keryx | (no subject)

On one of the lists I belong to, there's been some really interesting discussion about people's stances on body modification. I find most surgical body modification problematic. I wouldn't insist that others not get surgery to change the way their appearance, but it feels to me that plastic (even reconstructive) surgery, weightloss surgery and sex-reassignment are all ways in which we force the body to conform to cultural norms (duality of gender, fat is evil, there's only one kind of beautiful).

That doesn't mean I condemn individuals for making these choices. I just think the choices can (like all individual choices) add up to reinforcing those norms. But if the decision is to do that, or to live in a world that sends messages about your failure to fit 24/7... I can't fault someone for not being a Warrior of the New Culture or whatever, you know? It's hard just to be sorta fat, just to be a woman, just to be queer - it has to be much harder for your body to be seen by the culture (of which you are part) as a symbol of your Fundamental Wrongness.

I usually just shut up about this, because we're talking about choices that don't feel remotely optional to the people who make them. That's not them failing - it's a culture failing them; it's all of us believing that sex=gender or fat=agony. This is obvious to most of us when we talk about SRS or reconstructive surgery after cancer or something, but we're much more likely to criticise individuals for wanting "younger looking skin" or something else we consider shallow. The culture's not where it needs to go yet, and individuals are in different places along the way. So I can only criticise the culture, not the people wading through it.

I'm feeling optimistic today. This weekend I was watching television and realized that I found Tom Cruise oddly hot. I have a long history of being completely turned off by the buffly athletic hero body type. I like curvy and soft and wiry and gaunt, you know? [Not all together, silly!] But I've come to find buffness attractive as my partner has become more and more buff.

And I'm thinking the culture changes like that, too. The more each of us come to know a wider range of bodies, the more acceptable those bodies will be. It's started already, all over. That's why there's so much furor over "real beauty" and the Obesity Crisis, Egads! - because that change will slowly and fundamentally alter the nature of the way things and ideas get sold.

Yeah. I'm feeling optimistic.

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As someone who is very genderqueer, but looks an awful lot like a female, I agree with

trinityva that surgery under these conditions is usually really complicated. In my case, I don't identify as a man any more than as a woman--I'm some kind of gendered or genderless other--but I look like a woman and people regard me as a woman, and I find myself increasingly in a situation where my body is just a pain in the ass with too much extra stuff. The root cause of this is the fact that I have very large breasts. We're talking so large that when I try to do drag, wrapping reduces them to a B cup. I have seriously considered (am still considering, actually) getting a breast reduction, because I don't like having them be so large that I don't have the option of looking more male. I don't like having something that makes me have to look so much like a woman when I feel so other.

The desire to look more androgynous is also what is currently motivating my desire for weight loss, because I'd like to be just a little less curvy.

And I'm not saying that these concerns are completely removed from and independent of societal beauty standards. They're not. I'm human and I've lived in this culture for 21 years, and I've internalized my fair share of bullshit regarding weight and breast size. But, if I identified as a woman, I would never consider surgery, because my body looks like that of a woman, and I could learn to love it. I really think I could.

But I don't. And it's very important to me that I be able to look the way I feel, to be able to dress in such a way that people will wonder what sex/gender I am, to bust up people's conception of me and my gender. And yes, if we lived in a society where no one made gender assumptions, I might not feel the need to do this--because if no one made any assumptions about my identity or anyone else's, those of us who are transgendered/genderqueer might not feel the need to assert our gender identity (or lack thereof) as we do. But we still might want these things just to feel comfortable as ourselves--to feel comfortable in our skins (obviously I can speak only for myself).

I'm not trying to argue against anything you said. In fact, I was more relating my willingness to defer to individual choice on other surgical body modifications to the stance that seems obvious to most folk on SRS. Reduced down to an absurdly simple level, it's about looking the way you feel inside, which is the same thing people think about WLS and plastic surgery. I contend that people feel that way because they place value (mostly as a result of existing a duality-loving culture) on being way X vs. Y - or in the case of gender, because the culture doesn't recognize anything between a male and female body, and very little between male and female gender. But ideally we would. So, looking "female" wouldn't mean anything about gender or identity, any more than looking "fat" would say anything about your other characteristics, and we would accept a lot of bodies (and genders) in between that defied definition by today's standards - bodies that could be completely okay as they are.

As I said, I'm feeling optimistic today.