Gender Identity is Real

An excerpt from a larger piece On Objective Reality, Faith and Gender Identity

There is an objective reality. Through the scientific method - an extremely valuable tool - we (humanity) have been able to measure a great deal of that objective reality. I do not believe, however, that we have objective experience. Our interior life, our thoughts, feelings and most of what we sense is inevitably subjective. We can have pure, unfiltered experience which is different than what we think of as objective. It’s rare, though and even then is an encounter with objective reality – not objective reality itself.

Pure experience has also been called unthematic knowledge, but might be better understood as un-conceptualized experience. Experience which is not yet defined, not yet put to words, not yet remembered, not yet visualized with resonant or contrasting archetypical images. Not yet even really thought about.  

I first became aware of the term “unthematic knowledge” in reading Karl Rahner. Rahner was an important theologian involved in Vatican II. He used unthematic knowledge in his argument that finite human beings have a latent experience of the infinite. Through that experience we capable of transcendence. There are those who say this is impossible, that our thinking filters all experience. That the idea of transcendence must exist prior to the experience of it. Experience without thought happens though. I can personally vouch for the claim of Zen meditation, that our thoughts can be completely quieted. Nonetheless, thinking does often quickly rush in and conceptualizes our pure experience.

What happens if we have an experience we don’t have concepts for? When our thinking doesn’t know what to do with the experience? We instinctively scramble for something, anything in our minds that can make sense of it. If we find something that works for us, we often settle on it and filter any reoccurring experience through that concept. We may still sense that the concepts we are using isn’t really a good fit and become unsettled until we find something else to land on, however precariously.

Which brings me to the experience of gender dissonance. Gender identity is something most people don’t even notice they have. Even people who are true rebels when it comes to gender expression – who vigorously protest the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth – never question whether they are male or female or neither. Those of us who experience gender dissonance – who have a deep sense of self that does not line up with our assigned gender – wrestle with our gender identity and through that process become keenly aware that we have one. Some of us conceptualize that identity fairly early on. For others, like myself, the most fitting concept eludes us for years. Because no concept really quite fit for some time, I am categorizing that experience as un-conceptualized – as an unthematic knowledge.

Here are just a few of the concepts I have wrestled with in order to make sense of the unthematic knowledge of my gender.

1) Early in grade school I learned from adults and other kids that my actions were seen as acting like a girl and that was wrong for a boy to do. I was not yet questioning if I was a boy or not because that was what everybody told me I was.

2) By High School I was having fantasies of having been born female. Though the fantasies were not largely sexual, the mental gymnastics I had done to avoid questioning my gender led me to think I had something like Autogynephilia. Which is a discredited trans diagnosis claiming a fetishistic sexual attraction to the idea of oneself as a woman. I wouldn’t have known the word at the time though.

3) In college I learned about XX males and XY females – due to oversensitivity or under-sensitivity to hormones. I remember thinking “That must be my problem!”

4) In my early 20s my “biological clock” went off. I wanted to get pregnant in the worst way. It was the first time I thought about a sex change operation, but I abandoned that idea once I realized it wouldn’t give me a working womb.

5) Fresh out of college I found myself spending time with two groups of women who identified as lesbians. In many ways I felt like I had found my tribe, but knew my body would prevent me from ever being truly accepted in these groups.

6) In my thirties I tried to forcibly “embrace my masculinity” via inquiries into “Iron John” inspired groups. That failed miserably.

7) Then came my “essentialism is the enemy” phase after that. I became a one person crusade, correcting anyone who said anything using the terms men or women.

7) Then Second Life, an online multi-player virtual reality created an opportunity for me to embody as a female. It was astonishingly liberating to be seen and responded too as a woman. Through SL I found the courage to come out as a trans woman.

8) After a couple years on hormones and living full time as a woman for three quarters of that time, I have finally found a bodily reality that reflects this un-conceptualized experience of being female.

It’s important to understand that transsexual, transgender, genderqueer and other gender variant identities are fairly modern terms. They are specific historical and cultural terms to name an un-conceptualized experience of having a gender identity that doesn’t match the gender we are assigned at birth. This experience pre-dates these terms or ways of thinking about it.

Other cultures and other times in the past had different ways of expressing this, thinking about this, naming this. For example, the galli of ancient Rome, hijra in South Asia, two-spirit in Native American culture, katoey in Thailand, fa'afafine in Polynesia, muxe in Oaxaca and khanith in the Middle East. There has been some debate over whether these terms are trans identities, gay identities or third genders. However the terms are intrinsic to the culture and historical context of the regions from which they arose. Trans, gay and third gender are ways that our culture and history think of these things. They are not really transferable concepts. The point is that there’s a phenomena that is part of the human condition across historical and cultural lines.

However conceptualized, Gender dissonance is real. People throughout history and many cultures have behaved and/or expressed themselves differently than the gender they were assumed to be at birth. There is an objective reality at play. The person in question, though, is the only one who can know what they are going through and can only express it through the language available to them, hence subjectively conceptualized and experienced through a filter.

As mentioned, I have had a number of ways of understanding my gender identity over the years. Many of those options were based in ignorance and are not a current option for me. Others have their pluses and minuses. However my new bodily experience has made a decision for me. Questions of genderqueerness, essentialism vs. social construction, validity of claiming sexual orientation and other intellectual considerations are trumped by an experience of being in my increasingly feminized body that resonates with my un-conceptualized experience. There’s a physical feeling of accord that is deeper than thought. And so while there is still more than one option of how to identify, the identity that best describes my authentic experience is transsexual woman.