What is the body?

If we read different definitions about the body there is a consensus to talk about it not as a physical fact but as an elaboration. The body is not a group of organs; it is cultural perception of those organs in relation with social order and world order of each civilization. The body is in separate from human beings, it is a possession, a characteristic, at the same time body is a mark, a frontier that distinguished from the rest. As Le Breton said, a human being is not a product of a body, human being produce body’s qualities in its interaction with others and in its immersion with symbolic field. Body condition is created in society"(19). [1]

What is possible to be touch and seems to be a fact is build by social matters that also affect the way we feel and act with our body. The body is surround of social imaginary and social practices, social and cultural facts, there is a much closed relationship between society and the body. Le Breton explains it: “The body is metaphorist by the society and society is metaphorist by the body. In the body is possible to identify social and cultural symbolic challenges”(73). There is nothing strange in the fact that the body produced gender differences, because they exist in society as essential frameworks of identities and cultural roles.

What is a Trans’s body?
In Tran’s population are included transvestites, transsexuals and transgenders, at the same time that intersexuals. Each one have a specific way to feel and live their bodies.

Transvestite had ambiguous bodies, they keep his masculine sexual organs but they wear feminine clothes, gesture, voices. This metamorphosis could be made occasionally, in some private moments, or special occasions or could be assume in a permanent way. As we know there are only visible feminine transvestite, men to adopt women appearance. Body for transvestites is a total space of pleasure; they feel erotic and sexual desire in dressing and transform their bodies. They have many sources of pleasure, not only their sexual organs, but they continue using them to sexual orgasm, as they use to penetrate or be penetrated.

“I feel empty when I’m not dress. My breath, my pulse, my metabolism, my heart, all my body is different. There is something strange: when I’m Pepa I almost don’t go to pi, because is more difficult to women doing that in the street, I get use to retain. The same happen when I slept with make up in the arms of men. I dreamt different, I dreamt with colors and clothes that never appear when I am Joseph”.[2]

For transsexuals their body dysphoria makes them feel uncomfortable with their sexual organs that are why they prefer get a genital resignation and hormonal treatments to looking for a new appearance. Scientific advances now could rebuild vaginas but are not very good at rebuild masculine sexual organs. In this procedures there is a paradigma that forced bodies to be “normal”.

Transgender adopt an identity that is beyond their bodies. They see their self as men or women. And not only in their clothes, also in their actions and conceptions. It is most important their mental construction of their identity. In many cases they make some treatments (hysterectomy, uterus removed; ovariectomy, ovaries removed; mastectomy, mammalian glands removed; orquidectomy, testicules removed).

Intersexuals have at the same time masculine and feminine characteristics in different degrees. The problem come when society, doctors or parents, impose one of the two genders, most of the time that which is more notorious or which they choose arbitrary, before the subject could be able to decide for their own. That makes a conflict between gender identity and gender that was choose for them.

What construction of body makes Trans possible?
For many people and activists Trans identities questioned fixed masculine and feminine identities. That is why they don’t have any problem to say “I’m a man with vagina” or “I’m a woman with penis”, because their sexual organs or their external appearance is not what determines what they are. The question is if that make them questioned society because some of them are trying to be like the other gender, in the fixed manners it is determine. It is a paradox of social normalization because corporal ambiguity is not accepted.

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Reference
[1] Le Breton, David. La sociología del cuerpo. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 2002.
[2] Schifter Sikora, Jacobo. De ranas a princesas. Sufridas, atrevidas y travestidas. San José de Costa Rica: Instituto Latinoamericano de Prevención y Educación en Salud (ILPES), 1998.