6 de febrero de 2022

Sexual Identity.
Society builds on the sexed body, and more speci cally on the genitalia (male-female sex), the
gender identity (male-female), which determines for men and women different responsibilities,
activities, behavior patterns, values, tastes, fears, expectations, etc. Gender, therefore, rst of all
gives us an identity, constructs us men and women, and then, based on it, de nes intergender
relations (people of different gender) and intragender relations (people of the same gender), and
on it is built a social organization (economic, political, etc.) that is based on the sexual division of
labor. Gender is not a property of bodies or something that exists originally in human beings. It is
received in the form of codes, norms, written, oral or imaginary mandates, through different
social agents (family, school, churches, mass media, etc.) whose mission is to "integrate" us into
our society and its "normality", or in other words, into social "normativity". This mandate
constructs the masculine on the man-penis and the feminine on the woman-vagina, in an
excluding and opposing way (masculinity excludes femininity and vice versa), as well as
complementary (sexual division of labor, heterosexuality, etc.). (BuLLOUGH, V. L. 1998).
Such a dictatorship of the body annihilates desires, considers any "transgression of the norm" as
an aberration or a deviation and labels it with ridiculing terms, so that a person with a penis who
does not act according to the indicated gender normativity is derogatorily quali ed as a butter y
or a faggot, and a person with a vagina who does not act according to this normativity is quali ed
as a tomboy or a butch.

From such a dual cultural conception (two sexes, two genders) it is understood that transsexuality
and transgenderism are pathologized. In fact, the rst interpretation of transsexuality, in the
1950s, was made from the medical eld and was considered a psychic disorder. (HESS, B. and
CARO, E. 1995)

Since the 1980s, the de-medicalization of transsexuality and the struggle for its non-psychiatric
consideration as a sick mental manifestation in the Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM), has
favored the greater relevance of sociocultural interpretations, and has led to the understanding
that the right to choose one's own destiny is not a pathology. The anthropological analysis of
transsexuality allows, rstly, to consider it as a cultural expression different from what nature

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 prescribes. And secondly, the anthropological perspective allows a journey through time (history
in different social contexts) and space (different contemporary societies) to see its variability, and
therefore, its cultural expressions. Both tasks, walking through time and space, are very dif cult,
since the social need to reorder the "disordered" by virtue of the gender mandate prevents us
from tracing back through history to identify those who, without undergoing surgery (a recent
and non-determinant technique), lived another generic reality different from the one that marked
their body, and also prevents us from knowing the realities of those who, in different
contemporary transphobic societies, are expressing their transgender desires. Therefore, the
exploration in time and space is only approximate.

Transsexuality, an old human expression, seems to be acquiring greater visibility today. This is
due in large part to the individual or group effort of transsexuals themselves, and also to the
space that is opening up in society for the expression of desire. Transsexuality, which is not a
perversion or a pathology but one more aspect of a person's identity, is the representation of a
desire. As Nieto (1998, p. 13) states, human beings are a factory of desires. (LAGARDE, M.
1994)
Sexual desire is one of them, which, like all the others, is generated by each individual in society,
therefore, "there are no personalized social desires, there are individual desires in society". In the
past, desire was accommodated to the rigidity of society or lived in secret, inhibited by
overwhelming and imprisoning social pressure, generating anguish that, in extreme cases, could
lead to suicide attempts (unsuccessful or not). At that time, transsexual women were seen as men
who liked to dress as women and imitate the most exaggerated prototype of femininity, while
hardly anything was known about transsexual men. Today, contrary to what happened in the
past, we are witnessing the social presence of the sexual desires of individuals. Thus, individual
desire emerges and makes itself felt in society with a force unknown in previous times. Immersed
in this emergence, transgender expression ourishes, reminding us that anatomy is not destiny.
Social resistance has elaborated for the understanding of transsexuality the concept of
"transsexual anguish" in order to understand the existence of people trapped in the wrong
bodies. However, this idea can be reinterpreted in such a way that we understand that
"transsexual distress" arises from the fact of having been born into a wrong society/culture, as
Mackenzie already pointed out in 1994. This leads to the recognition that there is greater
variability of personal desires than of culturally and socially accepted sexual choices, and this in
turn reveals that, as Benjamin himself pointed out in another sense, instead of a bipolar desire
there is a continuum of desire. Exclusive oppositions (male-female, masculine-feminine) are
overcome by some who transform themselves into others, some who transform themselves into
others, and by those who participate in both. (MACKENZIE, G. O. 1994)

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 The con guration of personal identity is a very complex phenomenon in which many different
factors are involved, ranging from individual predispositions to the acquisition of various
capacities arising from the process of socialization and education, but undoubtedly a key factor in
the constitution of subjectivity is the determination of gender, the fundamental axis on which the
subject's identity is organized. (NIETO, J. A. 1998)
Traditionally, sex was considered to be the determining factor in the differences observed
between men and women, and was the cause of the social differences existing between people
sexed as male or female. However, for some decades now, it has been recognized that not only
genetic factors, but also power strategies, symbolic, psychological, social, cultural, etc. elements
intervene in the con guration of male or female identity, i.e. elements that have nothing to do
with genetics, but which are very important conditioning factors when it comes to the
con guration of personal identity. Consequently, it is nowadays af rmed that sex accounts for a
large part of the anatomical and physiological differences between men and women, but that all
the rest belong to the domain of the symbolic, the sociological, the generic, and that, therefore,
individuals are not born psychologically made as men or women, but that the constitution of
masculinity or femininity is the result of a long process, of a construction, of a warp that is
woven in interaction with the family and social environment.

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 Bibliogra a:

BuLLOUGH, V. L. (1998). Transsexuality in history. In J. A. Nieto (Comp.).

Transexualidad, transgenensmoy cultura (pp. Gi-ll). Madrid: Talasa Ediciones.

HESS, B. and CARO, E. (1995). Herramientas para construirla equidad entre mujeresj hombres.
Colombia: GTZ- Dpto. Nac. de Planeación.

LAGARDE, M. (1994). LM regulación social del género: el género como ltro de poder. Mexico:
Consejo Nacional de Población.

MACKENZIE, G. O. (1994). Transgender nation. Ohio: Bowling Oreen State

University Popular Press.

NIETO, J. A. (1998). Transgender/transsexuality: from crisis to reaf rmation of desire.

desire. In J. A. Nieto (Comp.), Transexualidad, transgenensmoj cultura (pp. 11-37).
Madrid: Talasa Ediciones.

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