What I can say is the justice system isn’t. I spent a lot of my life in red sports cars. During that time, I spent a lot of my life in courts arguing to nice judges that I wasn’t speeding. I usually lost. Actually, I think I always lost.

Then one day I bought a green car and my traffic tickets went way down.

Then a few years later I bought a silver car. Still fewer tickets.

The changes were just too abrupt to be some kind of change in driving, like I’m getting old so I’ve slowed down. And it wasn’t like I was getting old and buying lower-horsepower cars. My first red sports car — average 2 speeding tickets a year — made about 120HP. The next red sports car — same 2 speeding tickets a year — made about 150HP. Green sports coupe? About 200HP and 1 ticket every other year. Silver supercharged sports sedan? Who knows how much (I’m afraid to even guess — it’s faster than my 300HP V8 powered car), but I’ve gotten ZERO speeding tickets and only 1 ticket for running a red light (it was pink, I swear!)

I think this is also a good analogy for talking about impulse vs. behavior, and transitory vs. permanent. If you gave up coffee after decades of use, you’d probably be a pretty irrational, unpleasant person for a short time, suffering from any number of emotional and physical problems. But you’d learn to compensate for those ill effects pretty quickly, and your body would learn to compensate at the same time–just as you and it learned to compensate for the stimulant you were taking on a regular basis before.

IME, hormones were and are pretty similar. I had a personality, preferences, and a routine throughout; those were the most important factors in my behavior.

If I drink half a bottle of wine with dinner, will I need to get my stomach pumped because I’ve just consumed alcohol? Probably not. There’s a difference in quantity and administration; transmen are typically on levels that mimic the levels that half the planet’s population is “on” every day. They don’t take more because of effects you might be familiar with from your cursory research into steroids: higher doses of testosterone can cause many physical problems, and don’t offer much extra benefit in exchange. Many transmen report emotional effects from testosterone, either transitory or permanent; it’d be irresponsible to equate these with ‘roid rage, just as it would be irresponsible to equate tipsiness with a blackout. Cause and effect are both different.

I’m a trans woman. I too have experienced what it is like to shift from being “hormonally male” to “hormonally female.” Yes, my body behaves differently on estrogen as compared to testosterone. I cry more easily and my libido is far milder than when I had male hormonal levels. At times, I’m slightly more “moody” than before, but not by much. Because taking estrogen made the nerves in my chest more sensitive than before, my emotions feel slightly different that when I had male hormone levels. It’s a subtle difference that I’m not even sure how to describe. Unlike Holly, my perceptions haven’t shifted in any noticeable way. However, everyone is a different.

Out of all of the differences that I’ve described, the most intense changes were in my libido and in regaining the ability to cry. That’s it. Beyond that, the internal changes I have experienced have been pretty subtle. It’s nice to be able to cry again. Sometimes it’s disappointing that I don’t have much of a libido and sometimes it’s a relief. However, I wouldn’t classify any of these changes as having had major, “life-altering,” effects.

The change in my physical appearance is another matter all together. Estrogen radically changed how I look. I looked like a guy before. I look like a woman now. People started to treat me very differently as my physical appearance shifted. That change occurred within less than a year’s time. So, the changes were pretty obvious and not terribly subtle.

Men started treating me as though I was a child. They talked down to me. They treated me with the social equivalent of a dismissive smile and a pat on the head. Sometimes women did this too, although not nearly as much as men did.

As I came to be seen as an object of sexual interest, I received much more attention from men than I did before. Before, when I passed as a male, I would initially be seen as someone to compete against, someone to verbally spar with. Men would automatically assume that I enjoyed sharing misogynistic humor. As it became evident that I had no interest in these patterns of behavior, I was often viewed as odd and/or worthy of disgust and would eventually be ignored.

I found the competitiveness, casual social aggression, and openly misogynistic humor that many men share to be annoying and unpleasant. When I was perceived as a man, I tended to avoid making friendships with men because of these general behavior patterns. After my physical appearance changed, the competitiveness, social aggression, and misogynistic humor decreased to the point that I was able to comfortably form friendships with men.

Along with men’s sexual interest came sexual harassment: catcalls, rude sexual comments, and uninvited touching by strangers. I become far more fearful of being alone at night. I became wary of walking in certain parts of town even during day light. When hiking alone, I found myself on edge when meeting male hikers. Camping alone became an exercise in fear. I learned to avoid making eye contact with men when I was in public social spaces, especially in venues that serve alcohol.

These observations are just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on and on about the social changes that I have experienced. I could fill pages with my observations on the ways in which people treat me differently now that they perceive me as female. I could fill pages with the ways in which I altered my own behavior in response to these social changes.

As I crossed the threshold of transition, I remained the same basic person I had always been. My body’s responses and my emotions were altered slightly, but the overall impact and scope of my internal changes were small. I was still me. I didn’t feel horny quite as often and I could have a nice, long cry on occasion. However, I was still the same basic person I was before swallowing my first estrogen tablet.

When I think about the subtle changes that hormones have brought about in my body’s behaviors and emotions, I have to do the mental equivalent of squinting really hard to sense many of the effects. In comparison, the changes in people’s behavior toward me have been huge. When I think of the effects of social change on my behaviors and emotions, the chain of causality is pretty obvious. When you experience a radical change in people’s responses to you, it’s going to change how you respond to the world and how you think of yourself. In time, it can even change who you are as a person.

In my opinion, people make overreaching generalizations about the impact of things like sex hormones. Honestly, the effects of drinking a 24 ounce mocha from the local coffee shop has a far more dramatic effect on my emotions and perceptions than estrogen ever ever has. I’m not being flippant. I’m dead serious. How often do you hear people talking about the social implications of coffee consumption? How often do you hear people making vast generalizations about people who drink coffee vs. those who prefer fruit juice?

The differential social forces that surround issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, class and other demographic metrics are far more intense than a syringe full of sex hormones or a lousy cup of coffee. I often see people reaching for biological explanations as a convenient excuse to ignore the effects of bigotry and oppression. I’ve heard people use biological explanations to excuse all kinds of social horrors: domestic violence, sexual violence, poverty, colonialism, underemployment, low wages, and slavery.

After reading the same, tired justifications over and over again, I just want to scream.

stillblackfilm.org

For those who don’t know, testosterone is a steroid, and one possible side effect is popularly known as roid rage.

That said, I think as a culture we tend to overestimate and put too much emphasis on biological factors. Even if I have a tendency to drive slightly faster, it’s something I could obviously compensate for — and adjust to automatically over time, if I wanted to drive under a certain speed, like Mitchell talks about doing quite consciously. There’s not much evidence to assume that despite trying to be more careful about driving, something about testosterone’s effect on Mitchell’s brain is causing him to drive more dangerously, fast, or noticeably. In fact, that assumption would not only counter my own personal experiences, but I’m pretty sure it would contradict quite a lot of empirical findings as well. Testosterone cannot simply “cause” people to drive fast anymore than you could fesasibly blame testosterone as the “cause” of sexist remarks, adultery, bar fights, or rape.

On top of just the individual factors determining Mitchell’s behavior, you absolutely can’t ignore the interpretation of that behavior by the police. Ask any trans person who has gone from being perceived as a member of one gender to being perceived as a member of the other, and for the most part they’ll tell you that the hugest shift in their lives, at least outside of their personal inner experience of themselves, was in suddenly being pigeonholed into a different category by others. That’s what Mitchell’s story is really about, and I wouldn’t make the mistake of reducing it to biology — especially since it tells us something about how the social experience of being black and male differs from that of being black and female. (Not everything, by a long shot — it’s just a few people’s experiences.)

On top of that, there are quite a few black trans guys that I know here in New York. Several of them have talked about very similar experiences with racial profiling… even though like a whole lot of New Yorkers, they don’t drive to get around. Subway, on foot, whatever — still racially profiled, and there’s a gender element in that too. The black man = dangerous potential threat, in the eyes of our criminal justice system. Is that enough evidence for you?

There is indeed nothing sexist about that statement, especially when you point out:

“Perhaps this too is due to stereotypes - perhaps the police, and juries, won’t readily believe women are guilty of this offence - ”

This bias has been noted as skewing DV stats irreparably.

I don’t know why this would be sexist to point out: everyone knows, and it is widely acknowledged, that hormones have an effect on behavior.

However, in terms of the OP I also suspect that any testosterone-fueled increase in “bad driving” is probably much less of a factor than race.

# Silenced is Foo Writes:
February 5th, 2008 at 7:22 am

@Thene

Thank you for missing the point of my post. Again: how is that attitude different from “The Bell Curve”?
This comment was written by Silenc

The very short answer is that the Bell Curve based its theory on a claim of racial differences in intelligence. But there’s not much (any?) link between genetics and “race,” and so the theory doesn’t make sense.

There is, however, a pretty major difference between men and women, genetically speaking, which also results in some fairly major phenotypical differences. The conclusion appears to be in the same class as other “_____ are ______” statements, but it’s actually a true statement.

Drugs and hormones affect behavior. they’re just chemicals that interact with you. If you give someone large doses of testosterone, long term, AFAIK the chances of the recipient having violent or aggressive tendencies will increase. (and if you REMOVE tetosterone from some violent people, their tendencies towards violence will often DEcrease.)

In fact, the original poster whom you chastised didn’t even make an observation. He asked a question, and it isn’t a stupid or offensive one. Hormones aren’t candy; they’re powerful drugs with enormous and sometimes radical impacts on behavior. It’s perfectly reasonable to inquire whether the person taking powerful drugs reporting a change in outcomes has experienced an unreported change in behavior.

That wouldn’t even undermine the original reporter’s story, necessarily. Maybe the cops are unfairly targeting “male behavior”, and there is an intersection of sexism and racism in the original reporter’s increased incidence of interaction with the cops. Maybe anti-black discrimination is 90% of that. Maybe it’s 10%. Who knows? It’d be worth finding out, don’t you think?

But we’ll never know, if opening the inquiry itself is verboten.

Your original comment - That his newfound masculinity makes him a worse driver? - seems to ignore the fact that any given policeman has no idea of Mitchell’s driving history, or his trans status; they’re just seeing a guy in a car, and a guy in a car is, statistically, 33x more dangerous than a gal in a car. The squicky part - as with many similar policing issues - is that white guys can usually get away with that and black guys rarely can, and are prone to suffer the misuse of stop-and-search powers.

There is nothing sexist about thinking that the fact that only 3% of convicted dangerous drivers are women means that women are less likely to be dangerous drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the real-world number was larger than 3%, but suggesting that we have to assume, on sight, that women are as likely to be driving dangerously as men are is nonsensical.

Thank you for missing the point of my post. Again: how is that attitude different from “The Bell Curve”?