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AGE 8 AND WANTING A SEX CHANGE
Posted by Laura on October 20, 2009
Tags: Children, documentary, gender, identity, sex, stereotypes
Last night I sat down to watch Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change, the latest documentary as part of Channel 4’s Bodyshock series. The programme followed Josie and Kyla, two eight year old girls who had both been born boys, and discussed their stories surrounding the gender dysphoria they had both been diagnosed as having and what the future held for them both. The programme also featured Chris, a sixteen year old boy who had been born a girl and started testosterone treatment aged 14.
Whilst watching the programme several issues arose for me. Firstly is the continued stress on the gender binary of female and male. During my Women’s Studies course I lept on material which discussed the possibility of a third gender, even a third sex. Discussion of this still seems firmly cemented in academic discourse as I felt the programme further promoted the idea that you can either be female or male and this is what it means to be female and this is what it means to be male. A lot of emphasis was placed on the toys the children were playing with – they were either “boys’ toys” or “girls’ toys”, no allowances were made for gender neutral material which could perhaps avoid placing such an importance of such gender stereotypes. And what was the real issue at hand? Throughout the programme the link between sex and gender was explicitly expressed as well as an array of traditional roles. In the case of Josie, it seemed pretty clear that having male genitals was a major concern for her – but why then take this as an opporuntity to reinforce female qualities with her as she clearly retained “boy things” such as stereotypical boy hobbies and interests. Is there no room in medical discourse for the concept of sex dysphoria* – why the need to have ‘gender dysphoria’ when gender arguably is a social construct?
Overall I did really appreciate the attitude of the families concerning their children’s feelings but one worry was the language Josie’s mother used with her. Her mother referred to Josie’s penis as a ‘birth defect’, a suggestion which I felt reinforced further Josie’s negative feelings towards her genitals (was that really necessary?) as well as raising concepts that perhaps a child of eight would not, and perhaps should not have to, understand. During Feminism in London I attended a workshop about raising children in the age of porn, hoping to glean what we should be informing our children about – how do you address an issue like porn with them? What language do you use? What concepts would they understand? This is relevant here as how do we raise our children to be aware of identities such as transgender, transsexual, or even hermaphrodite?
My last comment is briefly on ethics. Another child featured in the programme (whose name completely escapes me, I am sorry) who was born a girl but living as a boy talked of having girlfriends. His mother acknowledged that yes, he did have girlfriends but at this point (still fairly young) they were not telling his girlfriends about him being born a girl. For me that posed moral issues - should you really be withholding such detail? Is this almost like deceit? Is it right only to disclose such information when those involved are odler and such relationships hint at becoming physical?
Comments, as always, are welcomed.
Laura
*If there is literature on this please let me know, I would be most interested!
Tags for this post:Children, documentary, gender, identity, sex, stereotypes
October 20th, 2009 at 10:23 am
I only caught the very end, literally a minute of the show and was shocked that they continually ungendered the transboy calling him “her” and “she” I don’t know if they did this with all the kids, but what a pathetic attempt at tackling the issue if so.
It was offensive and undermining.
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Yes, the narrator’s use of pronouns was incredibly patronising. I felt the documentary really only skimmed the surface of this complex issue. It would have been nice to have heard from a Trans activist group too, with more discussion about the wider social context and implications of identifying as trans at such a young age.
As for the moral issue of whether you should always inform partners about being trans – why would it amount to deceit if you didn’t tell them? If your partner is attracted to you then they are attracted to you, surely it shouldn’t matter how you identify your gender or sex. If you believe that we need to open up our thinking on the restrictive gender binary of male and female, then surely we need to also adjust our traditional categories of sexuality (e.g. ’straight’, ‘gay’) accordingly.
Plus, the deceit argument would imply that trans people are always obligated to ‘come out’ to every sexual partner they have, because it would be deceitful not to. But, by this logic, you could say that trans people are in a sense ‘deceiving’ everyone by ‘fooling’ them into believing they are a different sex! Which, clearly, is rather daft.
It was an interesting topic to raise, though.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Sorry, I should have made it clearer that I was referring to deceit only in the context of them being children and ethical implications with that. I am not implying that it is deceitful for trans people in general not to inform their partner of such details but rather when it’s a situation involving ‘minors’.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:53 am
Thank you Laura for raising an important debate. I thought I was alone. Being born into a body of the wrong sex was not treated in a sensitive or informed way in this documentary. At the gendering of toys, with dinosaurs and cars for boys and dolls for girls, I despaired. A male friend of mine recently visited my house and saw a poster of a vintage car on the wall and couldn’t help but comment on its place in my house. The words slipped as easily from his mouth as his greeting. Social gendering obviously isn’t dead but thank goodness neither are websites like this one. The real turning point for me however was after the male who identifies as a girl was taken to the beauty parlour, given blonde highlights on long locks and told ‘you look like a beautiful girl’. A person identifying as female, whether born female or not; should not be taken to a beauty parlour aged 8-10 and given a head of highlights as a lesson in being female. It is gender stereotyping gone mad. I have never grown my short hair to long in all my years of living, and have never had to lean on hair as a crutch for my gender or sexuality. Parents like that are putting unnecessary demands on young children to conform to meaningless gender stereotypes. Whether their children are identifying as boys or girls so be it. But don’t give them the extra burden of the gender roles of a mad society on top of their dysphoria. With regards to literature I’d recommend Judith Butler’s- Gender Trouble from my degree studies, but I assume you read it on yours. Thanks again.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:09 am
A very good and thoughtful piece Laura.
For me the most worrying aspect of the programme personally was the way the narrator consistently used the wrong pronoun, presumably in an attempt to sensationalise the issue. So referring to a transboy as ’she’ to me seemed particluarly nasty. It was akin to calling black people ‘coloured’ effectively an insult to these children who tried so hard to appear as the opposite sex.
One of the reasons why the transgirl may have been so keen to present an all-feminine image comes from the findings of Kessler & McKenna in their 1978 book “Gender”. They investigated the way in which people assign gender to others and found that, contrary to what might be expected, just about everyone works on the principle of ‘male or not-male’. So that if there is just one masculine quality evident, the individual is considered male, and that it would take the complete absence of anything masculine before an individual is unambiguously considered female.
One of the more unfortunate aspects of the gender binary system that we live with is the “if it isn’t heads it must be tails” logic, which means gender recognition functions on the ‘if it isn’t male it must be female.’ principle. This may go some way to explaining why male-to-female transgendered people go to such extreme lengths to be appear feminine, they are subconsciously aware of the need to ensure that they display nothing masculine at all in order to be confident at being considered female.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Thank-you Natacha. Kessler and McKenna rings a bell, I read about them when I looked into this during my women’s studies course – my memory is so bad. Thank-you for reminding me, I think I will have to go back to that book again soon because I find all these issues so interesting.
I certainly agree with the last point you make and I remember reading something about this kind of attitude being taken in the case of hermaphrodites and the ‘assigning’ of their sex/gender.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Thank-you Serena and yes, what you’re saying is really important I feel. It’s bizzare that I showed the documentary to my sociology students and they couldn’t recognise the process of social gendering and the concept of gender being learnt was alien to them, and these are students who study the very processes of things like socialisation and so forth. I think it’s so imbedded into society that it’s hard for the majority of people to see outside the box and think that sex/gender are anything but biological facts.