That's a nice picture and all but doesn't the genitals reveal what kind of body you have and what kind of hormones you produce, which affects the way your brain develops, which controls every expression you make? Just checking..
Well, not every situation of being transgender (or intersex, for that matter) is the same; there are various intersex conditions, issues relating to hormones, and all involve issues of one's gender identity not matching one's apparent physical sex. So with that in mind it is a bit difficult to answer your question directly.
But I think it is important to remember that the key thing is that for a transgender person there is incongruity between the physical sex (what you are describing) and the mental (the internal sense of being male or female), and correcting this is done by changing the body through hormone therapy and possibly surgery, because it is not possible to change a person's gender identity.
BTW, is there any research on how strongly and how early transgender kids know that their sex doesn't match their physical parts?
I found something that had a mean age of around eight (and a modal age of five), but I couldn't find further research so I didn't post it. As it is, I have heard personal testimonials of transgender people knowing at a very young age.
This is partially what confuses me, too. It's also why the Genderbread picture is kind of odd to me. I believe pretty much everything we are is on a scale, much like the picture, and can be very fluid. But it feels weird to me that it still describes things in a binary nature. What exactly is "woman-ness" or "man-ness" when talking about gender? Like, I really just don't understand what it is if it isn't talking about just gender roles. And if that's the case then that should be pointed out, and even talking about things in terms of traditional gender roles seems reductive to me. Perhaps there just isn't a way to do that graphic without going that route. I dunno.
Well, I think if you look at the pictures they aren't actually showing a binary scale. A binary scale would be something like this:
Male <-----------------> Female
Instead they are showing two separate scales:
Male |----------------------|
Fem. |----------------------|
Or masculinity and femininity or "man-ness" or "woman-ness" (which I think sound like very silly words, but I'll live). The point is to show that while
most people's internal sense of being female, tend to express themselves in ways that are "normal" for women in their culture, and whose physical sex is unambiguously female (and reverse all of those things for cisgender men), and this can create the impression that there is a binary, there is actually an almost infinite variety of possibilities and this is an attempt to represent that.
This actually represents a shift; in the 1930s you had the psychological inventory test developed by Catherine Cox Miles and Lewis Terman in their study
Sex and Personality, which presented an inventory of attitudes and behaviors parents could use to measure successful acquisition of masculinity and femininity. Tests such as this (M-F test) were used to construct a continuum from feminine to masculine that a child (or adult) could be placed on and could indicate successful gender acquisition. By the 1940s this would lead to the development of sex-role theory. For instance, this is how
one test looked:
Gendered Knowledge: In the following completion items there are right and wrong answers, and it was assumed that the more "boyish" would know the right answer to questions 2, 3, and 5, and the more girlish would know the answers to items 1 and 4. Girls who knew the answers to 2, 3, and 5 would be scored as more "masculine"
1. Things coooked in grease are: boiled (+), broiled (+), fried (-), roasted (+)
2. Most of our anthracite coal comes from: Alabama (-), Colorado (-), Ohio (-), Pennsylvania (+)
3. The "Rough Riders" were led by: Funston (-), Pershing (-), Roosevelt (+), Sheridan (-)
4. Red goes best with: black (-), lavender (+), pink (+), purple (+)
5. The proportion of the globe covered by water is about: 1/8 (-), 1/4 (-), 1/5 (-), 3/4 (+)
Gendered Feelings: The test also included a variety of stimuli that were thought to provoke certain emotions. Respondents were to answer whether these things caused (a) a lot, (b) some, (c) little, or (d) none of the expected condition. For example:
Does: being called lazy; seeing boys make fun of old people; seeing someone cheat on an exam make you ANGRY?
Does: being lost; deep water; graveyards at night; Negroes (this is actually on the list!) make you AFRAID?
Does: a fly caught on sticky fly paper; a man who is cowardly and can't help it; a wounded deer make you feel PITY?
Does: boys teasing girls, indulging in "petting"; not brushing your teeth; being a Bolshevik make you feel that a person is WICKED?
(To score this section, give yourself a minus (-) for every answer in which you said that the thing caused a LOT of emotion, except for the answer "being a Bolshevik" whihc was obviously serious enough for men to get very emotional about. On all others, including being afraid of Negroes, however, high levels of emotion were scored as feminine.)
And it goes on. Of course, as we know now the problem is that cultural norms for masculine and feminine behavior change over time, and today some of these are downright amusing. In most cases the reason for tests like this was because the perceived connection between homosexuality and failed gender acquisition in boys (and the similar connection between lesbians and failed gender acquisition as girls, though there has always been more hysteria about gay men than lesbians, I think). These perspectives also still have a lot of currency among people who are anti-gay or people who claim to practice reparative therapy (there's a difference?) For really poignant example of this, I would suggest reading
this blog project on BoxTurtleBulletin.
Over time there were challenges to these tests (e.g. feminist psychologists who pointed out the androcentric bias that presented maleness as the normative standard both men and women were measured against, criticisms of male sex role identity actually creating male sex role strain, the realization that what masculinity and feminity means at different ages will change (e.g. early childhood as compared to early puberty as compared to early adulthood), and can mean different things to a person based on changes in ethnicity, sexuality, and even education. I think part of the difficulty with these conversations is that those older models lasted for decades and still have a lot of cultural cache with them.
To me, though, you're just you, and whatever that means to you, and I'm just me. I don't feel especially "male" in any way. I guess I fall into a good amount of traditional male gender roles, but I still identify more as just "me" rather than "male."
Maybe this has something to do with the way that for people in a dominant group (e.g. white, straight, cisgender), their status as a member of that class isn't necessarily always salient for them. I'm not sure; I'm not really usually conscious of, say, being white. I am, of course, but this just isn't really something I think about when I think "I am these things."