"Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes." - Mickey Mouse

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Sam: Transgenderism has, for the past few years in mainstream newspapers, been portrayed and associated with humour, self-deprecation, entertainment and sleaze...

Even among the transsexual community, there are pre-op and post-op transsexual people. Essentially, they want to be recognised by the sex they identify as, but Singapore is rigidly patriarchal and has a strange obsession with penises that our classification of gender/sex and conceptualisation of gender/sex-related issues are based on the presence-and-absence-of-the-penis binary. This is explained by the reference to pre-op male-to-female transsexual individuals as male (e.g. he, him, his, etc.)...

There is also the blessing/curse of the medicalisation and pathologisation of transgenderism/transsexualism. On the one hand, it provides legitimacy for sexual reassignment and empathy, given the dominance of medicalisation as an ideology; on the other, it stigmatises those of diverse gender identity which departs from current societal norms...

Can those who identify as male/female be appropriately addressed as male/female (respectively) regardless of being pre- or post-op? (after all, who has the right to tell a person who or how he/she is or should be?)

Me: I'm sure you'd agree that Thailand has a much more friendly culture towards transgendered individuals than Singapore. Yet over there they are also "associated with humour, self-deprecation, entertainment and sleaze". Even if you think this a bad state of affairs, it is something to consider.

I don't think the reluctance to recognise transgendered individuals is due to "patriarchy". It is just a recognition of physical facts. If not, why do people undergo the operation in the first place? And why do even transsexuals (AFAIK) regard post-ops as more properly transsexual than pre-ops?

What actually do you mean by pathologisation of transgenderism? Do you mean looking at it as a "problem" which needs to be "cured"? Even then, a "cure" can come through sex reassignation surgery or counselling such that the person is comfortable with his biological gender. And the latter is not necessarily a bad thing: just as not all CHIJ girls are lesbians later on in life, likewise, not all who have transgendered tendencies continue to have them.

Actually here's an interesting question. Most progressives/liberals think (and so do I, perhaps shockingly to some) that people should be allowed to undergo sex reassignation surgery so they can be the sex they feel they really are. Yet probably most of these people would not approve of race reassignation surgery a la Michael Jackson or Dawn Yang. Wherefore the inconsistency?

Sam: perhaps the humour is a way to cope, but we'll never know. i'll have to do more research in that area.

it is in patriarchy itself that gender identity is a rigid dichotomy. so, the transition is not without its social baggage.

even so, the identification with the opposite gender/sex and the want to assume the opposite gender/sex identity could also inform of patriarchy, which has determined for us its hegemonic brand of male-ness and female-ness. in this line of thought, the exhibition and celebration of male-ness/female-ness are merely reproductions of hegemonic masculinity/femininity.

gender identity disorder is used to medicalise a case in which someone does not conform to the aesthetics and ideology of the dominant masculine/feminine dichotomy (in this case, they are on "the other side" and want to acquire the socially recognised attributes, other than biological, of "the other side").

looking at it from one perspective, since it is pathologised/medicalised, the state and society are sympathetic to people diagnosed with GID, and allow them to integrate into society with sexual reassignment surgery.

i juxtapose this with the issue of sexuality, not gender identity, with regards to queer sexualities in our society. society (at least for the "'phobes and fundies") believes gay-ness is illness and can be cured. and so long as there is reluctance towards "correction", queer persons will not be tolerated, and hence will be marginalised and disincentivised.

gender identity and reassignment surgery on the other hand, ultimately reproduce, and not reconfigure, the dominant gender binary. so, it is not as contestable as discussing sexuality and sexual identity.

if gender identity becomes as fluid as (queer) sexuality, it will disrupt the binary/dichotomy. and you will see the 'phobes and fundies taking up the agenda. because gender identity disorder is ultimately a subset of the dominant/hegemonic masculinity/femininity discourse, most of us are cool with it.

we tend to pathologise things, observations, phenomena, behavioural traits, that deviate from the norm, that challenge dominant ideologies of the time. body dismorphic disorder, GID, kleptomania, etc.

pathologisation/medicalisation help society cope with these differences, since we like to make sense (or try to) of everything. we think skin colour should be fixed, so we think MJ is wacko, and we do not treat fantasy on equal grounds as reality, so we would charge that dawn is a fake and a liar. and if there is an "illness" or "disorder" that can be attributed to all these, all the better for us, as it points the "right" way to "remedy".

Me: So basically thanks to "patriarchy" we will never know what our unencumbered selves truly want to be.

Yet, the truly unencumbered self is basically a corpse. Our characters and personalities cannot be disentangled from social influences. There're very interesting parallels here with the idea of an uncorrupted soul and how worldly baggage and Sin twist it.

Even if you see "gender identity disorder" as how society punishes deviance from gender norms, you cannot deny that even without this medicalisation, those with transgender tendencies feel a profound sense of *wrongness* with their bodies, and identify with the other gender. If they don't, why would they want to undergo sex change surgery?

Unless you're saying that there's a non-negligible constituency of transgendered individuals who do not wish to go all the way, e.g. biological males who wants breasts but not a vagina, or a vagina but not breasts, or transvestites who want to wear a dress but not have fake breasts, and don't even bother to speak in an artificially high voice. Of course, you could once again blame "patriarchy", saying that due to it, those who feel even a twinge of transgender tendencies feel pressured into having all the others. But then, like Sin (or indeed, the proposition that we're all brains in vats) this is a very hard hypothesis to disprove and all facts can be rammed into this framework one way or other.

Supposing it were possible to abolish gender norms, even if we assumed that this liberated transgendered individuals, what about all the rest? In a world with no gender norms, people would feel profoundly discomfited. In our eagerness not to "oppress" the majority, we'd end up oppressing the majority. As Durkheim said,

"Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him."

I am disturbed that you do not consider body dismorphic disorder and kleptomania to be pathologies. Relativism is not a coherent position. Is *anything* a pathology then? Are anorexic individuals perfectly healthy? Are you also against the "negativisation" of disease? Living with AIDS is an equally valid mode of living - forget about antiretrovirals!

Sam: to an extent, (gender) identity is shaped by patriarchy, which is why it seems "special" should someone has traits common of that from males and females.

it's not so much about society "punishing" deviance from gender norms. i'd prefer and am interested to look at how medicalisation/pathologisation of GID plays a role in social integration. if it is not medicalised, people will think these individuals (who want to do SRS, assuming if it's not called SRS in this context) are insane and this would not be socially sanctioned.

you don't have to be disturbed (as stated in your last paragraph) because that is not what i mean. pathologisation and medicalisation serve a social function. debating about the (historical) origins of pathologisation/medicalisation is not my agenda nor interest, but it is important we appreciate the social and political history behind them.

in you raising anorexia as a question of (im)perfect health, you are already assuming it's a health-related issue. valid, but in a different time and age, it would have been called something else.

medical opinion is medical reductionism, and medicine as we know, is a very trusted knowledge, among many different kinds of knowledge. i can say that there may be a god behind this and this is always a form of knowledge i subscribe to. in pathologising/medicalising something, we give primacy to the field of knowledge that is the hard sciences. just because they seem so reasonable and logical, doesn't mean they are the real truth. same goes for other forms/domains of knowledge.

the "creation" of disease serves society in different ways, besides sense-making and meaning-creation, and in the process, marginalises some groups while privileging other groups. i mean, if someone died of high fever, we could say that some deity took his/her life. it is because of observations of empirical data, which we assume to be an observation and empirical, that we label it high fever.

to be radical, i think anything can be pathologised, but it just depends on what the intellectual elite (who happen to be a group) think about it. there are social process being pathologisation.

sometimes we can do without it. for example, we can do without the guilt if we realise one part of our identity is not in sync with the rest/majority of the community's.

the goal of medicine (i.e. in SRS) is in-sync with the goal of an individual who wants to have SRS. so that is one good thing for the individual.

essentially, transgendered persons, or persons struggling with their gender identity, should have the right not to feel guilty or ashamed of who they are.

any way, we could be brains in vats.

Me: Err. While primary and secondary sexual characteristics are largely not common to both sexes, there're plenty of common traits both share, like a head, 2 eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears etc

Just because something is medicalised does not mean people don't think there's something wrong with it ("insane" is a difference of degree, not type). Go out on the street and ask people whether they think someone who wants to do SRS is normal.

So what would you call anorexia? And just because it might have been called something else does not mean that it was not a sign of bad health. And it is curious to defer to the judgments of other ages more than that of our own: is there a reason why we should trust the judgments of other ages more than ours?

What you call "medical reductionism", most people call "what works". We give primacy to the hard sciences because they give us results. If you get slashed with a katana you can either pray to a god or you can rely on medical knowledge and get yourself stitched up. If you think the former is an equally good (or even better) way to approximate reality than the latter, good for you, but you probably won't be sharing the reality the rest of us live in for much longer, one way or another.

Sam: it is very convenient bring in the empirical to disprove (and in the process) embarrass the conceptual/theoretical. and you can do it, again and again.

but as i would like to emphasise, i'm looking at it at the conceptual level, at the level of rhetoric and the formation of arbitrary meanings.

yes, the conceptual is sweeping and generalising, but so long as it has implications on one domain of life/society, i'm interested in looking at it (at the conceptual level).

going out on the streets asking people for their opinion, or getting painfully acquainted with a sharp weapon, is not a concern of this discourse. it is rather detached (from real life and empirics), but at the same time, it is not obligated to empiricism.

lived experiences will always have the "last say" over abstract concepts, because of the way they function. the conceptual lacks in the department of obviousness. but as a matter of personal taste, i find it fun to engage the abstract once in a while.

hope you know where i'm coming from.

Me: Reminds me of what a lecturer once said:

"See, this is where Social Science comes in. We look at the evidence and disagree with their theories."

My comment to a friend:

"So humanities are just talk cock lah."

If a theory is not applicable to real life in some way, then it is just intellectual masturbation in a vacuum. This is not to say that it cannot be enjoyable, but it makes one question the utility of the theory.

And to jettison the empirical entirely begs the question of what the conceptual/theoretical are based on beyond flights of fancy and daydreaming, and leaves one seriously nihilistic about any implications they might have on one domain of life/society.

More broadly, strict empiricism is not the only way of falsifying a theory, but without reference to some aspect of the material world, it is not hard to find theories which are unfalsifiable, in which case anyone can say anything.

Sam: humanities does talk some cock sometimes, but it (aims to) gives new perspectives and ways of looking at stuff.

so, looking at stuff in a different way may be deemed cock.

well, karl marx conceived of the pure/ideal form of communism not totally based on his observation of industrial capitalism. it is empirically-inspired, but not empirically-informed.

for example, i derive concept A after being inspired by empiric A1 at a specific time and place, but it is always possible concept A be disproven by empiric A2 or B, in a different space/time. more important, there is a concept and we can (should) appreciate its historical context.

i've heard people say that haha. "humanities talk cock one!" and "social science too rigid". we're surrounded by discourses that are of the cock and rigid kind.