Film: What Makes You Your Gender?

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Isaac, another kid from the documentary, offers an answer to those questions. He too began transitioning at a young age like Ariel. He cut his hair, started wearing masculine clothes, and began taking testosterone hormones at age fifteen. It’s “a super fun drug in some ways,” Isaac said, “without doing anything, you just grow like more muscle. It gives this sort of deep booming voice, and all this extra hair you can play with” (Isaac Preiss, What Makes You Your Gender?). He revelled in all of his new physical characteristics. However, unlike Ariel, Isaac had the privilege of hindsight at the age of nineteen. He knew that he was a boy mentally, but he wanted to become one physically as well. And that was why he turned to testosterone. After …show more content…
He said that at age 16, he “essentially ended up rejecting the idea of gender entirely” (Frontline). He finally had the masculine features he wanted, but there was no longer the need to perform. In this way, Isaac was like Preciado, who used hormones to not change his gender, but to hack it. Preciado says that “I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me…” (Preciado 16). Preciado and Isaac both receive a fair amount of backlash due to their use of testosterone in a nonconventional way. Many people thought that Isaac was “self-hating and delegitimizing anyone who has undergone medical transition” (frontline) and others judged Preciado because he “took testosterone outside the aegis of a medical protocol, without wanting to become a man..” (Preciado 56). Both used testosterone in a way that pleased them and their needs. The writer Gary Greenberg, who discusses the advantages and setbacks of defending the biological causes of homosexuality versus the belief that homosexuality is a choice in his essay “The Science of Sexual Identity”, uses a term that describes the action of personally molding one’s characteristics: “self-reconstruction” (Greenberg …show more content…
All the kids in the documentary are in some way, reconstructing their biological makeup. Greenberg writes that sexual orientation, and even gender identity, “is inborn and immutable” (Greenberg 3). And yet, the need to take hormones to adhere to one’s internal identity makes it seem as though transitioning is some sort of illness that must be fixed. The majority of the kids felt like, as Preciado puts it, “gender dysphorics” (Preciado 55). Gender dysphoria occurs when one’s body does not match the gender that they feel to be true. Ariel and Isaac felt as though their bodies needed to match with their internal genders, or else they would feel unsatisfied with their lives. That dissatisfaction, many critics of transsexualism believe, is simply because they are deviating from the norm of cisgender. Cisgender means that one feels and identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth. Like the ex-gay men from Greenberg's writing who decide to stop being gay, many people, including the parents of some of these children, believe that transgender people have the decision to be trans or not. That is not true, as Greenberg explains, because reparative therapy or denial only “leads people to repress rather than change their natural inclinations” (Greenberg 3). He also writes that sexual orientation, like being trans, “is so deeply woven into a person’s identity that it is inseparable
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