DISCLAIMER: this page is entirely subjective and the material herein
should not be taken as gospel but rather as the opinions of one person
My Story
In an effort to explain more fully what psychological androgyny is,
I will here use myself as an example. Twenty-five years ago, I had a
girlfriend who liked the music of David Bowie. I eventually became a big
Bowie fan because I found him attractive and wished I could be him. I
felt great kinship with Bowie. I felt that I was androgynous just like
he was, but since I didn't look that way, I resented it when others could
effect the glitter / glam look -- because I was The Real Bowie Fan while
they were posers.
My relationship with the girl who got me interested in Bowie went
awry, and evolved into a demoralizing, unrequited love affair that left
me dejected and quite distraught. In an attempt to find relief, I took
a friend's advice and went to a gay disco (this was 1978). In the space
of just a few weeks, I discovered that my attraction to males was mostly
to feminine (as opposed to effeminate) and crossdressed males. In those
days, there were not too many transsexuals of the shemale (pre-operative
transsexuals who capitalize on their "full male function") variety, so
what I encountered was drag queens, which are TG (transgendered) gay men
with a heightened sense of camp and melodrama (in contrast, transvestites
are straight and do not frequent gay establishments).
For the most part, my attraction to drag queens was emotional. I
had crushes on them and would pine away, longing for their love. The few
times I had sexual relations with drag queens, however, were not the best
experiences, since the queens would remove their wigs, make-up and
clothing first, thereby "breaking the spell," as it were. I had been
looking forward to making love to a drag queen, not to her gay male alter
ego.
I found myself not only drawn to males in women's clothing, but to
the possibility of wearing women's clothing myself, and I did so a half
dozen times. I wasn't sure why I wanted to do this, though. Two or
three years before, I had on occasion wished that I'd been born a girl
instead of a boy, but I had never really wanted to dress as a girl
before. Now, I did. I found that drag queens generally didn't like it
when their boyfriends showed as much of an interest in their clothing as
in them, though. I really didn't understand my attraction to drag queens
and wanting to wear women's clothing, so I went into the closet, telling
myself that I was a closet transvestite, and I stayed in this closet for
23 years.
About a year and a half ago, I went to a Thai restaurant, and after
about 10 minutes of intense scrutiny, concluded that my waitress had not
been born female. We talked and I was quickly entranced and smitten.
This was the first time I'd met and conversed with a transgendered male
outside the context of a disco or a bar, and I was surprised to realize
that I did not feel guilty about my attraction.
I went online and learned lots about transgendered folk, hellbent on
discovering how it could be that I was both tranny and trannychaser. I
had always been told that there was something wrong with being both. I
took the COGIATI gender test and I scored as "androgyne," but I had never
heard the term before, and since the score explanation described
androgyne as someone who was androgynous, I automatically disregarded the
description's relevance to myself on the grounds that I was not
androgynous. After all, I didn't look androgynous, so how could I be?
Eventually, I went to a gender therapist and concluded that I was indeed
androgyne. I joined the androgynes internet mailing list at Yahoo and
began to hash out with the list subscribership the finer points of
androgyny, the results of which are this website.
Curiously, I met with a great deal of opposition in the androgynes
Yahoo group when I proposed that just because someone looked androgynous
didn't mean that he or she was androgynous. As a result, I came to feel
that the terms androgyne and androgynous do not describe the same thing.
I came to view the term androgyny as describing a look, a lifestyle or an
identity, but viewed androgyne specifically as an identity. To this day,
I bristle when referred to as androgynous because of all those years of
wishing I could be like David Bowie, little realizing that I had been all
along!
Androgynes: the Psychologically Androgynous
Psychological androgyny -- which is basically just another way of
referring to the state of being androgyne -- can be maddening. Trying to
display outwardly what is inside can be difficult, and the results are
often interpreted by passersby not as "androgynous," but as "non-passing
transsexual," i.e. the dreaded (by TGs) "man in a dress." Being born
with androgynous looks is one thing. Trying to make oneself appear to be
androgynous is another.
I am convinced that there is a huge number of androgynes who do not
realize that they are androgyne because of two reasons. First, there is
not a lot of data on androgynes as yet -- few studies, virtually no
tabloid TV, nor movies on the subject. Second, most androgynes never
"come out" because they don't "snap" like transsexuals do: they don't
have a midlife crisis / epiphany where they suddenly decide they either
have to live their lives as the "opposite sex" or take their own lives.
Most androgynes live lives of quiet desperation, never discovering who
and what they truly are: neither men nor women.
Female androgynes tend to recognize themselves less frequently than
male androgynes do for two reasons. First, females in our present
culture are able to openly wear pants and be assertive, whereas males
cannot wear skirts and be passive without courting disaster. Second, the
lines between butch, androgyne and F2M (as in female-to-male transsexual)
are quite blurred in lesbian subcultures.
Some Thoughts on Drag Queens and Shemales
Drag queens, like androgynes, constitute a different category than
the standard TG (transgender) categories of TV (transvestite) and TS
(transsexual), and yet, since they are the most visible of TGs in pop
culture, many androgynes' first exposure to TGs other than themselves may
be to drag queens. Insofar as many androgynes' attractions to other TGs
are more a matter of gender affinity than sexual orientation, drag
queens' clearcut homosexuality presents a problem. Are drag queens
transgendered in the same way that TVs and TSs are? For the most part, I
would say no, but the existence of shemales calls that assumption into
question.
While it has been argued that androgynes are inherently bisexual
since they can identify with either gender, it might be more apropos to
call them homogenderal since they have a strong tendency to be attracted
to both one another and "the opposite gender." In this context, it is
understandable when an androgyne male is attracted to females, female
androgynes, male androgynes, feminine intersex people, M2F
(male-to-female) TSs and shemales. All of the these groups share a
strong component of femininity in their psychological makeup, and yet,
save for the females category, all also contain a distinct component of
masculinity. What differentiates drag queens from other bio-male (or
male-born) TG folks might be that their gender identities are masculine
(like those of TVs?). My guess is that this has something to do with the
fact that they identify as men who are attracted to men. Those people
who are attracted to drag queens may have a non-traditional gender
identity, but by and large, drag queens are gay men who have a need to
parody, satirize or otherwise lampoon women for dramatic effect.
Shemales are the most maligned of all TGs because "the transsexual
community" generally holds that a self-professed TS who doesn't despise
their male genitalia isn't "a real TS." The fact that only an estimated
10% of TSs ever get SRS (sex reassignment surgery), however, implies that
there are far more shemales in the world than so-called "real
transsexuals." Think about it: for the non-op TS, the options are pretty
much limited to either living one's life enjoying genital sex or not.
The individual's H[R]T (hormone [replacement] therapy) regimen determines
whether or not male function will remain viable or not, so such is a
conscious decision. It is understandable that some people would rather
not forego genital sex for their whole lives.
Questions Concerning The Nature of Attraction
The question arises whether or not a trannychaser (or "T admirer")
is bisexual or homosexual for his attraction to T folk. TSs will argue
that since they are women, their relationship with a man is heterosexual.
Many chasers, however, will point out that the sex acts involved in such
a relationship are of a strictly homosexual nature, and so there is a
double standard. Things are trickier for the androgyne trannychaser
because they identify as neither of the standard binary genders.
It is because of (male) androgynes' gender betweenness that
relationships with drag queens are the least productive or viable. Would
a male androgyne's relationship with a TV be any better, then? I would
say no on the grounds that TVs are heterosexual and would find
androgynes' genitalia an insurmountable obstacle. Why then would a male
androgyne's relationship with a (biological) female work? It's because
the androgyne is drawn to femininity in general, and what better source
than a bio female? That said, it is androgynes' affinity for mixed
gender messages that draws them towards people whose genders or bodies
are mixed in one way or another. It is all too easy for an androgyne to
conflate mixed gender with mixed sex, and therefore clothed TG
individuals of all sorts can be attractive to an androgyne if and when
there is an incongruity of gender and sex.
Oddly, the psyche tends to interpret both intersex and shemale
individuals as being of mixed sex, and yet only the former can be of
mixed sex. Shemales generally think of themselves as TS despite what
the rest of the TS community might think. Their bodies can be confusing
for androgynes in that shemales can be mistaken for having two genders or
two sexes. For that matter, it has been put forth by at least one
T-girl, Renee Reyes, that trannychasers are inherently transgendered. I
tend to agree with this. As the argument goes, homosexuals are men
attracted to other men, while trannychasers are not attracted to men but
to women, despite the fact that many of these women don't have female
genitalia (yet, if ever). Some trannychasers might be closet homosexuals
who find sex with males who look like women to be less intimidating, but
hardly all of them are. The proportion, however, is currently unknown.
I suspect that androgynes are predisposed toward trannychaserdom (or
should that be trannychasing?) insofar as they identify with neither
gender and therefore feel an affinity with people of mixed or otherwise
unfixed gender and / or sex. This gives androgynes great freedom, and in
a way lends weight to the term third gender, because since androgynes are
neither men nor women, sexual orientation isn't really an issue.
Take the above as brainstorming or ranting, as you will. There are
some things that I felt a need to communicate to others, and that's what
I have done. The disclaimer at the top of this page applies.
