My friend just made an interesting post about the “Pregnant Man” story. ‘[It’s] complete nonsense,’ he says, ‘Beatie is not a pregnant man […] the fact that Beatie has had her breasts removed does not make her a man.’ He goes on to say that, ‘Dennis Abner is not a tiger.’
This was my reply:
Yeah. You’re wrong.
Choosing to be (like) a tiger, lizard or anything else is not the same as being psychologically and neurologically male, and ending up with female anatomy. The two are incomparable. You’re right, the fact that Beatie has had [his] breasts removed does not make [him] a man. That just helped him feel more comfortable about himself. You blithely refer to contrasts between gender and sex as to suggest knowledge of the complexities of them, but the whole thrust of your post is based on a failure to understand them.
Now then, I suspect what you want to point out is more a comment on the media than it is about gender. Sure: This isn’t some kind of ground breaking biological/scientific breakthrough, and that’s right. Headlines are headlines, what do you want? The fact that the media is reporting this as a ‘male pregnancy’ rather than ‘a freaky woman who wants to be a man’ is a GOOD step though. It’s as fundamental as not referring to homosexuals as if they were criminals. That alone is worth any ‘hubub’. Your post is an insult to that progress, unintended as it is.
I’ve not made a careful study of Dennis Abner, but I have studied gender. However, on the wing: You have to get your fundamentals correct.
Saying Abner is actually a cat would be absurd, because he is human. He’s expressing himself like a cat. It’s an extreme of me wearing eyeliner and having a ‘goth’ identity, because I associate with gothic aesthetics and culture. I’m still, contrary to some opinion, human.
Assimilating the characteristics of Henry VIII, or even believing yourself to be Henry VIII does not make you Henry VIII. (If you want to go the route that transgendered people are just mentally ill, like they used to say gay people were, then your awareness is decades out of date with known facts, and I can’t help you.)
Yet Beatie is male, and has always been male. (We accept his anatomy as a mere biological quirk, disorder or accident.) This is because sophisticated thinking respects that gender is not accurately described by anatomy, any more than sexuality is.* If you think that being homosexual is ‘assimilated’/nurtured or any of that other discredited bullshit, again I can’t help you. Gender is similar. This is at the crux of the difference between transgendered people, and transvestites, or drag queens. Male transvestites might ‘assimilate the emotions and reactions’ of women, or simply imitate them, but they are still men. They know they’re men, they’re comfortable with being men. They are men who want to express themselves in a feminine idiom. That’s different from Beatie, but there might be parallels to Abner.
And by the way, in this there are clues as to why the T got added to GLB, even though as you say they are different things.
* The specifics of why I couldn’t possibly cover here. As someone else said, you’d have to read lots of books.