I was pretty amazed at the message board reactions on entertainment blogs to Chastity Bono’s announcement last week that she’s having a sex change. I’m not really surprised at how ignorant people still are to the concept of transgender people in general, but I was really shocked at how people didn’t even bother to step back for a moment and try to comprehend the complexities of it before attacking Chastity’s decision. I don’t personally fully understand how someone feels like the wrong gender inside, but I have tried to imagine what it must feel like to feel like that and how psychologically challenging it has to be. Insider secret—despite much of the general population assuming a sex change is the next step after being gay, most gay people also can’t comprehend the desire to have a sex change.
What being gay does help us understand is what the general public doesn’t—that being gay has nothing to do with being transgender. I’m a male who loves men but never even considered that maybe I was supposed to be a woman. Sexual orientation and gender identity work completely independently of each other. There are people who have sex changes and yet are attracted to the same sex AFTER the sex change (for example, a man has gender reassignment surgery to become a woman who is then a lesbian), which is pretty much your evidence that the two are not related.
I think the introduction of sex changes probably challenged even gay people way back when they were first…um…created? There was one episode of the hilarious 1970s sitcom Soap in which Billy Crystal’s gay character, Jody, decides that the best way for him to be with his lover without being persecuted by society is to get a sex change, so they will basically be a ‘heterosexual’ couple. Seems a really uninformed storyline, despite its incredibly progressive plot for that time, because Jody didn’t really want to be a woman (he eventually decides not to become a woman), not to mention that—would his male loving lover still want to be with him if he had become a woman? I know many people do stay with their partners after sex changes in reality, but personally, that wouldn’t quite work for me. Yeah, I love Danny and all, but part of what I love about him is his wiener! Soap’s slightly erroneous look at a gay man was pretty much a result of trying to present all complexities of ‘alternative’ lifestyles through one single character back then. Jody eventually went from being gay and considering a sex change to having a relationship with a woman and having a baby (which then got kidnapped by the mother’s family, but that’s a whole other ‘soap’ opera!).
But back to the Boner—I mean, Bono. There are those who feel she should have just kept her mouth shut and not announced her sex change if she wanted the privacy she has requested, because it’s TMI. But what would she do? Have the sex change then just appear on the scene as a man and say, “Guess what I did when I was on vacation!” Disappear from the face of the earth, and then when she was a man, just take on an entirely different identity, never explaining whatever become of Chastity Bono? The truth was going to come out eventually, so she just had to give everyone a heads up—and perhaps, hopefully, bring the subject of transgender people into the public eye a bit more.
Many people also seem to be hung up on the fact that Chaz first came out as ‘gay’ and is now coming out as getting a sex change. Is it really hard to understand? Basically, Chastity Bono was NEVER gay. What she was was a straight man trapped in a lesbian’s body (sounds like a bad joke usually told by straight men: ‘I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.’ Yeah—so funny that anyone who is not a straight man forgets to laugh every time. Besides, straight men are way too in love with their own penises to ever be lesbians). It could have taken Chastity years to realize the complexity of who she really was. So initially, she had to find a place where she belonged—people who would accept her. Since she was physically a woman who inside was attracted to women, the logical fit seemed to be that she was a lesbian, so she went with it.
But what does a person do once he or she gets ‘in’ with that group, and realizes something still doesn’t feel right? Really hard to grasp, I know, but just think of how transgender people feel about it. Going all the way is a bigger decision than any of us will ever have to make in our lives, and they should be applauded for making it, whether they decide to go for it or not. Alexis Arquette had the same challenge, and she decided not to go through with the operation, and simply remains a man living as a woman. I can understand that decision as well, because it has to be simply terrifying, no matter what you feel like on the inside, to give up what you’ve known on the outside for so long. Those of us who are not transgender will never truly know what they go through, but if we allow our minds to imagine the complexities of the thought process and the internal emotions, we could be a much more understanding peoples. But we’re all really just too self-involved in our own gender issues and sexual desires to actually bother to take time to understand that of others.
