Human Rights for Trans Men in Colombia Tak Combative (D. C. Hernández) & Colectivo Entre-tránsitos
From sex to gender, the situation of trans men
When did you decide to be a man? When did you decide to be a woman? These questions make no sense at all for most people, because most people never make such a decision. If we understand gender as a performative way of being, determined by culturally assigned roles, appearances, behaviors, and so forth, maybe we can give a little bit more meaning to the questions above. According to Judith Butler, gender is a way to interpret our physical differences; it is a condition not of what we are, but of what we do. (1) In fact, the real questions are: What does it mean to be a man? Or what does it mean to be a woman? Does it have to do exclusively with the way our bodies look? Gender studies have led us to understand several issues regarding this topic. First of all, we have learned that there is a difference between sex and gender. For several decades that difference was thought as a distinction between biology and culture. Sex was thought as the male/female division according to genitalia and reproductive functions. Gender was understood as the set of behaviors that corresponded to each sex. But the difference between biology and culture became more and more controversial when the concept of ‘the biological’, understood as a description of pure ‘facts’ about nature, was very difficult to maintain. It turned out that a biological description was also a way to interpret reality and, therefore, it was influenced by historical, social, political and ideological issues. It could be useful to remember, for example, that in Ancient Greece there was only one sex for human beings: male. Women were considered males with inverted sex (“one-sex model” according to Thomas Laqueur (2)). Nowadays both sex and gender are thought as social and cultural constructions. However, the difference between them (as much as the difference between sexual orientations and gender, for example) allows us to understand that to be a man does not equal having a penis, and to be a woman does not equal having a vagina. It turns out, then, that to be a man or a woman has to do with a series of behaviors, dress codes, roles in society, activities one is allowed to do or not, advantages or disadvantages regarding different kinds of power, etc. This means that there are a lot of ways to understand the concept of woman and man, depending on the context. Especially for the Western mentality, there is a set notion of what it entails to be of either gender. This often leads to discrimination against those who are not easily categorized as a conventional man or a conventional woman. They are limited, oppressed and segregated by other members or entities of society. Having taken into account what has been mentioned above, perhaps it is easier to understand more about the questions that were raised. In general, we assume our gender without much consideration, almost by instinct. But if we analyze gender the way we have done, we can critically question how we name or