There’s nothing that starts up arguments better in the base brat groups on F-book than discussions about what it was like to grow up queer on a military base.
The strongest counter argument that most former base brats can come up with is that it wasn’t easy to be queer in the civilian world so why do I concentrate on the military world.
I didn’t grow up in the civilian world, I grew up in the military world.
I lived on military bases from the month I was born until just after my 16th birthday.
By the time I was 8 years old I knew the following terms:
- Homo
- Faggot
- Queer
- Cocksucker
- Pansy
I was taught that women were inferior to men and that girls were inferior to boys.
It would be an understatement to say that the military was a very misogynistic and homophobic environment.
The Canadian Armed Forces had a very strict policy against homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” right up until 1994 when they were ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to ditch the homophobia.
This policy was CFAO 19-20.
And as I’ve said before, yes, the policy didn’t apply to military dependents. But each and every member of the Canadian Forces would have received basic information on this policy as they were expected to rat out fellow members if they suspected those fellow members of being gay, lesbian, or exhibiting any other sexual “abnormality”.
I think this is one of the reasons that Captain Terry Totzke was so hellbent on making me understand that I was a homosexual because I had sex with the babysitter. In Totzke’s mind I must have been a homosexual as there would be no other reason why I’d let a boy twice my age put his penis into my rectum on various occasions. Totzke’s training in the military must have fucked up his common sense beyond all belief.
And as study after study has indicated, military personnel were very prone to bringing their training into the homes on base.
This is one of the reasons why domestic abuse was always a problem in the military community. In the military you do not under any circumstance question or disobey the orders of your superiors. In the military home the male spouse would often view themselves as the commander of the house and everyone in the house was his subordinate bound to obey his each and every command. And there would be hell to pay if commands were not obeyed.
All I can say is that I am very thankful that Richard never caught me crossdressing in my early years on Shearwater or Griesbach. Actually, I’m very thankful that no one else caught me crossdressing.
I cannot imagine, even in today’s world, growing up trans on base, or even just gender non-conforming. Being gender non-conforming on base is dangerous.
For the longest time I had always assumed that my desire to not be male had something to do with the abuse from 1978 until 1980.
No, the abuse was not the source of my desire to not be male.
Yes, in the aftermath of the abuse I really wanted to be a girl. But I had always assumed again that that was due to the abuse as well as the teaching of Captain Totzke and nothing more.
I had always written off my desires to have my own breasts and my own hips like the girls at school was just me being fucked up due to the abuse.
All the abuse from CFB Namao did was set me up for further abuse on CFB Downsview.
It was the military’s attitude towards gender non-conforming people, and the military’s opinion that gender non-conformity was a mental illness that caused me to bury my desires.
Yes, I realize that switching hormones isn’t going to be easy, but at least today’s civilian world is far more accepting than the homophobic and misogynistic environment that I grew up in.
Yes, I do expect to encounter boneheads who think that what I am doing goes against “god’s will”.
Tough.
Yes, I do expect to encounter women that will accuse me of wearing “their” gender as a costume.
Tough.
For the most part my gender identity and my sexual orientation were formed in utero. The brain is literally hard wired for sex. If the human brain, or any other animal brain for that matter wasn’t hard wired for gender identity and sexual orientation, reproduction would have never worked.
Sex is a basic instinct.
There is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.
But how the brains are wired very much depends on what hormones the fetus is exposed to in utero as well as the levels of those hormones, and the timing of the exposure.
Genes and chromosomes also play heavily into gender identity and sexual orientation.
Humans start developing as females even if they have XY chromosomes. However, once the fetus’s gonads develop into either testicles or ovaries and start secreting either androgen or estrogen the the fetus will either keep developing as a female or the development as a female will halt and the fetus will start developing as a male.
Persons that are born intersex prove that gender is not a simple binary male / female choice. We’ll never know the true prevalence of intersex persons throughout the entirety of human existence, but it would be safe to say that ever since mammals started determining sex via the presence of a second X or Y chromosome that intersex persons have been with us.
One type of intersex are persons with XY chromosomes that are born presenting as female. XY is supposed to be male, right? Well unlike what the bible thumpers would love for you to believe, due to Androgen Insensitivity intersex persons are often born with testicles in their abdomen, a vagina, but no uterus, all external genitalia presenting as female. These people are usually not detected to be intersex until they become teens and fail to go through puberty.
Their testicles are in their abdomen because due to the androgen insensitivity they failed to descend towards the scrotum. Basically the gonads stayed where they would have been had they developed into ovaries.
They have a vagina and external female genitals as both male and female fetuses have these until the gonads become testicles and the female tissues are repurposed for their male counterpart.
Males have mammary glands and nipples because they form before the gonads develop into ovaries or testicles.
How and when the brain starts adapting its wiring is anyone’s guess. Researchers know what the various areas of the brain do, but the exact wiring patterns that form and how they determine the characteristics of the fetus are still quite a few years away from truly being understood.
Trans people and queer people and gender non-conforming people have existed all throughout human history no matter how hard the Abrahamic religions have tried to erase them. To say that human beings are either genetically male or female, identify as male or female, and are only attracted to the opposite sex is quite laughable.
Beeshive 