to the world. (p. 150-151)

And it must be stated up front that I trust their experience - I do not believe trans people are mentally ill or suffering from gender identity disorder (GID), which I am not convinced is an actual valid diagnosis for anyone. Here is how the DSM-IV-TR defines GID:

DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria For Gender Identity Disorder

A. A strong and persistent cross-gender identification (not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex). In children, the disturbance is manifested by four (or more) of the following:

1. repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is, the other sex

2. in boys, preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; in girls, insistence on wearing only stereotypical masculine clothing

3. strong and persistent preferences for cross-sex roles in make-believe play or persistent fantasies of being the other sex

4. intense desire to participate in the stereotypical games and pastimes of the other sex

5. strong preference for playmates of the other sex

B. Persistent discomfort with his or her sex or sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex.

C. The disturbance is not concurrent with a physical intersex condition.

D. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

When the APA membership discussed the continued relevance and use of this diagnosis, members were split - but some would definitely like to see it revised or eliminated.

Katherine Wilson, Ph.D. said that DSM fails to acknowledge that “many healthy, well-adjusted transsexual people exist” or to distinguish between such individuals and those who would benefit from a medical treatment.

She would like to see GID replaced with a term such as gender dysphoria, which would describe someone who is persistently distressed with his or her physical sex characteristics or with the limiting gender-based roles that society often imposes on men and women. (Hausman, 2003)

More importantly, trans people suffer depression, anxiety, and addictions at about the same rate as the general population (an increased prevalence likely arises as a result of the social ostracism and discrimination they experience). When they come to see a therapist, they often are not coming for counseling around gender issues - it is often for all the same reasons other people go to therapy: family, relationships, work, depression, anxiety, substance use, and so on.

So if their experience is not pathological in the usual sense, how do we account for the discrepancy between gender identity and natal physiology? The term gender dysphoria is useful, I suppose, but in the absence of pronounced brain differences between trans and non-trans people (most likely based in genetics or epigenetics), we lack a solid understanding.

The deeper one gets into these men's lives, the more one learns that it really is not even about the penis for many transmen - their breasts are often a source or torment and their experience of menstruation, especially the first time, was traumatic.

Kristen Schilt and Elroi Waszkiewicz (2006) looked at the role of surgeries in transmen in their presentation to the American Sociological Association:

For most of our interviewees, hormone therapy, which gives transmen male secondary sex characteristics like thicker facial and chest hair, and chest reconstruction take priority over phalloplasty. Chest reconstruction involves a double mastectomy to remove the breasts, signifiers of womanhood,(7) and allows for the surgical construction of a male chest. The effects of testosterone, such as beard growth, create a male appearance. Having facial hair, no visible breasts, a low voice, and “men’s clothes” function as “cultural genitalia” for transmen, as they are assumed to have a penis based on their appearance.(8) Thus, even without a “real” penis, transmen can gain a male social identity that lines up with their personal gender identity.

For transwomen, the situation is a bit different - these women report that living with a penis, although they can pass as women in society, prevents them from fully adopting their internal gender identity - for them, the surgery is important.

Setting an Integral Foundation

In the integral psychology model developed by Ken Wilber, the human being grows and develops as a body, as a psyche, as an interpersonal being, and as a member of society. Each of those domains (the It, the I, the We, and the Its) shape the individual and determine her/his identity - and all of this occurs in an interrelated and interconnected manner.

Ken Wilber (Integral Psychology, 2000), explains the interaction of the quadrants with the now familiar phrase (at least it's familiar in integral circles) "tetra-evolve" (also: tetra-arising, tetra-interact, and so on) - the idea is that all quadrants interact in the creation of a holon:

It is not enough to say that organism and environment coevolve; it is not enough to say that culture and consciousness coevolve. All four of those "tetra-evolve" together. That is, the objective organism (the Upper-Right quadrant), with its DNA, its neuronal pathways, its brain systems, and its behavioral paterns, mutually interacts with the objective environment, ecosystems, and social realities (the Lower Right), and all of those do indeed co-evolve. Likewise, individual consciousness (Upper Left), with its intentionality, structures, and states, arises within, and mutually interacts with, the intersubjective culture (Lower Left) in which it finds itself, and which it in turn helps to create, so that these, too, coevolve. But just as important, subjective intentionality and objective behavior mutually interact (e.g., through will and response), and cultural worldviews mutually interact with social structures, as does individual consciousness and behavior. In other words, all four quadrants-organism, environment, consciousness, and culture--cause and are caused by the others: they "tetra-evolve."

(It does not matter "how" this happens; that "how," I am suggesting, is more fully disclosed at the postrational, nondual waves; at this point, it is only necessary to acknowledge that this interaction seems phenomenologically undeniable. Whether you think it is theoretically possible or not, your mind does interact with your body, your mind interacts with its culture, your mind interacts with the physical organism, and your organism interacts with your environment: they all "tetra-interact.") (p. 183-184)

Among those who accept the AQAL model (pronounced "aw kwal" - all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, and all types), this notion of tetra-evolving is taken as foundational. It is one of the primary assumptions upon which the whole model is built - to call it into question brings whole elements of the model into question.

Wilber goes as far as to say this tetra-evolution of the quadrants is essentially obvious: "this interaction seems phenomenologically undeniable." But is it undeniable? If we can't find an explanation that allows for the transsexuality in a non-pathologized manner, then we must question the extent to which body and psyche are inextricably linked.

So then how do we fit trans people into the model?

Trans men and women grow up with the awareness that they were born in the wrong body. In fact, trans people do not feel that they are transforming, for them its a transition:

Their goal is simply to become recognizable. Who they are at heart does not change during transition. Notice that they use the term "transition" rather than "transformation." Although they do have to make a social and physical changeover from one sex to another, they are not transforming, like caterpillars becoming butterflies. They are not changing their personality, only the physical package that houses the person inside the flesh. They are not transforming themselves from women into men. They are repairing the link between their bodies and their gender identity. (Rubin, 2003, p. 143-144)

From their experience and perspective, their body is all wrong for who they are as a gendered person. They would seriously question this assumed linkage that Wilber feels is unquestioned in its obviousness. I would suspect that intersex and other transgender people might also offer resistance to the idea that the body inherently shapes identity, especially gender identity.

The great gift of postmodern and poststructural views of gender identity is that these models break the 1:1 link between genitals and gender identity. The social construction model argues that (1) gender is constructed by each individual, (2) that it is based on conscious or unconscious acceptance or rejection of cultural norms (hegemonic masculinity, for example), and (3) that gender identity is not always equivalent to biological sex identity.

The flaw, for me, is that there is considerable evidence of the ways in which biology and brain structure impact our notions of male or female. The social construction approach tends to minimize or reject this research - but an integral approach cannot make that exception. We must find a way to account for the body in trans identity development.

I am going to propose a rather radical solution to this problem - but I am at a loss as to how to describe this phenomenon without pathologizing it - I can't offer the how or the why, only an attempt at explaining the what.

Subtle Bodies and Gross bodies

In 2003, Wilber posted a series of excerpts from what was to be (before his illness) part of the Kosmos Trilogy begun with Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - one of those postings was Excerpt G: Toward A Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies (Shambhala Publications website).

If you choose to read that article/excerpt, please keep in mind that Wilber comes from a Buddhist background, as well as transpersonal psychology, and association with various "nondual" gurus (some toxic, some not). Because of his own contemplative experience and due to the teachings he has received, Wilber accepts ideas about subtle and causal bodies with (it seems to me) little intellectual questioning.

He has talked frequently over the years about the three bodies - gross body (physical matter, the "outside" body), subtle body (contains - or can contain - the 3 levels of emotional, mental, and higher mental), and causal body (contains an overmental consciousness [Aurobindo's overmind], and is also the source for involution of archetypes - see Plotinus).

I've never entirely bought into this notion (it always felt metaphorical to me, even though I feel I can sometimes "read" bodies, which is probably picking up on the subtle body) - while there is considerable overlap on these ideas in the writings of various mystics coming from all of the major wisdom traditions, there has not been anything empirical for me to wrap my brain around.

Until now.

As I was thinking about the topic of trans identity and the lack of "fit" in their birth bodies, I decided to look back at Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel (2009). He had written extensively on out-of-body-experiences (OBEs) in that book, which he uses as a foundation for his self-model theory of subjectivity.

He lists ownership, agency, and location at three of the defining elements of "me-ness" in most people. While these and other qualities are important, he feels it has become increasingly obvious that . . .

ownership is closest to the core of our target property of self hood. Nevertheless, the experience of being an embodied self is a holistic construct, characterized by part-whole relationships and stemming from many different sources.[5] Phenomenal ownership is not only at the heart of conscious self experience; it also has unconscious precursors. Classical neurology hypothesized about a body schema, an unconscious but constantly updated brain map of limb positions, body shape, and posture.[6] (p. 78)

Ownership would seem to be a hard word for those who feel almost betrayed by their birth bodies. Interestingly, however, in finding a way out of the "location" issue so as to explain OBEs, he may have also given us a solution to the embodiment problem in integral self theory.

Metzinger offers a brief history subtle body thinking to create an intellectual, philosophical, and theoretical foundation for his idea OBEs - here is his list:

Examples are the Hebrew ruach, the Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and the Indian prana. The subtle body is a spatially extended entity that was said to keep the physical body alive and leave it after death.[14] It is also known in theosophy and in other spiritual traditions; for instance, as "the resurrection body" and "the glorified body" in Christianity, "the most sacred body" and "supracelestial body" in Sufism, "the diamond body" in Taoism and Vajrayana, "the light body" or "rainbow body" in Tibetan Buddhism. (p. 86)

He suggests that the idea of the subtle body may be the origin of our modern conception of the soul. More importantly to our work here, however, he tries to ground the idea of the subtle body in contemporary neurobiology (specifically body schemas).

My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—says that this subtle body does indeed exist, but it is not made of "angel stuff" or "astral matter:' It is made of pure information, flowing in the brain.[15] Of course, the "flow of information" is just another metaphor, but the information processing level of description is the best we have at this stage of research. It creates empirically testable hypotheses, and it allows us to see things we could not see before. The subtle body is the brain's self-model, and scientific research on the OBE shows this in a particularly striking way. (p. 86)

It's not too challenging to see Metzinger's model and Wilber's model as highly similar, at least as far as a general view is concerned.

For Metzinger, the subtle body is information, the brain's self-model; this is not all that different from Wilber's subtle body containing emotional, mental, and higher mental aspects of self.

Antonio Damasio offers a neurobiological model that can possibly account for this subtle body - and we leave the causal body to Wilber and the esoteric traditions.

In each of his last several books, Damasio has been refining his brain-based model of the self, most recently in Self Comes to Mind (2010). Arguing that the origin of the self and self-consciousness is in the upper brain stem and surrounding region, he posits a proto self, an organized and coherent, though temporary neural mapping of sensation and "primordial" feeling; a core self, a kind of stream of conscious that is modified whenever an object or experience "modifies" the proto self; and an autobiographical self that possesses knowledge of past (memory) and future planning. This third stage is social and spiritual in its construction and not directly connected to brain circuitry in the same way as the earlier stages.

Again, this autobiographical self is similar to Metzinger's and Wilber's versions of the subtle body - and he does a better job of explaining its origins than either Metzinger or Wilber.

So we have the gross physical body - the sexed body - and the subtle body that contains or holds our sense of self.

So is it possible that when these two do not match in terms of sex identity (female body, male self identity, or some other incongruous combination) that we have a transgendered person? Is this the child who grows up to be transsexual?

I think this may be an integrally-oriented explanation. And of course, how this dissonance is lived out will depend wholly on the developmental stage of the individual in question.

• A mythic-authoritarian stage person, one who is religious, would likely not be able to face or "embody" the lived conflict between body and self.
• A rational, self-expressive person might simply see gender reassignment surgery as the only obvious option.
• A relativistic, communally oriented person might see variety of options from (assuming he has a female body) living as a butch female, living as a male with no surgeries, take testosterone, taking T and having chest reconstruction, all the way up to phalloplasty.

There is still much to think about around this topic - but I want to think out loud and maybe get thoughts from people who think I am off the deep end or on the right track or somewhere in between.

Stay tuned.

References:

• Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. NY: Pantheon Books.
• Hausman, K. (2003, July 17). Controversy continues to grow over DSM’s GID diagnosis. Psychiatric News, vol. 38, no. 14: 25-32.
• Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. NY: Basic Books.
• Rubin, H. (2003). Self-made men: Identity, embodiment, and recognition. Nashville, TN Vanderbilt University Press.
• Schilt, K. R. & Waszkiewicz, E. (2006, Aug. 10). I feel so much more in my body: Challenging the significance of the penis in transsexual men’s bodies. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Accessed online: 2011-03-13 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p104747_index.html.
• Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology: Consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
• Wilber, K. (2003). Excerpt G: Toward a comprehensive theory of subtle energies. (Shambhala Publications website).

Tags: masculinity, integral theory, transsexual, transmen, philosophy, Ken Wilber, integral psychology, AQAL, Henry Rubin, Slef-made Men, Thomas Metzinger, The ego tunnel, Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, subtle bodies, gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, self, self concept, embodiment, body, gender identity, sex identity, social construction, quadrants, gross, subtle, causal