Transsexualität, Biologie und Feminismus

Im Spiegel findet sich ein interessanter Bericht einer Transsexuellen

Frage: Zurück zum Anfang: Wann hast du gemerkt, dass du anders bist?

Stefanie: Das war eigentlich schon immer klar. Aber erst so mit zwölf Jahren, also in der Pubertät, konnte ich mein Problem konkret einordnen.

Der häufig gehörte Satz „Das war eigentlich schon immer klar“. Er überrascht nicht, wenn man davon ausgeht, dass Transsexualität im wesentlichen auf pränatale Hormone zurückzuführen ist.

Schon im Kindergarten zog es mich in die Mädelecke, nie zu den Jungen. Ich habe mit Puppen gespielt, nicht mit Autos. Mit Jungen konnte ich wenig anfangen und die wohl auch nichts mit mir. Irgendwie galt ich immer als Außenseiter. In der frühen Kindheit habe ich mir da keine Gedanken drüber gemacht. Außerdem hatte ich eine Freundin, die wiederum Jungenspielzeug vorzog. Später habe ich mich auch nicht getraut, den anderen zu sagen, dass ich viel lieber ein Mädchen sein möchte. Ich hatte viel zu große Angst vor deren Reaktion. Aber immer, wenn es ums Klamotten kaufen ging, habe ich neidisch auf die Mädchenkleider geguckt. Die Jungenklamotten, die ich trug, waren nie das, was ich wollte.

Wiederum ist es einfach, dies nach den biologischen Erklärungen zu verstehen. Transsexualität bewirkt eine bestimmte Gehirnformatierung, die dann eben auch auf die Auswahl des Spielzeugs auswirkt.

Ich hatte ja hier schon einige Artikel, in denen es auch um Transsexualität ging:

• Biologische vs. gesellschaftliche Begründung: Welche Theorie ist günstiger für Homosexuelle,Transsexuelle etc
• Transsexualität, Androgenrezeptoren und Gene

Im Feminismus kann man darauf abstellen, dass hier eben erfolgreich Rollen durchbrochen werden, aber wie? Auch dazu hatte ich schon ein paar Artikel:

• Andrea Dworkin zur Transsexualität
• Feminismus, Alice Schwarzer und Transsexualität
• Butler zur Konstruktion der Geschlechter
• Geschlechtsidentität bei Transsexuellen und Transvestiten aus einer feministischen Diplomarbeit

Hier ein paar weitere Stellungnahmen von feministischen Seiten, die ich gefunden habe:

Von Genderpschology.org:

For the purposes of this article, I will be focusing largely on the phenomenon of male-to-female transgendered people. By far the most transgendered people are male-to-female, and this fact alone merits analysis. Moreover, as Marjorie Garber points out in her scholarly work on cross-dressing Vested Interests (1991), female- to-male transgendered people are not generally understood to be as remarkable as male-to-female transgendered people, because in male-dominated culture as we know it, it is ’normal‘ when women want to become men. For participants in male-dominated culture it is obvious that social power is most often attached to male bodies. If a woman wants social power, it is clear she might attempt to gain it by impersonating a man. Why a man might choose to go the other way is more complicated. Finally, I would like quickly to point out that I will not be contesting the usefulness, accuracy or even fairness of the identity designation ‚transgender‘, which subsumes several previously separate sexual minority cultures and acts. In what follows I will be analyzing transgenderists as a unified group not because I believe the grouping is ‚right‘ but simply because the grouping already exists as a cultural category. (…) One of the most obvious consequences of turning transgender into an official identity is that it creates an imaginary boundary between the gendered person and the transgendered person. That is, once we have a particular group willing to represent itself and be represented as transgender, the rest of the population is able to feel that much more secure about dividing itself up along gender lines. (…) Transgender could therefore be understood as a form of nostalgia for traditional gender. It is hopefully clear to almost anyone why men would experience more nostalgia for traditional gender than women might. Historically, gender division has allowed men to project onto women those personality traits in themselves associated with weakness, confusion, hysteria, dependence and fear. That is, gender division implies both a material and an emotional division of labor in any given population: women perform menial domestic tasks and they act out those emotional or characterological states which are deemed most publicly unacceptable. As long as both genders accept their emotional tasks, it is easy for men to believe that they are somehow biologically predisposed to strength, rationality, intellectual autonomy and any number of other valuable leadership qualities. But in most contemporary first world countries women actively oppose the ’naturalness‘ of this division of labor, and in fact demonstrate its inaccuracy by challenging it in the first place. Subsequently men are forced to become aware that women can fight oppression just like ‚men‘ would — and if women can behave like men, there might exist somewhere inside themselves a powerless and frightened ‚woman‘ just waiting to come out.

I’d like to emphasize here that ‚feeling like a woman‘ or even ‚being a woman‘ cannot, in a male-dominated culture, ever be a good feeling. It is always, at some level, to feel inadequate, helpless and inferior; in short, it is to feel ‚impotent‘. Male-to-female transgendered people often report feeling ‚better‘ and ‚more natural‘ after their operations or during the times when they are cross-dressed. I do not wish to argue with their subjective experiences — my point is simply that as ‚women‘, and especially as transgendered people, they occupy a marginal and frequently degraded position in mainstream culture. I would even venture to argue that the act of masquerading as a woman, whether by dressing up or by receiving surgery, suggests an act of self-destruction or self-punishment. But if men understand their transgendered identities as forms of self-affirmation, why might I want to make the claim that they are essentially deluding themselves?

The answer can be found if we consider the kinds of relations real women have with real men. I have already stated that gender division is nothing more than a division of social and economic labor. Transgendered men become women because they have chosen to perform some aspect of women’s labor. They may believe this choice was made for them by a ‚core‘ orientation, but nevertheless they have consciously decided to switch genders. No one forces them to do it. However, real women have been forced to become ‚women‘ simply by being born into a gender divided culture. In other words, the only model of ‚woman‘ these transgendered men have is based on an identity which is not chosen, but enforced.

Also eine relativ freie Wahl, ganz anders als in der Darstellung der Transsexuellen selbst.

Bei Alas, a Blog wird Transsexuellenfeindlichkeit im Feminismus untersucht und dabei auch zur Transsexualität Stellung genommen:

Note that essentialism isn’t limited to just biological essentialism. There is also “experience essentialism”; in this case, certain experiences are said to define womanhood, always in a post hoc manner designed to exclude some unwanted class of women.

As Brownfemipower points out, making “womanhood” an exclusive space in order to keep out unwanted, marginalized groups is not something new, or something that has been done exclusively to transsexuals. Throughout history, the experiences of relatively empowered women has been positioned as the norm; the experiences of other women is then positioned as non-representative of “womanhood.” This has happened (and is still happening) to women of color, to lesbiansc, to Jewish women, and it is currently happening to transwomen.

To my eyes, a lot of the “womanhood is our exclusive domain” arguments strongly resemble anti-same-sex-marriage arguments. “Womanhood,” like “marriage,” is described as if its implications and social meaning has never changed in thousands of years; this false description of unchanging history is then used to argue that all change must therefore be not only bad, but a threat to those who are currently married and/or women.

In the I Blame The Patriarchy thread, Edith (of the blog Because Sometimes Feminists Aren’t Nice) wrote:

Radical feminists are also against oppression and against gender roles, but they simply do not see being transgender as a good way to fight gender roles — rather, they see transgender as a way of ENFORCING gender roles. […]

If gender is inborn, something neurologically wired, then being “born” in the wrong body makes sense. But actually, radfems tend to believe that gender is socialized and therefore, no one is “born” in the wrong body. […] In this way, I personally think that the more modern, “biological” view of transgender is the more essentialist.

I agree with Edith that the “female brain trapped in a male body” — or the “male brain trapped in a female body” — view of transsexuality is essentialist. But it’s hardly as if “X brain trapped in Y body” narratives are a fair way to describe all of transsexual and transgendered thought! There’s no doubt that some individual transsexuals — like some individual cisgenders — have essentialist views. But to take disagreements with how some transsexuals view gender as a criticism of the entire idea of transsexuality is unwarranted

In a sense, those transsexuals who move from one sex to the other “entrench the system” of gender as a binary, because they are willing to dress and be identified in society as one gender and not the other. But all of us go along with the gender-binary system in some ways, whether its women who shave their legs or faces, men who avoid wearing dresses and gowns, or any of a thousand ways people adapt to the gendered society we live in.

Ein anderer Beitrag hebt die Privilegien hervor.

Dort wird darauf abgestellt, dass niemand mehr privilegiert ist als Männer, auch wenn es weitere Privilegien zB aufgrund der Hautfarbe gibt. Transsexuelle mit ihren männlichen Körpern haben eben dieses Privileg dem Grunde nach erhalten, auch wenn sie es evtl. später ablegen.

Wer andere Theorien aus dem Feminismus kennt: Bitte in den Kommentaren mitteilen.