Britni Danielle of Oh My God, That Britni’s Shameless brings up a cool point about assumptions about transsexuals and gender.
While transwomen have a harder time passing in society, transmen oftentimes have a slightly easier social transition. Many find refuge in the lesbian community, where butch women are accepted and celebrated, and many can fly under the radar that way. And in public, many transmen are simply mistaken for young boys, as opposed to transwomen who oftentimes look like a “man in a dress” during their transition. This may also to contribute to older studies that had found that for every 3 transwoman, there was one transman. For a long time, transmen could choose to remain being seen as butch lesbians and were therefore not as obvious and desperate to transition as many transwomen were. Now that being transgender is becoming more socially acceptable, the number of transmen is increasing greatly and slowly catching up to the prevalence of transwomen.ÂÂ
Sometimes it’s not that gender gaps exist, it’s that our assumptions about gaps make it easier to ignore people who don’t fit them. Asexual men? Naw man! 90% of men masturbate/look-at-porn/whatever and the other 10% are liars. Sexually dominant women? Naw man! I paid for a night with a “femdom” and she was hawt! Transmen? Naw man, that’s just another one-a-them bull dykes.
Submitted by 2742 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-02-27 21:47.
Probably off subject, but this brings up something I noticed awhile back. It seems that gender-switching in the media is portrayed vastly differently depending on if the original gender was male or female. When it comes to simple crossdressing, men in drag are usually portrayed as comical, whereas women in drag is usually portrayed as trying to fit into a male role.
When it comes to actual sex-change, whether realistic or magical... for men becoming women, I've seen a few dozen of examples of that (several dozen if you count throwaway jokes) most of which were, again, treated comically, often a forced change that humiliates the subject. ("Your body was burned so badly we couldn't even tell what sex you were, so we reconstructed you based on the photo of this girl we found in your belongings!") Whereas with female-to-male... it seems they pretty much don't exist. Okay, I can count five examples: the movie "Boys Don't Cry" (except this is questionable because there's no actual sex-change in it), the show "The L Word" (haven't seen it personally, no cable, so not sure if it counts), an episode of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" where Sabrina turns into a boy to find out if boys act differently when she's not around (they don't), a chapter of the popular webcomic "The Wotch" (which is partly mitigated by the fact that the Wotch turns boys into girls instead in all the other chapters), and the Japanese Comic "Futaba-Kun Change" which features an entire clan of people who switch sexes based on their emotional state after reaching puberty (which is also partly mitigated by the fact that the main character grew up male and there isn't much focus on any female-born ones until later chapters). I'm sure there's probably more, but most of these are pretty obscure examples as it is, and all of them only existed for the past decade or so. With male-to-female, I've been exposed to examples for my entire life, without even looking for them.
[Note to Anime/Manga fans: I am not counting "Birdy the Mighty" or "Maze: the Megaburst Space" because while the focus may have been more on the female "halves", in both cases they were really two different people occupying the same body.]
Submitted by 2742 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-02-28 18:55.
and then there's "never give up," where a "princely" girl is forced/blackmailed by her mother, the owner of a modeling agency, to pass herself off as a male model so she can be near the boy she's been in love with since, like, ever, who has gone into modeling. whereupon hijinks ensue, of course, because let's face it, it's a japanese manga and those mangaka sure love their hijinks. there's a goodly amount of gender-bending in this one, actually...
also, what about "ranma 1/2"?
Submitted by 2742 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-03-02 21:34.
Because in Ranma 1/2, Ranma (and much later, Herb) are inherently male both physically and mentally. I have a hard time considering someone who was born male, is female only half the time, and doesn't desire to change from their original sex to count as a "Female-to-male". Unless you were thinking of Ukyou, but she's a crossdresser who does not actually desire to be male, and is not in any way sex-altered (willing or forced).
Likewise, I'm not familiar with "Never give up", but it sounds like merely crossdressing to be able to take on a male role, which I mentioned is very common. I was pointing out the fact that genuine or "magically forced" female-to-male trans are virtually nonexistent in the media, whereas male-to-female has had some visibility for at least a few decades, even if only sometimes as a joke.