Sex and Identity

Extraordinarily intelligent post from Jim Burroway on Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, as a response to Autumn Sandeen's post noting that Chimgalanga identifies as a woman.  Burroway quite rightly notes that by Western standards, that would make Chimbalanga "transgender," but that we are not dealing with a Western couple.

I agree wholeheartedly with Autumn’s point that this story does say a lot about the LGBT community and media. But I also think that Autumn’s position, as admirable and fully correct as it is from a Western point of view, says more about the construction of sexuality and gender in Western society than it does about how people in other cultures actually see themselves.

As I said, we have avoided describing Tiwonge and Steven as a “gay” couple, but we’ve also avoided describing Tiwonge as intersex, transgender or transsexual, and for good reason. None of these terms may describe Tiwonge very well because they speak to a Western, Euro-centric understanding of sexuality and gender, and not an African one.

Sandeen makes some good points, but as Burroway points out, her assumptions may not be quite on target.   It's the old problem -- assuming that our frame of reference is everyone's frame of reference.  For anyone who has any familiarity with other cultures at all, it's an obvious fallacy.  (Hell, if you're paying attention, you can figure it out from reading manga -- the Japanese have very different ideas than we do about a lot of things.)

At any rate, read both posts -- they intersect very nicely with a lot I've written about cultural identity.