My View

Feelings & Theories

by Geselle Galadriel

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After reading "Theories of Gender" in Polare Issue No. 14, I suppose if I must continue the tradition of using insufferable and discreet terms to describe myself and also using the new N.S.W. law passed recently as a guide, I am a ... queer celibate female transgendered biological determined androgyny male to female transsexual male.

Yet all my life there has never been a label I could hold on to. If to be queer means that I do not relate to my genitals, then I am queer. Yet to say I was arbitrarily ascribed them, I feel is indeed flippant.

What if I feel my whole body is wrong? I am a practicing contortionist (no, really), so where it has been deemed by this new legislation as an advantage in sport to be a transgenderist, in my sporting art form it is an absolute disadvantage.

No hormone can reassign me my female hips or lighten my tendons like a females, although estrogen does soften them a little. So then, I am a biological determinist.

I am not saying because you have a womb it must be used but I have desperately wanted my child. But 4 years ago I was diagnosed as infertile. At the same time I was on ludicrously high amounts of hormones - 3 vials of Premogyn a fortnight, 4 Androcur a day and 4 Provera a day. Of course I started to produce copious amounts of colostrum and naturally I was "clucky" as hell. It almost drove me to suicide. I was depressed for 3 years and the emptiness still bites into me (no, really).

How can the birth experience ever be labeled as an arbitrarily assigned experience? Labels do not help. No operation can give me the female genitals that I actually feel lent and not actuate or even give me any fertility back let alone produce my child. The transsexual process, to me, is but a copy and seems but a meddling one at that. No I.V.F. programme would touch me, not even for a million dollars and then it would be dangerous for the child!

My inability to be male and then relate to my self cross genderdly began before I could talk. This dichotomy has lead me to experience life as being confusing and deeply painful psychologically. You may be polite to call me she and give me some rights in society but the feelings never stop.

I intellectually that the terms of gender male or female cannot stand separately but only in relation to each other. Yet, the skeletal system, the reproductive system, the Mullerian duct or the vas deferens are not arbitrarily assigned, they are flesh and blood, and no introduced hormone or operation erases that blueprint. Forget chromosomes as an argument, these are whole symbiotic systems no psychology can remove the male system or female system just as no one dealing in transsexualism has ever been able to tell me when at last shall I start ovulating. Feelings cut deeper that any surgeons bill ever will.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.