![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Meredith Russo (@Mer_Squared), 2019-02-09:
Person A: What would you do if you woke up in a body with a different hormonal/genital situation than you have now.
Person B: Haha pee standing up! Touch my boobs!
Me, Without Looking Up From My Phone: Dissociate. You would dissociate. Enjoy staring at the wall above your TV.
Responses from pre-transition trans people were along the lines of "Offer up a prayer of thanks," and from post-transition trans people things like, "Be really angry about all the progress of my transition being undone," but this is mostly about cis people in another thread greatly underestimating the effects of having a body that doesn't fit one's gender. There are people whose sense of gender is so faint that it wouldn't matter much, but AFAICT they're relatively rare (I know a few). Most people would have trouble with it. Some cis actors who have lived cross gender for a while to prepare for a trans or cross-cast role have described pretty severe psychological effects from just the effect of just doing that, and IIRC one who wore a binder and a packer to play a male role found doing so just for a day of shooting at a time wound up pretty distressing.
Another difference folks noticed about trans responses was the request for more details: "Is my proprioception pre-adjusted or do I have to learn that?" "Are my ID documents, transcripts, etc., and everyone else's memories magically altered at the same time, or is this a shock to everyone else too?"
The thing is, it is an interesting question, can be a fun fantasy, is easy to joke about ... but some of us already know what such a mismatch is like, only without the "suddenly you wake up..." part.
(no subject)
In that magic wand transformation hypothesis, it would I think make a big difference to be warned, even if the warning was something like "alien wizards are doing this to some people, we don't know why"--anything that would make me less likely to start with "this must be a dream/am I hallucinating?"
(no subject)
(no subject)
One of my students was a woman who'd been a friend of mine for years, and she went around asking all of her friends if they'd treat her differently if she were male. When she asked me, I said, "Yes, I think I'd trust you less," and she said, "But, but ... you're supposed to know better!" And I gently told her that I was human, too. :-)
(no subject)
I have not run across this! I should like very much to read their accounts. Can you point me in a direction? I'll search, but I don't know what exactly I should be searching on here. Are there famous examples?
I confess, this entire line of argument rubs me the wrong way. "mostly about cis people in another thread greatly underestimating the effects of having a body that doesn't fit one's gender" - we don't know that, do we? We don't know if there's some swath of people, possibly large, who are fine with received/assigned gender, and will adjust contentedly wherever they're dropped in gender space. We don't know if what makes trans people trans is (in part) that they are people for whom gender is more psychologically important, and thus for whom having a mismatch is much more devastating.
One of the problems here is that, as with all minorities, it's the minorty status of trans people that's marked, and therefore problematicized and studied and regarded as in need of explanation. Consequently, cis gender development is woefully understudied. People make assumptions about what gender is like for cis people, to the effect of cis people are just like trans people, only having won the body/gender assignment lottery. But I don't know that's true, or to what extent it's true.