You feel like you sometimes don’t fit in because you like to dress or do things that are associated with the opposite sex. You question what your identity is, you have doubts about what it means that you like to wear clothes of the other sex, is it normal? Does it mean I’m transsexual? Does it imply that I am homosexual? Nothing of this. Society has imposed rules on you, a way of being and thinking just because of the genitals you were born with. And you have had no say in this imposition. Being born a man or being born a woman does not mean that you have to like “man things” or “woman things.”
Keep reading this Psychology-Online article in which we will explain why you might like to wear women’s clothes as a man to know more about the topic.
The concept of gender
Before starting to answer the question that occupies the title of this article, it is advisable to review some definitions to fully understand and address this topic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the gender Like the socially constructed roles, the behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. That is, gender is not something natural, but a social and cultural construction based on sexual differences.
For Judith Butler, gender theorist and precursor of queer theory, gender is constituted through the acts that socially and culturally are associated with one gender or another, an idea that he calls the theory of performativity. Therefore, since gender is formed through a stylized repetition of acts, it is not a stable identity, there is no “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes.
If you are interested in the topic, you can read here.
sex and gender
During the 1950s, North American social psychology focused on the analysis of behavioral patterns of people. female and male sexes from an essentialist and heterosexist perspectiveaccording to which the biological sex of the individual was what determined their identity.
Within our culture it is not possible (or at least it is very difficult) to separate sex and gender. According to Butler, since the body is inevitably transformed into his or her body, it is only possible to know the body by its gendered appearance. This idea becomes evident when, for example, we encounter a person whose body does not have a defined gender appearance and we get nervous because we can’t classify it within one sex or another. The rule is so internalized that the exception not only confirms it, but also makes us realize the relevance that the body has in the construction of gender, and that we can understand how this becomes the battlefield for those who fight to perpetuate the norm and those who fight to destroy it, such as those who they dress in a non-normative way to that which has been established according to their sex.
In the following article you will find.
Why am I a man but I like to dress as a woman?
It is important to first clarify two concepts that can often be confused. On the one hand, we have the sexual identitywhich corresponds to the personal experience of belong to one sex or another (male or female) based on sexual (genital) characteristics. Two terms are derived from here:
- Cissexualif we believe that the body we were born with is the one that belongs to us.
- Transsexualif we feel that the body that has touched us does not belong to us.
On the other hand, we have the gender identitywhich refers to the identification with the contents of the genre, that is, with the model of male or female person that each individual builds on himself and is part of personal identity.
Some authors define gender identity as self-classification as man or woman based on what is culturally understood as man or woman. The process of constructing gender identity is at an intra-individual level, but it develops in interaction with the learning of roles, stereotypes and behaviors. Even so, this does not imply the assumption of gender roles and attitudes, since each person develops their own sense of masculinity and femininity. However, the practices that correspond to each gender are standardized and are perfectly identifiableso the very sense of masculinity or femininity may differ or adjust more or less to what is understood by the masculine or feminine gender, causing the person to feel more or less comfortable with the gender you have been assigned (because, as we have already seen, gender has to be constructed, by default, based on sex), from which new ways of understanding gender can be proposed and generated, thus emerging a series of new concepts such as queer.
In the case of clothing, “dressing as a man” or “dressing as a woman” are simply ways of dressing that have been associated respectively with the male gender and the female gender, but there is nothing in a man’s DNA that implies that he You have to like “dressing like a man” or you have to dislike “dressing like a woman.” One can like women’s clothing just as one likes to go to the beach, the problem is that in the first case he has been taught since childhood that he should dress in men’s clothes and that he should reject women’s clothes. The vast majority internalize these learnings without questioning them as part of “their way of being”, or they abide by them in order to fit into the society that surrounds us, but the way you dress is still a matter of tasteso we could start by changing the phrase “I am a man but I like to dress as a woman” to “I am a man and I like to dress as a woman.”
Gender identity and Queer theory
One of the points that queer theory addresses is the questioning of identity as something fixed, coherent and natural, a questioning that opens the way for the theorization of other categories such as sexuality and gender as socially constructed. That is, queer theory questions the categories of sex and gender, and identities in general.
Queer describes the incoherence in the stable relationships between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Institutionally, queer has been most commonly associated with gay and lesbian issues, but its analytical framework also includes issues such as transvestism, hermaphroditism, androgyny, etc.
The queer perspective recognizes the confluence of identities, sometimes with contradictory effects, in the same subject.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Butler, J. (1990). The gender in dispute. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Barcelona: Paidós.
- García-Leiva, P. (2005). Gender identity: explanatory models. Psychological Writings, 7, 71-81.
- Heredero, O. and García, J. (2015). The metrosexual man as contemporary Narcissus: the role of current advertising discourse in the construction of masculinity. Information Sciences Documentation, 38, 245-263.
- Penedo, SL (2016). The queer labyrinth: Identity in times of neoliberalism. Egales Editorial.