tuesday

unicornduke:

fuckyeahgenderstudies:

This is fucking super interesting.

A graduate student of famed neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has found a group of men and women who report that their sexual identity can switch involuntarily to that of the opposite sex and back again. The transgender metamorphosis, these people assert, can occur several times a day and at inopportune moments. It is also accompanied by the sensation of phantom breasts or genitalia of the non-biological sex.

The research grows out of Ramachandran’s long-standing fascination with the study of body image and how it contributes to a basic sense of the self, work that has included investigations into the phantom limbs of amputees.

This sounds like gender fluid people. The biggest problem I had with the article is that is called their gender identity “sexual identity”. Gender/=/sexuality.

cruising by to offer unhelpful commentary. I’m guessing, based on the name and the particular misuse of “sexual identity” that the authors of the original research (and possibly even the article itself) are not native English speakers/speaking the English taught in post-colonial countries, and thus use sexual identity in a more literal interpretation, that the person feels a difference in sex rather than in gender (especially considering that gender is a social construction, composed primarily of learned behaviors and social cues, like the way people dress) and as they’re talking about phantom limbs, gender… isn’t exactly what they mean. So, yes, the term is being used incorrectly, but they also are likely operating in a slightly different linguistic/cultural system, and either way, don’t actually have a better term to substitute since they’re not talking about gender fluidity, but literal bodily fluidity between sexes, even if that fluidity exists only in the mind.

If I’m heinously wrong, blame the fact that I’m lazy and didn’t read anything more than the blurb. /wanders off.