Transgender in the US Military: Embracing Paradox to Find Authentic Self

in #gender7 years ago

"There are a lot of transgendered troops. There are over 15,000 of us, but I know a lot personally. They’re getting discharged left and right, and these are good people for the military. If you worked alongside of me, we served, we went outside of the wire together, we had each other’s backs together, right? So, you didn’t see me any different then, don’t see me any different now – and please, change your opinion on others like me."
– Logan Ireland

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Gender isn’t binary. It has at least four axes: body type, self-image, sexual attraction, and behavior. You can be declared a male at birth, be into women, wear a dress, and feel like you’re a woman. You can be a female biologically, identify as female, wear “men’s” clothing, and be into men. That’s two of eighty-one potential genders, since each axis has at least a masculine and feminine extreme and gender-neutral center (3 x 3 x 3 x 3).

So gender isn’t binary, nor is it just a spectrum, but (again, at least) a four-dimensional topology, a field of possibility. And maps are not the territories that they represent; so even that cannot do credit to the range of possible expression in a human body. Gender has as many possibilities as there are people.

And that’s a lot. In this millennium, societies and worldviews collide and splash into each other, merge and breed and multiply, and what we used to think it means to be a human exponentiates until we reach what would have seemed an unimaginably far horizon, and the word “humanity” no longer holds its meaning. Test your bigoted conservatism: Does an “upload” that believes itself to be your mother but exists as data on a mainframe count? Does your daughter, who has tampered with her DNA, and now has gills and flippers, count? Does the Amazon deserve the legal rights of personhood, at least as much as Amazon.com? This is the slippery and metamorphic landscape that we’re moving into, now. We’re going to have to shed our limited, traditional ideas of normalcy.

Or so the trends appear. But there are organs in the social superorganism, more conservative dimensions of the human world, that won’t go quietly into the night about it. Institutions like the military struggle to adapt to changing climates due to their innate requirements for structure and stability...and so, of course, it is a “major win” when someone who identifies as male but bears a set of female genitals is recognized as male by her battalion’s officers.

How will this new variety of mutant human being – someone freed from oversimplifying categories, someone who adopts an ego only as a practical formality but lives as nameless mystery – still demonstrate that structure and stability required from us by social contracts? We get a glimpse of our post-categorical humanity by asking why it is transgendered people register for military duty twice as frequently per capita than their cisgendered counterparts.

How will the metamorphic, plasmic new human being – one liberated from categories in a world too vast and hyper-diverse for stereotypes and ultimately even ubiquitous agreements about category and label – still live in ways that demonstrate that structure and stability? And this is where we find the tale of Logan Ireland – raised as a girl, but one tough SOB – who says that “What I like about this deployment is, I can be my authentic self.” For him and nearly 16,000 other US military who must hide that they’re transgendered, service in the Forces is the only place that they don’t feel imprisoned by the cultural reflection of an image they cannot accept. The Army is the only place that Ireland can simply be.

Of course, when he says “self” it seems apparent that he means the ego-image that he holds in spite of how society receives him. His fiancée, Laila Villaneuva, was born a male, identifies as female, also serves, and lacks the kind of brotherly support that Ireland receives from his commanders. By coming out, they both risk discharge on the basis of outdated regulations that declare their state of being psychologically impaired.

(But wait – if “psychological impairment” is the issue, here, than anybody who imposes their interpretation of reality on people with the threat of force would be far more insane than someone whose opinion of themselves does not align with our society’s anemic sexual taxonomy. If we define impairment as the opposite of health, then violence of any kind is madness, and a person’s gender is irrelevant.)

The educated guess is that our personalities evolved as a means of keeping track of roles and obligations in society. We’re “people” only insofar as our experience reflects a story of identities in social interaction. When the expectations of our peers and family don’t reinforce the narrative of separation, there’s a possibility for something else – a deeper, more authentic self that doesn’t draw a line between the “I” and “others.”

Ultimately, life is more creative than our minds can grasp. No matter how we try to reason at these things, we’re doomed to fail, and all that we can do is despair or celebrate the vast abundance of the world in all its splendor. Diversity – of gender, culture, species, anything – if properly engaged, becomes a koan and a movement past the stories that divide us into pure experience. Beyond the boxes we defend – identities and borders, names and categories – is reality. It’s more amazing than you think.

Michael Garfield is an evolutionary biologist by training, transmedia artist-philosopher by calling. Dig into his writing, podcast, art, and music feed at patreon.com/michaelgarfield

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I see you are up to very delicate and difficult subjects. I think nowadays people are very polarized if it comes to LGBT, Transexuals and all the gender stuff. The conservatives and liberals cannot come together and discuss it without an emotional and ideological fight. There is lack of rational debate about it in today`s mainstream.

I can't expect to add any rationality to this debate, but hopefully by highlighting how we weave our identities out of our raw experience I can help people see how the reasons they spend so much time fighting are really not worth the violence.

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