Ruben Goldsbrough
Where do i begin?
As I stated in the indroduction page to my MA project i am interested in exploring and dealing with the grey areas of gender, questioning things like, when did you know and what did you do rather than I am transgender therefor I must do this. By exploring people stories of gender discovery in this way I hope to learn about what its like to be transgender first hand rather than what textbooks and webpages will tell me. Dealing more with the emotional changes rather than the physical changes for surgery.
This has always been an area of interst to me as I've know quite a few people who have had to deal with it themselfs.
As well as being an MA student i'm also a youth support worker specialised in dealing with LGBTQ issues and from my experence there is nothing out there to help with the emotional side of being transgender, its all about surgury and the changing or horomones.
With this project Im hoping to be able to produce 1 of a seris short film telling the real life storys of transgender people and how they realised they where transgender and what they did to deal with it.
So what is transgender?
Even though the year is 2015 you'll be amazed how few people know what to be transgender or how it come to be and as a result its become a bit of an unspoken topic.
Which as a result means that thousants of people a year live there lifes unhappy being told that they're just confused and only gain the confidence to transition later in life.
To start my research I just googled "what does transgender mean?" and the image to the left tell you just that. Easy. So why are people still so confused?
Trans / LGBTQ in Animation and film
I thought this would be a great place to start for my project just to see if there was any real repersentation out there for the trans people in the main stream media.
To the left of this you'll see an image of a spider diagram i made of my basic understanding from what I'd seen in film or on televison.
As you can see i thought of loads of Gay/lesbian films/tv shows but next to nothing with an trans charecters in it.
Gender / Sexuality symbol
Gender and sexuality are two very differant things and alot of people dont realise this.
Gender is the sex that you see your self as, where as sexuality is who you're attracted too. Again a pretty simple thing to understand, so why are people still getting confused?
So lets look at the basics.
Gender
noun
noun: gender; plural noun: genders
-
the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).
Click on the link to go to the source
BUTTT its not just that simple anymore, there are more than 2 genders as you can see, I've already explained what it means to be transgender but sometime people just dont have a gender, this is called being gender fluid
Gender fluid is a gender identity which refers to agender which varies over time. A gender fluid person may at any time identify as male, female, neutrois, or any other non-binary identity, or some combination of identities. Their gender identity can vary at random or in response to different circumstances.
Sexual Orientation
noun
-
a person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted; the fact of being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual
Click on the link to go to the source
Sexual orintation is pretty straight forward compared to gender and can be broken down into around 5 categories as shown in the picture above.
Other's
Though i've already covered both gender and sexuality sometimes people still don't fit in.
To the left you'll see the "no idea" which as you can see is mostly used towards transgendered people.
Click on the link to go to the source
How are men and women differant?
I decided to start by doing a really loose search into the basic foundation of the main 2 genders. Female and males
Cisgender men and women
Why and how are men and women differant? Is it something we're born with or ar we taught how to be masculine / feminine by sociaty depending on our assigned gender at birth.
What is feminine and what is masculine?
If we separate humans into the two genders male and female, and measure all kinds of things, physically and psychologically, we find that, on average, some traits differ between the genders. This is clearly not rocket science – we see evidence of that daily when we notice that, on average, men are taller than women, have more body and facial hair, and smaller breasts.
If a trait is stronger in women, it may be called feminine; if it’s stronger in men, it may be called masculine. This is simply how language works, there is no discrimination or value judgement implied. Such classification also does not mean that all women have a particular feminine trait, or that this trait is stronger in every single woman than it is in every single man. It doesn’t even mean there is a large difference between the genders, or that there is only a small or no overlap between the genders. It simply means a significant difference can be observed. Such classification also makes no statement about cause, only about correlation. If a psychological difference is observed, the root may be social, cultural, physiological, etc., or a mixture of many factors.
I found this great artical (linked above) that covered of the science of being transgender along side with so many links to acamenic paper relivent.
Amazing find!
Will definate be returning to this site later in my studies.
FEMININITY
Feminine traits are ways of behaving that our culture usually associates with being a girl or woman.
WORDS COMMONLY USED TO DESCRIBE FEMININITY
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dependent
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emotional
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passive
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sensitive
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quiet
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graceful
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innocent
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weak
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flirtatious
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nurturing
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self-critical
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soft
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sexually submissive
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accepting
Masculine traits are ways of behaving that our culture usually associates with being a boy or man.
WORDS COMMONLY USED TO DESCRIBE MASCULINITY
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independent
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non-emotional
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aggressive
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tough-skinned
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competitive
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clumsy
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experienced
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strong
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active
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self-confident
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hard
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sexually aggressive
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rebellious
Masculinity
Clearly, society’s categories for what is masculine and feminine are unrealistic. They may not capture how we truly feel, how we behave, or how we define ourselves. All men have some so-called feminine traits, and all women have some so-called masculine traits. And we may show different traits at different times. Our cultures teach women and men to be the opposite of each other in many ways. The truth is that we are more alike than different.
