I've been thinking about the Bill Cosby rape accusations lately, and how a Black woman I greatly admire recently shared a lecture by him where someone had commented something about "This is the man they're trying to silence in the time of Ferguson and Eric Garner" (paraphrase from memory). I felt that there was something terrible about framing the many, many accusations leveled at him from a diverse array of women as some sort of conspiracy to silence a powerful, political Black man and therefore harm his people. But I kept silent, because I didn't know how to wade into such thorny territory and didn't think it was my place.
Last night I was reading a variety of radical Black women bloggers, starting with Trudy of Gradient Lair. I don't remember the name of the one who posted Beverley Johnson's piece and highlighted that the experience she was talking about was misogynoir, further explaining the trap that she and other Black women experience of knowing that they will be accused of disunity to the Black community if they speak their story of assault by a black man. This is the link to that interview, however: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/12/bill-cosby-beverly-johnson-story?mbid=social_retweet
My own thoughts that I want to share are about the fallacy that my friend may have fallen into: This idea that if someone's speaking, especially if they're doing it well, to important social issues in a way the person listening agrees with, that person will then conclude the speaker must be a moral person. After all, they're delineating such a powerful and important moral vision, right?
I learned the hard way--through surviving a sexually and somewhat emotionally abusive relationship--that this isn't true. So now it seems really obvious that, no, articulating a good vision doesn't make someone a good person. That's bad news at first--you can't trust the social networks you've trusted so far--but eventually it settles down into good news: You default back to evaluating how safe and positive a person is to be around based on observing their behavior over time and gradually becoming closer if they pass the tests, just as you would if politics had never come into the picture. It's freeing, because politics brings in all kinds of strong, often nasty, almost always exhausting emotions into play, so it's nice to be able to say no and push back on them dominating every aspect of your life.
But some people might still be struggling with how someone could be a great activist for a great cause and still be a serial rapist or otherwise horrible. And one answer is that the power-hungry, totally selfish people of the world see the social sphere as something to manipulate, and a great way to get away with serial rape is to look like a great person. But it's one thing to admit that someone you have a great deal of trust in has done bad things, and it's another thing to believe that person has never, ever believed in any of their expressed ideals and has only been using them as a means to power. Sometimes that leap of thought is true, but human motivations are seriously complex, so I'll offer a more flexible understanding of how bad people can fight for good things.
And here it is: Activism, politics, and rhetoric are a non-physical competitive sport. They're human pitted against other human as well as against self, using skill with emotions, performance, facts, and logic to push toward a goal. This is inherently rewarding because it's a difficult, multi-faceted skill with endless applicability, because of the chance to win in the competition, and because of the emotional payloads associated with feeling righteous and so on. A human being can, I believe, horribly harm others just because the harmer doesn't care, while also having an emotional need for feeling righteous and moral. Just like someone who needs emotional catharsis might watch a tear-jerker drama, intentionally turning on the sorrow and turning it back off to go about life, an abuser can turn on and off their need for morality (and that's if they haven't at least partially convinced themself that their actions actually are justified).
Lately I've been thinking about how morality itself isn't actually, despite what our culture usually teaches, about a set of abstract logical rules that exist outside of any actual human. Rather, it's a recognition of humans' and animal's social and emotional needs, and an ongoing process of trying to maneuver ourselves into meeting more of those needs and violating them less severely. If we understand that two of those needs are actually to feel and appear moral, it lets us step back from involvement with politics on the surface level and actually examine political discourse as a social behavior and way of inducing interesting internal sensations.
Another point I want to make on hero-worshiping people who make the best speeches or otherwise rhetoric or activist well: Who can influence others in a way that's recognized as, e.g. "smart", is not a politically neutral thing. People who have more power already are more likely to have their words and deeds recognized as powerful even if they're the exact same words, but they're also more likely to have the education and socially-valued ability to produce words that would be recognized as better even were the author unknown. Yes, wanting it badly enough and practicing for a long time are important factors, but there is a large component of privilege in who comes across as a powerful speaker and who is given the opportunity to be heard. Thinking good speaker = good person is pretty congruent to thinking well-educated, highly able-minded, well-connected = good person (and therefore uneducated, disabled, and/or socially marginalized = not good person).
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Sam Gamgee
Okay, so the Lord of the Rings is racist, sexist, and classist as hell. But for all those shortcomings, I'm still grateful for one gift it gave us social-justice-minded nerds: Sam Gamgee.
Arguably the main hero of the first classic epic fantasy series, he's both hardheaded and soppily sentimental, a working-class gardener who's in love with a man and a woman at the same time, and whose same-sex love saves the world in the end. Of the four hobbits in the Fellowship, he's the one that isn't stated as coming from the whiter, taller, closer-to-facial-haired subgroup that comprises the wealthier class. Instead, he's short, brown, and can't grow a beard--nothing like the white European male beauty norm.
Add to that the fact that he comes from an autonomous, peace-loving anarchist society of Little People, and I can't think of many more subversive heroes. Tolkein was certainly not worthy of social justice credentials, but I find it very interesting that his one such character is the one who he follows in the epilogue, after first having been introduced as relatively insignificant compared to those with better heritage, and only in the last book revealing his true degree of heroism.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Doesn't challenging the legitimacy of gender misgender trans people?
"Doesn't challenging the legitimacy of gender misgender trans people?"
It's a question that's haunted me for six and a half years. How can I speak my truth about gender without hurting other people?
I just realized a way to explain how this conflict is not a conflict at all.
Imagine that society forces everyone into one of two roles which dominate their lives from before they're born to after they're dead: Artist or warrior.
Obviously there will be many people born who fit really clearly into the artist, as opposed to the warrior, camp and vice versa. And some of those will be miscategorized--their inner warrior is so strong that all the socialization to be an artist can't overcome it, for example. They'll go to great lengths to transition because they can't survive in the wrong role, it's so suffocating. But the vast majority of people will accept their training, either because it fits, or because it's the best option they have.
Some people will be both, the warrior-poets who combine two essences that their culture sees as contradictory. Others will need to be neither, want to curl up in the logic of engineering or follow other dreams that are too far orthogonal to both art and war to be stretched into their assigned existence. And in this society, these people will be defined according to their relationship with this imaginary binary.
But just because someone drew a line, and some people fit on one side or another, doesn't make that line legitimate. It doesn't make it a good way to organize a society or a useful way of understanding the immense variety and similarities among people. It doesn't mean it's natural, no matter how much it fits with some people's natures.
And that's how it is with gender. No, in this narrative I am not centering the priorities of trans people who want to be recognized as real whatever-their-genders-are. They have their own narratives and spaces to speak, and anyone who wants to understand trans voices needs to read a diversity of them. But I'm saying they are real, just as some people are undeniably born artists. The idea that gender isn't real is not to say that someone can't be born to fit into a certain gender--it's to say that most of what we believe about gender, and the idea that everyone has one, is a myth or a non-natural and oppressive requirement of society, a lot like an over-powerful religious institution. I'm talking about erasing the line, not the territory on either side of it.
It's a question that's haunted me for six and a half years. How can I speak my truth about gender without hurting other people?
I just realized a way to explain how this conflict is not a conflict at all.
Imagine that society forces everyone into one of two roles which dominate their lives from before they're born to after they're dead: Artist or warrior.
Obviously there will be many people born who fit really clearly into the artist, as opposed to the warrior, camp and vice versa. And some of those will be miscategorized--their inner warrior is so strong that all the socialization to be an artist can't overcome it, for example. They'll go to great lengths to transition because they can't survive in the wrong role, it's so suffocating. But the vast majority of people will accept their training, either because it fits, or because it's the best option they have.
Some people will be both, the warrior-poets who combine two essences that their culture sees as contradictory. Others will need to be neither, want to curl up in the logic of engineering or follow other dreams that are too far orthogonal to both art and war to be stretched into their assigned existence. And in this society, these people will be defined according to their relationship with this imaginary binary.
But just because someone drew a line, and some people fit on one side or another, doesn't make that line legitimate. It doesn't make it a good way to organize a society or a useful way of understanding the immense variety and similarities among people. It doesn't mean it's natural, no matter how much it fits with some people's natures.
And that's how it is with gender. No, in this narrative I am not centering the priorities of trans people who want to be recognized as real whatever-their-genders-are. They have their own narratives and spaces to speak, and anyone who wants to understand trans voices needs to read a diversity of them. But I'm saying they are real, just as some people are undeniably born artists. The idea that gender isn't real is not to say that someone can't be born to fit into a certain gender--it's to say that most of what we believe about gender, and the idea that everyone has one, is a myth or a non-natural and oppressive requirement of society, a lot like an over-powerful religious institution. I'm talking about erasing the line, not the territory on either side of it.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Witchhunts =/= Social Justice
We all know the internet helps foster mob mentality, and it's oh-so-easy to get caught up in a social justice scandal. And I don't think that behavior is useless or even mostly bad--it helps us create social norms against stuff like rape and racism.
But focus on punishing an individual for a transgression also fails pretty badly on a number of fronts. First, it upholds a taboo on wrong/abusive behavior that prevents people from confronting such behavior in our society. For example, if admitting to abusing a partner means someone is ejected from the society of nice people, it becomes too horrible for someone to analyze their own behavior or sit a friend down and tell them what they've observed them doing. This becomes a huge problem in things like discussion of rape culture, because the majority of people have done something that qualifies as sexual abuse/assault in the most stringent definition--examples include assuming a man wants sex (as young women are socialized to do), having sex with someone who's been drinking or consuming other drugs, sex where consent was given out of a sense of obligation rather than enthusiasm, taking some behavior as implied consent (as all young people are socialized to do), and many others. Most people can't accept both that sexual abuse is one of the most horrible things you can do to someone, and that it's something they and/or many of their loved ones have committed.
This leads to the next major flaw with the punishment focus: It can reduce political and cultural issues to individual morality. It's hard to talk about how we're all doing really terrible things when our heads are stuffed with memes about how only monstrous people deserving of ostracism or other vengeance do really terrible things. We can never get to constructive critiques of cultural and structural injustices if 7 billion individual egos and reputations are in the way.
And the third thing is pretty simple: People are limited, but messing up doesn't suddenly make them no longer worthy, equal human beings. People deserve and need compassion and forgiveness. We're going to make mistakes in morality the same way we make mistakes in math--and we'll never grow past them if we're too paralyzed with fear of the consequences to learn. We're stuck, like the rest of the world, not just the humans in it, in historic cycles that grew out of amoral systems of physics--energy has to come from somewhere--and natural selection. There are no easy answers for achieving moral perfection--there is quite possibly no path to righteousness. We deserve to treat each other like we're walking through the perilous landscape that we are, both physically and morally, and understand that doing our best isn't enough to prevent us from ever doing harm, but it is better than nothing. We need each other.
Each of us can and should participate in trying to uncover, understand, and heal the wounds of our culture. I tend to shake my head at the idea of "slacktivism"--what more effective and sustainable way of making a better world is there than starting conversations that shift public opinion? You can't fight the culture without acknowledging that it's in you and in the people you spend your days with. All those social justice scandals end up being a great way to understand the issues, but once it turns into an "us" versus "you" thing, we've lost most the battle. It's an all-of-us thing.
Some people are really into retributive justice, but I'm not one of them. Yes, there are some people who knowingly and willfully harm others when there's an easy alternative, and something needs to be done to stop those people. Yes, you absolutely should turn your back on a friend who's victimized another friend in order to support the survivor. But all of society doesn't need to give up on everyone who's ever done anything that harms someone, because that's every single one of us and we're each people anyway. We need to focus on things like prevention, and finding people who are falling through the cracks. We need people who are willing to say, "No, that's not a family matter," when they suspect a child or adult's in trouble, and we need even more urgently strong, effective education to undo the cultural scripts that promote and justify abuse of all sorts before someone ever gets their hands red. And after. We need scripts that say, "Okay, you messed up and hurt someone. Take a big breath and go forward to make amends." We need to look at how all of our institutions are part of the systems of abuse that make up much of our culture, and we need to be able to name the problems with them without having supporters make the discussion into a duel to defend their honor. It's about fixing the future, not further entrenching the past.
But focus on punishing an individual for a transgression also fails pretty badly on a number of fronts. First, it upholds a taboo on wrong/abusive behavior that prevents people from confronting such behavior in our society. For example, if admitting to abusing a partner means someone is ejected from the society of nice people, it becomes too horrible for someone to analyze their own behavior or sit a friend down and tell them what they've observed them doing. This becomes a huge problem in things like discussion of rape culture, because the majority of people have done something that qualifies as sexual abuse/assault in the most stringent definition--examples include assuming a man wants sex (as young women are socialized to do), having sex with someone who's been drinking or consuming other drugs, sex where consent was given out of a sense of obligation rather than enthusiasm, taking some behavior as implied consent (as all young people are socialized to do), and many others. Most people can't accept both that sexual abuse is one of the most horrible things you can do to someone, and that it's something they and/or many of their loved ones have committed.
This leads to the next major flaw with the punishment focus: It can reduce political and cultural issues to individual morality. It's hard to talk about how we're all doing really terrible things when our heads are stuffed with memes about how only monstrous people deserving of ostracism or other vengeance do really terrible things. We can never get to constructive critiques of cultural and structural injustices if 7 billion individual egos and reputations are in the way.
And the third thing is pretty simple: People are limited, but messing up doesn't suddenly make them no longer worthy, equal human beings. People deserve and need compassion and forgiveness. We're going to make mistakes in morality the same way we make mistakes in math--and we'll never grow past them if we're too paralyzed with fear of the consequences to learn. We're stuck, like the rest of the world, not just the humans in it, in historic cycles that grew out of amoral systems of physics--energy has to come from somewhere--and natural selection. There are no easy answers for achieving moral perfection--there is quite possibly no path to righteousness. We deserve to treat each other like we're walking through the perilous landscape that we are, both physically and morally, and understand that doing our best isn't enough to prevent us from ever doing harm, but it is better than nothing. We need each other.
Each of us can and should participate in trying to uncover, understand, and heal the wounds of our culture. I tend to shake my head at the idea of "slacktivism"--what more effective and sustainable way of making a better world is there than starting conversations that shift public opinion? You can't fight the culture without acknowledging that it's in you and in the people you spend your days with. All those social justice scandals end up being a great way to understand the issues, but once it turns into an "us" versus "you" thing, we've lost most the battle. It's an all-of-us thing.
Some people are really into retributive justice, but I'm not one of them. Yes, there are some people who knowingly and willfully harm others when there's an easy alternative, and something needs to be done to stop those people. Yes, you absolutely should turn your back on a friend who's victimized another friend in order to support the survivor. But all of society doesn't need to give up on everyone who's ever done anything that harms someone, because that's every single one of us and we're each people anyway. We need to focus on things like prevention, and finding people who are falling through the cracks. We need people who are willing to say, "No, that's not a family matter," when they suspect a child or adult's in trouble, and we need even more urgently strong, effective education to undo the cultural scripts that promote and justify abuse of all sorts before someone ever gets their hands red. And after. We need scripts that say, "Okay, you messed up and hurt someone. Take a big breath and go forward to make amends." We need to look at how all of our institutions are part of the systems of abuse that make up much of our culture, and we need to be able to name the problems with them without having supporters make the discussion into a duel to defend their honor. It's about fixing the future, not further entrenching the past.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Gender Identity, or Cutting Off My Heel to Please the Patriarchy
Half a year ago, I'd take a deep breath and repeat to myself, "If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it," when I started to panic because I was feeling or thinking something that meant maybe I wasn't really an androgyne.
At the time, I hadn't yet embraced the political side of my feelings toward the gender binary. I was just trying to release myself from the pressure to conform to the social construction of gender identity, reminding myself that it was an idea and not absolute truth, that just because some people found it useful, didn't mean it had much explanatory power over me.
To me, the construct of "gender identity" includes a few things that can get me to panic:
1. Recognition of gender as a real thing, not a social construct
2. Therefore, everyone has an innate gender
3. This gender is stable and intelligible--the person "feels" like that gender all the time and always knows what gender they are
4. Therefore someone who always feels different from their assigned gender is trans, whereas someone who doesn't have that feeling must be cis and has no place in trans communities or identities
5. Society is right to gender people because that affirms something essential about them (that needs affirming to prevent dysphoria), and this is only a problem--and a fixable one--for a few atypical people with a medical condition that causes them to be miscategorized
In reality, I feel like most of my issues with gender come from the fact that it's a system of social control that doesn't give a damn about individuals. I don't feel like social gender does me any favors, and I feel like I'd be better off if it didn't exist. The concept of gender is a pretty obvious leg of the patriarchy, so de-politicizing nonbinary experience as an exceptional variant of "gender identity" seems like a form of appeasement to me.
Now, I don't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the nature-vs-nurture debate, yes, there is a "nature" component to gender experience. Most trans people identify with the "born this way" narrative. I'm not entirely an exception--I could tell you all the childhood memories of struggling against the gender I was forced into. And even what I'm talking about as gender experience that doesn't fit the concept of gender identity can be pigeonholed in with labels like "genderfluid," "agender," and "graygender". Some people might find that satisfying, but to me it seems like a lens that's focused on a different part of the landscape, where maybe I'm a blur in the periphery--but I need better tools than that to understand and accept myself.
And those tools have to be political. No sucking up to the gender binary on this one. What is oppressing me gender-wise isn't a unique personal difference. It's the same thing that's oppressing everyone else gender-wise. People looked at my genitals when I was a tiny baby and sent me on one track because of that: I was given a certain name, referred to by certain pronouns, dressed in certain clothes, expected to be friends with certain other kids, rejected by the other label of kids, taught to be passive, taught I was disgusting for being attracted to other people of the same label, taught my value was as a sexual object, taught my body wasn't worthy, told I didn't have the right to leave my assigned category or choose what pronouns and nouns could be used for me, and many other things besides.
These things are wrong. These things are wrong to do to someone whether their brain developed to expect a different body or not. There is nothing weird or wrong with me for not liking them. There is nothing personal and apolitical about me not liking them.
Again, I do not wish to deny the good that other people find in their relationship with this oppressive system: As an integral part of our social fabric, it structures many of the ways people have to connect with others or feel good about themselves. There's nothing wrong with dressing up pretty, or showing off a manly skill, or bonding with other women, or bonding with other men. There's nothing wrong with valuing and identifying with certain gendered body types, styles, or ways of being in the world.
But there's really, really something wrong with how these things are categorically imposed upon one group of people and denied to another group of people. There's something really, really wrong in having to choose one set or the other as a package deal. There's something really, really wrong with the wage gap, masculinity as violence, and lack of political representation of women. I don't think you can separate inequality from categorization. As long as the culture literally doesn't allow you to talk about someone without putting them into "he" or "she," how can stereotypes that perpetuate inequality ever dissipate?
I won't choose a gender because there is nothing in me that always feels like the same gender, but I also won't choose a gender because gender wouldn't exist (at least as an obligatory thing) in society if women had never been oppressed. As a society, you don't need to know what gender people are unless you're going to use it to discriminate against them--to change your behavior toward them based on the whole non-consensual package deal that has nothing to do with them as individuals. I don't want any part in that. I have to have a part in it because it's so embedded in our society, but I'll minimize my part as much as I can.
Okay, fine, you say, why is asserting that such a big deal for you?
If you haven't struggled against it, you might not realize it, but one of the most insidious parts of the gender identity construct (my point #4) is that you have to have been born this way, and you have to really be this way, to escape your assigned gender. It's a common bias in our culture, that anything about someone can and should be accepted as long as it isn't tainted by agency. Poor because you had no opportunities? Definitely deserving of help! Poor because you did drugs and dropped out of school? Oughtta throw you in jail! There's obviously a positive side to this bias--it gives people an incentive to pay attention to cause and effect in their decision-making--but tools of social policing are flexible, and in this case are used to support the patriarchy by regulating who can step outside its central construct of "biological" gender. It's really, deeply messed up to tell someone an important part of who they are is only legitimate if they can prove they didn't choose it. A lot of the most important things about who we are and what's going on in our lives--good, bad, neutral, and fuchsia--is chosen, driven by an incomprehensibly complex tapestry of nature, choice, and experience. One of the many abusive things you can do to someone is deny and devalue their choices and preferences, teaching them they have no right to be a person.
I don't think anyone who I learned about gender identity from meant for me to interpret it that way, but I did. Trying to cut off the role I played in choosing my own gender identity was truly cutting off a piece of me. That's why I had to tell myself, "If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it."
This was a version of the saying, "If the shoe fits, wear it," but recently I was reading variants of the Cinderella fairy tale, and I noticed the parallel in the title of this post, where one of Cinderella's stepsisters cuts off her heel to fit the shoe that means the prince will marry her.
It's an unflattering comparison. A violent, treacherous act by a bully. But the surface reading isn't the only one. Cinderella's stepsisters are upper-class girls whose biological father is dead. They probably don't have the skills to work, and even if they did, work would be unthinkable for someone in their class. Their only hope for survival long-term is to find a good husband, and meanwhile they're stuck in a household under the absolute authority of their abusive mother, as the absent rich man's wife. Such a hierarchical society requires a pecking order, so they must bully Cinderella (since their mother hates her and has chosen her to be on the bottom of the heap), or fall themselves. And if they fall... no mother's help means no husband, no father means no family wealth to support them as spinsters, and so they perish.
Choosing to attack my own reality--and, given how closely gender is tied to the visible, my relationship with my body--to conform to the narrative of transness that sits most nicely with the patriarchy was not so far from the person who attacked their own body to survive in a historical patriarchy. Remember that next time you want to protest that nonbinaries aren't political, that our identities don't exist to change society--they don't have to be, but they can be, or someone's cutting their heels off.
At the time, I hadn't yet embraced the political side of my feelings toward the gender binary. I was just trying to release myself from the pressure to conform to the social construction of gender identity, reminding myself that it was an idea and not absolute truth, that just because some people found it useful, didn't mean it had much explanatory power over me.
To me, the construct of "gender identity" includes a few things that can get me to panic:
1. Recognition of gender as a real thing, not a social construct
2. Therefore, everyone has an innate gender
3. This gender is stable and intelligible--the person "feels" like that gender all the time and always knows what gender they are
4. Therefore someone who always feels different from their assigned gender is trans, whereas someone who doesn't have that feeling must be cis and has no place in trans communities or identities
5. Society is right to gender people because that affirms something essential about them (that needs affirming to prevent dysphoria), and this is only a problem--and a fixable one--for a few atypical people with a medical condition that causes them to be miscategorized
In reality, I feel like most of my issues with gender come from the fact that it's a system of social control that doesn't give a damn about individuals. I don't feel like social gender does me any favors, and I feel like I'd be better off if it didn't exist. The concept of gender is a pretty obvious leg of the patriarchy, so de-politicizing nonbinary experience as an exceptional variant of "gender identity" seems like a form of appeasement to me.
Now, I don't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the nature-vs-nurture debate, yes, there is a "nature" component to gender experience. Most trans people identify with the "born this way" narrative. I'm not entirely an exception--I could tell you all the childhood memories of struggling against the gender I was forced into. And even what I'm talking about as gender experience that doesn't fit the concept of gender identity can be pigeonholed in with labels like "genderfluid," "agender," and "graygender". Some people might find that satisfying, but to me it seems like a lens that's focused on a different part of the landscape, where maybe I'm a blur in the periphery--but I need better tools than that to understand and accept myself.
And those tools have to be political. No sucking up to the gender binary on this one. What is oppressing me gender-wise isn't a unique personal difference. It's the same thing that's oppressing everyone else gender-wise. People looked at my genitals when I was a tiny baby and sent me on one track because of that: I was given a certain name, referred to by certain pronouns, dressed in certain clothes, expected to be friends with certain other kids, rejected by the other label of kids, taught to be passive, taught I was disgusting for being attracted to other people of the same label, taught my value was as a sexual object, taught my body wasn't worthy, told I didn't have the right to leave my assigned category or choose what pronouns and nouns could be used for me, and many other things besides.
These things are wrong. These things are wrong to do to someone whether their brain developed to expect a different body or not. There is nothing weird or wrong with me for not liking them. There is nothing personal and apolitical about me not liking them.
Again, I do not wish to deny the good that other people find in their relationship with this oppressive system: As an integral part of our social fabric, it structures many of the ways people have to connect with others or feel good about themselves. There's nothing wrong with dressing up pretty, or showing off a manly skill, or bonding with other women, or bonding with other men. There's nothing wrong with valuing and identifying with certain gendered body types, styles, or ways of being in the world.
But there's really, really something wrong with how these things are categorically imposed upon one group of people and denied to another group of people. There's something really, really wrong in having to choose one set or the other as a package deal. There's something really, really wrong with the wage gap, masculinity as violence, and lack of political representation of women. I don't think you can separate inequality from categorization. As long as the culture literally doesn't allow you to talk about someone without putting them into "he" or "she," how can stereotypes that perpetuate inequality ever dissipate?
I won't choose a gender because there is nothing in me that always feels like the same gender, but I also won't choose a gender because gender wouldn't exist (at least as an obligatory thing) in society if women had never been oppressed. As a society, you don't need to know what gender people are unless you're going to use it to discriminate against them--to change your behavior toward them based on the whole non-consensual package deal that has nothing to do with them as individuals. I don't want any part in that. I have to have a part in it because it's so embedded in our society, but I'll minimize my part as much as I can.
Okay, fine, you say, why is asserting that such a big deal for you?
If you haven't struggled against it, you might not realize it, but one of the most insidious parts of the gender identity construct (my point #4) is that you have to have been born this way, and you have to really be this way, to escape your assigned gender. It's a common bias in our culture, that anything about someone can and should be accepted as long as it isn't tainted by agency. Poor because you had no opportunities? Definitely deserving of help! Poor because you did drugs and dropped out of school? Oughtta throw you in jail! There's obviously a positive side to this bias--it gives people an incentive to pay attention to cause and effect in their decision-making--but tools of social policing are flexible, and in this case are used to support the patriarchy by regulating who can step outside its central construct of "biological" gender. It's really, deeply messed up to tell someone an important part of who they are is only legitimate if they can prove they didn't choose it. A lot of the most important things about who we are and what's going on in our lives--good, bad, neutral, and fuchsia--is chosen, driven by an incomprehensibly complex tapestry of nature, choice, and experience. One of the many abusive things you can do to someone is deny and devalue their choices and preferences, teaching them they have no right to be a person.
I don't think anyone who I learned about gender identity from meant for me to interpret it that way, but I did. Trying to cut off the role I played in choosing my own gender identity was truly cutting off a piece of me. That's why I had to tell myself, "If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it."
This was a version of the saying, "If the shoe fits, wear it," but recently I was reading variants of the Cinderella fairy tale, and I noticed the parallel in the title of this post, where one of Cinderella's stepsisters cuts off her heel to fit the shoe that means the prince will marry her.
It's an unflattering comparison. A violent, treacherous act by a bully. But the surface reading isn't the only one. Cinderella's stepsisters are upper-class girls whose biological father is dead. They probably don't have the skills to work, and even if they did, work would be unthinkable for someone in their class. Their only hope for survival long-term is to find a good husband, and meanwhile they're stuck in a household under the absolute authority of their abusive mother, as the absent rich man's wife. Such a hierarchical society requires a pecking order, so they must bully Cinderella (since their mother hates her and has chosen her to be on the bottom of the heap), or fall themselves. And if they fall... no mother's help means no husband, no father means no family wealth to support them as spinsters, and so they perish.
Choosing to attack my own reality--and, given how closely gender is tied to the visible, my relationship with my body--to conform to the narrative of transness that sits most nicely with the patriarchy was not so far from the person who attacked their own body to survive in a historical patriarchy. Remember that next time you want to protest that nonbinaries aren't political, that our identities don't exist to change society--they don't have to be, but they can be, or someone's cutting their heels off.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Soft features
I'm trans. I was assigned a certain gender at birth, and am again and again by the majority of people who so much as glance at me on the street, but it's never fit very well. Now, since the beginning I've been aware that I'm not trans enough. You see, once upon a time John Money decided that trans people are okay as long as they fit certain criteria that make them worthy of medical and social recognition. They need to be binary for one thing--identifying as male when assigned female, or female when assigned male--and they need to be 100% normative for their self-identified gender. Doctors put up bars and hoops for trans people to jump through to warrant medical transition, and legislators used many of the same for legal transition. Only those trans people who need it most--those for whom living without transition would be worse than death, for example--would be willing and able to jump through all those hoops. Plus (and I don't know if this was doctors or others), being trans must be biological. If it's about society, you should get rid of that internalized sexism. If it's a choice, you're making the wrong choice. Otherwise doctors wouldn't put all these hoops in the way, and society wouldn't hate you. Therefore the only people who are legitimate trans people are binary-identified people who suffer intensely and constantly from distress at the sex of their bodies, not anything related to social perceptions of gender, yet want to meet the gender norms assigned to the sex they want for their bodies.
As a genderqueer who isn't trans enough, I desperately want to be more trans. I don't have anything like a stable gender identity, but maybe if I pretend that my genderfluidity never or vanishingly rarely passes through my assigned gender, I'll be closer to "enough". Maybe if I feel more gender dysphoria, maybe if it gets closer to unbearable, I'll be okay. I'll finally be worthy enough that this really important part of me can be recognized. I'll see my true self reflected in other's words. Other trans people will accept me, and I'll stop feeling adrift, invisible.
It turns out that the real answer was having people I respect tell me, flat-out, that no one should have their gender identity denied. Suddenly there wasn't an "enough" anymore, no more power dynamic, just me. As me. So I'm trans. Not trans enough, just trans.
I still have a weird/uncertain place in the trans community, but I trust that my own communities of the non-binary and non-transitioning will sort that out over time. More saliently, I still have the question about what it means to be trans. And while I want to avoid defining trans identity through dysphoria and suffering, because that rhetoric is a way of erasing people like me and has caused me more suffering than gender dysphoria itself, I do sometimes experience distress when people gender me--or when I look at my body. This post is about looking in the mirror.
It took me years to name it, that rare-but-memorable disoriented despair I'd fall into when looking at my face. The last time I had it, without yet knowing its name, I got on Facebook and messaged with a friend about it, panicked. I probably said something similar to some of the following:
I'll tell you a secret: I say I only rarely get dysphoria, but it's not uncommon for me to get this easily brush-offable buzzing sense of unreality when I see the femininity of my face. I'm often reminded of male anime characters whose angelic faces get them read as female by other characters. I'm reminded of the androgyny of angels, flat chests and soft, pretty faces.
See how complex cultural ideas are inseparable from a supposed "biological" reaction to unexpected anatomy? How can I know I was "born this way", that I'm actually biologically different from cis people, if Japanese cartoons and Catholic angels are the basic unit of my dysphoria?
I couldn't stop asking that question until I got lost answering it. Because gender goes much, much deeper in our culture than portrayals of fictional characters.
I want "strong" features, but instead my body is too "soft." And so I messaged my friend in a panic because people could see me as "soft," see my life as "smooth," but couldn't see how "hard" and "sharp-edged" I was. Couldn't see the "strong" emotional and social forces within me. Each word I just put in quotes is one where I'd use exactly the same word for my physical features and an emotional/social/moral trait I was upset about people seeing or not being able to see in me, because of their physical counterparts. I can't break "soft" down into physical and non-physical components. Our very language for describing personality is rooted in sexist metaphors.
Want more? When we say "strong female lead," we don't normally mean she swings kettlebells. But "strong" also means the physical, muscular strength that testosterone nourishes. And further, someone's muscular strength--and the "strength" of their jaw line and other bone structure--is part of how we are trained to categorize them as "male" or "female"when we meet them. So four things--personality, physical traits, sex, and gender--are indistinguishable in much of our core vocabulary. I was stunned when I first saw this. I know now that I will probably never be able to untangle the biological from the cultural roots of my gender dysphoria. I was born into a culture that doesn't make a distinction, programmed from birth not to see one.
I'm guessing the ancestors who made our language mined their own bodies for metaphors. And after all, it isn't entirely sexist: Softness in the body can come from leisure as well as estrogen, hardness from intensity and experience as well as testosterone. But hormones are often a dominant factor, and certainly our culture has long seen women as "softer" and men as "harder". These words--metaphors--are sexist. Our perceptions of who is what sex are sexist, based in an evaluation of someone's conformity to sexist stereotypes. That's why people who don't fit the assigned words mocked as belonging to or being like "the opposite" sex. Our language doesn't know the difference between the associated traits, physical or metaphorical, and the actual gender.
Knowing this has changed how I look at my own body. I look around at presumably cis men at work and realize that some have rounded foreheads and soft faces, or narrow "weak" jaws and shallow brows. My rejection of my own face is a feedback loop, a cycle fed by unrealistic ideals of what someone who's not female should look like, and ridiculous but culturally-ingrained assumptions about a connection between appearance and personality or experience, and an expectation that I should look androgynous if I identify as such, or that I should want to look different than I do since I am trans, with a belief again from the dominant cis-normative culture that other people should be able to look at my physical features and tell who I am. Maybe there's some differences in the sexual development of my brain in there that helps kick it all off, but all the cultural stuff around gender is more than messed up enough for me to not want to be part of it. And you know what? Either way I'm a legitimate trans person.
As a genderqueer who isn't trans enough, I desperately want to be more trans. I don't have anything like a stable gender identity, but maybe if I pretend that my genderfluidity never or vanishingly rarely passes through my assigned gender, I'll be closer to "enough". Maybe if I feel more gender dysphoria, maybe if it gets closer to unbearable, I'll be okay. I'll finally be worthy enough that this really important part of me can be recognized. I'll see my true self reflected in other's words. Other trans people will accept me, and I'll stop feeling adrift, invisible.
It turns out that the real answer was having people I respect tell me, flat-out, that no one should have their gender identity denied. Suddenly there wasn't an "enough" anymore, no more power dynamic, just me. As me. So I'm trans. Not trans enough, just trans.
I still have a weird/uncertain place in the trans community, but I trust that my own communities of the non-binary and non-transitioning will sort that out over time. More saliently, I still have the question about what it means to be trans. And while I want to avoid defining trans identity through dysphoria and suffering, because that rhetoric is a way of erasing people like me and has caused me more suffering than gender dysphoria itself, I do sometimes experience distress when people gender me--or when I look at my body. This post is about looking in the mirror.
It took me years to name it, that rare-but-memorable disoriented despair I'd fall into when looking at my face. The last time I had it, without yet knowing its name, I got on Facebook and messaged with a friend about it, panicked. I probably said something similar to some of the following:
My face looks wrong. It's so innocent-looking. People can't see my spikes and hard edges. They'll see me as soft and pure. Even angelic. I'm not supposed to look like this!My friend didn't understand me, of course, but afterward I realized I was talking about sex characteristics. That "angelic" face was a result of bones not thickened by testosterone, pores not widened, and a softening layer of estrogen-invoked fat. Years ago I'd already sighed gratitude for the millimeter of sharpness losing babyfat gave to my face, reducing that dysphoria, but it wasn't enough.
I'll tell you a secret: I say I only rarely get dysphoria, but it's not uncommon for me to get this easily brush-offable buzzing sense of unreality when I see the femininity of my face. I'm often reminded of male anime characters whose angelic faces get them read as female by other characters. I'm reminded of the androgyny of angels, flat chests and soft, pretty faces.
See how complex cultural ideas are inseparable from a supposed "biological" reaction to unexpected anatomy? How can I know I was "born this way", that I'm actually biologically different from cis people, if Japanese cartoons and Catholic angels are the basic unit of my dysphoria?
I couldn't stop asking that question until I got lost answering it. Because gender goes much, much deeper in our culture than portrayals of fictional characters.
I want "strong" features, but instead my body is too "soft." And so I messaged my friend in a panic because people could see me as "soft," see my life as "smooth," but couldn't see how "hard" and "sharp-edged" I was. Couldn't see the "strong" emotional and social forces within me. Each word I just put in quotes is one where I'd use exactly the same word for my physical features and an emotional/social/moral trait I was upset about people seeing or not being able to see in me, because of their physical counterparts. I can't break "soft" down into physical and non-physical components. Our very language for describing personality is rooted in sexist metaphors.
Want more? When we say "strong female lead," we don't normally mean she swings kettlebells. But "strong" also means the physical, muscular strength that testosterone nourishes. And further, someone's muscular strength--and the "strength" of their jaw line and other bone structure--is part of how we are trained to categorize them as "male" or "female"when we meet them. So four things--personality, physical traits, sex, and gender--are indistinguishable in much of our core vocabulary. I was stunned when I first saw this. I know now that I will probably never be able to untangle the biological from the cultural roots of my gender dysphoria. I was born into a culture that doesn't make a distinction, programmed from birth not to see one.
I'm guessing the ancestors who made our language mined their own bodies for metaphors. And after all, it isn't entirely sexist: Softness in the body can come from leisure as well as estrogen, hardness from intensity and experience as well as testosterone. But hormones are often a dominant factor, and certainly our culture has long seen women as "softer" and men as "harder". These words--metaphors--are sexist. Our perceptions of who is what sex are sexist, based in an evaluation of someone's conformity to sexist stereotypes. That's why people who don't fit the assigned words mocked as belonging to or being like "the opposite" sex. Our language doesn't know the difference between the associated traits, physical or metaphorical, and the actual gender.
Knowing this has changed how I look at my own body. I look around at presumably cis men at work and realize that some have rounded foreheads and soft faces, or narrow "weak" jaws and shallow brows. My rejection of my own face is a feedback loop, a cycle fed by unrealistic ideals of what someone who's not female should look like, and ridiculous but culturally-ingrained assumptions about a connection between appearance and personality or experience, and an expectation that I should look androgynous if I identify as such, or that I should want to look different than I do since I am trans, with a belief again from the dominant cis-normative culture that other people should be able to look at my physical features and tell who I am. Maybe there's some differences in the sexual development of my brain in there that helps kick it all off, but all the cultural stuff around gender is more than messed up enough for me to not want to be part of it. And you know what? Either way I'm a legitimate trans person.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Non-binary femme piece
I read this piece exploring what it means to me to be femme as a genderfluid, female-assigned nobinary at When She Speaks I Hear the Revolution's non-binary themed open mic last night. Enjoy!
Femme is the crackling current of a shared experience. It's the melody of beauty mixed with joy. It's the dark sure way our damp eyes hold each other close, resisting the seeping poison-pain of misogyny and femmephobia, from workplace lunches to rape recovery centers. Femme laughter rings out with scorn at the scripts that would reduce lives to weakness, and vapidity, and irrelevance. It's the knowledge that other stories have always teemed throughout the world, surrounding the ones of male archetypes that get written down, taught in class, projected on large screens. Femme is seeing every piece of bling as a locket, holding threads that knit our stories to the world and each other.
Femme is different for everyone, but for me it is also the aching gap between who I am and the distorted misinterpretation that is all the mainstream dares to see of me. I am femme because I am not a woman--I would not be femme if I were a woman.
As a not-woman, I could forget that I like long hair, erase the dysphoria of agreement between aspects of my presentation and how others seek to read my body. I could foreswear kinship with the isolated women in my male-dominated profession, never speak of the strength I found in nail polish, hide the steel of my emotional openness so it cant' be construed as weakness. But I won't butcher myself for normative masculinity, won't empty out the lockets tying me to femininity. That, too, is part of me.
I'm a femme because society will never recognize my masculinity, holds it hostage, offers soothing reassurance that all I have to do is pull the trigger on every memory of moist eyes holding sympathy. I'm a femme because that forced-choice is a knife held to my soul. Society lets me look trans masculine, or cis feminine, but cannot read my femininity as trans, cannot see how it's a response and counterpart to my own masculinity, a part of what I am as a man or an androgyne or agender. Just as society misses the anti-femininity of my core when I am a woman.
Often those who identify as femme do so because someone sought to take it from them. Because lesbians are supposed to be butch, men aren't supposed to wear ribbons, and a trans person who was first forcibly labeled "female" is trans-masculine. But these threads can't be plucked from our bodies, nor from the tapestries we weave together, and hold in our eyes.
Femme is the crackling current of a shared experience. It's the melody of beauty mixed with joy. It's the dark sure way our damp eyes hold each other close, resisting the seeping poison-pain of misogyny and femmephobia, from workplace lunches to rape recovery centers. Femme laughter rings out with scorn at the scripts that would reduce lives to weakness, and vapidity, and irrelevance. It's the knowledge that other stories have always teemed throughout the world, surrounding the ones of male archetypes that get written down, taught in class, projected on large screens. Femme is seeing every piece of bling as a locket, holding threads that knit our stories to the world and each other.
Femme is different for everyone, but for me it is also the aching gap between who I am and the distorted misinterpretation that is all the mainstream dares to see of me. I am femme because I am not a woman--I would not be femme if I were a woman.
As a not-woman, I could forget that I like long hair, erase the dysphoria of agreement between aspects of my presentation and how others seek to read my body. I could foreswear kinship with the isolated women in my male-dominated profession, never speak of the strength I found in nail polish, hide the steel of my emotional openness so it cant' be construed as weakness. But I won't butcher myself for normative masculinity, won't empty out the lockets tying me to femininity. That, too, is part of me.
I'm a femme because society will never recognize my masculinity, holds it hostage, offers soothing reassurance that all I have to do is pull the trigger on every memory of moist eyes holding sympathy. I'm a femme because that forced-choice is a knife held to my soul. Society lets me look trans masculine, or cis feminine, but cannot read my femininity as trans, cannot see how it's a response and counterpart to my own masculinity, a part of what I am as a man or an androgyne or agender. Just as society misses the anti-femininity of my core when I am a woman.
Often those who identify as femme do so because someone sought to take it from them. Because lesbians are supposed to be butch, men aren't supposed to wear ribbons, and a trans person who was first forcibly labeled "female" is trans-masculine. But these threads can't be plucked from our bodies, nor from the tapestries we weave together, and hold in our eyes.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
On anger in civil discourse
The short version of this post is that I read Quinnae's Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism and am convinced.
The posts I've remembered writing on this blog in the months since I last posted are the excessively angry ones, the ones I've been naggingly ashamed of. At a distance, why did I have to howl my hurt into the internet, there to be forever connected to my name? Why did I call out other community members specifically to rant about things they wrote, sometimes years prior, that hurt my feelings? Shouldn't that degree of hurt feelings be saved for less petty targets?
These rhetoricals have one very specific answer among many more nebulous psychological reasons: Around the time I started this blog, I had been introduced to the concept of "tone policing"--and the virulent resistance to it--by a blogger whose passion and activism I greatly admired and read about eagerly. Quinnae addresses the tone policing meme and also points to the larger culture of political rage, calling it linkbait.
Another article I read on the subject whose link I've lost discussed the issue of minority communities--especially young LGBT people--being trained in the rhetoric of oppression even when they haven't actually personally experienced any of the oppressive acts that loom so large in their understanding of what it means to be part of their minority community. I definitely think that skewed understanding of queerness has affected me negatively, driving rage, fear, and anxiety, which in its turn causes highly unproductive-to-the-cause behavior like staying in the closet despite likely being in a safe-enough place.
As an example, I've only seen first-hand evidence of non-male bisexuals being excluded from the LGB community by LG people a handful of times in my life, but I've been taught that it happens almost constantly. I have far more examples of inclusion in my own memories, but they fade in contrast to the words of fellow bisexuals and especially their example of angrily decrying it.
Now, I believe monosexism is an urgent problem to be resisted, but is it to be resisted with overwhelming force that has been amassed over several months since the enemy last crossed my path, or is it to be resisted with a few assertive words and the sense that most reasonable people can easily be persuaded to our side or are already on it? Was there any point in building up that artillery rather than rational, empathetic arguments for rational, empathetic people?
I'd rather my queer "tribe" not go to war anytime soon, so no.
I think a larger lesson lies here as well: Time to turn off the sound bites and get my nuanced understanding back in the game.
Sometimes tone policing is a form of oppression used to discredit someone's valid complaints; other times it's meant to protect the targets from verbal/emotional abuse, keep all of us from living in fear of mob reprisal if we try expressing ourselves, and/or protect the reputation of the movement from justified perceptions that we're out to, say, murder everyone else.
There are other viral behavioral norms in social justice communities, especially online, that harm if accepted blindly, too. One that occurs to me is interpreting my hurt feelings as a member of a minority group as a knee-jerk reason to demand change or cast someone else's words/actions as oppressive. That may or may not be appropriate and requires critical thinking to execute.
The posts I've remembered writing on this blog in the months since I last posted are the excessively angry ones, the ones I've been naggingly ashamed of. At a distance, why did I have to howl my hurt into the internet, there to be forever connected to my name? Why did I call out other community members specifically to rant about things they wrote, sometimes years prior, that hurt my feelings? Shouldn't that degree of hurt feelings be saved for less petty targets?
These rhetoricals have one very specific answer among many more nebulous psychological reasons: Around the time I started this blog, I had been introduced to the concept of "tone policing"--and the virulent resistance to it--by a blogger whose passion and activism I greatly admired and read about eagerly. Quinnae addresses the tone policing meme and also points to the larger culture of political rage, calling it linkbait.
Another article I read on the subject whose link I've lost discussed the issue of minority communities--especially young LGBT people--being trained in the rhetoric of oppression even when they haven't actually personally experienced any of the oppressive acts that loom so large in their understanding of what it means to be part of their minority community. I definitely think that skewed understanding of queerness has affected me negatively, driving rage, fear, and anxiety, which in its turn causes highly unproductive-to-the-cause behavior like staying in the closet despite likely being in a safe-enough place.
As an example, I've only seen first-hand evidence of non-male bisexuals being excluded from the LGB community by LG people a handful of times in my life, but I've been taught that it happens almost constantly. I have far more examples of inclusion in my own memories, but they fade in contrast to the words of fellow bisexuals and especially their example of angrily decrying it.
Now, I believe monosexism is an urgent problem to be resisted, but is it to be resisted with overwhelming force that has been amassed over several months since the enemy last crossed my path, or is it to be resisted with a few assertive words and the sense that most reasonable people can easily be persuaded to our side or are already on it? Was there any point in building up that artillery rather than rational, empathetic arguments for rational, empathetic people?
I'd rather my queer "tribe" not go to war anytime soon, so no.
I think a larger lesson lies here as well: Time to turn off the sound bites and get my nuanced understanding back in the game.
Sometimes tone policing is a form of oppression used to discredit someone's valid complaints; other times it's meant to protect the targets from verbal/emotional abuse, keep all of us from living in fear of mob reprisal if we try expressing ourselves, and/or protect the reputation of the movement from justified perceptions that we're out to, say, murder everyone else.
There are other viral behavioral norms in social justice communities, especially online, that harm if accepted blindly, too. One that occurs to me is interpreting my hurt feelings as a member of a minority group as a knee-jerk reason to demand change or cast someone else's words/actions as oppressive. That may or may not be appropriate and requires critical thinking to execute.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Burdening society
Reposting a blog comment responding to another commenter on Musings of An Aspie:
I really want to question the idea that a disabled individual who needs constant atypical supports is a “tremendous strain” on “society”. The fact that society isn’t organized in a way to provide for everyone’s needs with love and love for the caregivers as well is the strain, not the individual. So while I have no problem with the prediction that having a child who needs constant monitoring would be a strain on the family, because we live in a society with messed up priorities, I don’t think you owe it to “society” to keep your potentially disabled child from existing, and I don’t think being forced to accommodate for people with atypical needs is even a bad thing for society.
What places a strain on society?
Greed. Production of nuclear missiles. Subsidizing fossil fuels and thereby destroying the biosphere quicker. Market failures, like how some people starve to death while others go on vacations in their personal jets. War. Child abuse. Murder. Sexual assault. White-collar crime. Unethical lending practices. Racism. Alcoholism. Meth. Excessive gambling. Undervaluing of education. Past genocides.
Greed. Production of nuclear missiles. Subsidizing fossil fuels and thereby destroying the biosphere quicker. Market failures, like how some people starve to death while others go on vacations in their personal jets. War. Child abuse. Murder. Sexual assault. White-collar crime. Unethical lending practices. Racism. Alcoholism. Meth. Excessive gambling. Undervaluing of education. Past genocides.
Having to adjust to take care of people whose needs aren’t met by default doesn’t put a strain on society. It heals it. I completely understand if anyone doesn’t want to be the one fighting all of society’s failures to get their kid a decent life, but I don’t for a minute agree that society is somehow hurt by reallocating resources to something that’s actually a good thing to do.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Beta Readers and Diversity: Focused or widespread?
I was reading this post: http://tranifesto.com/2012/05/03/ask-matt-writing-a-trans-character-in-fiction/
Overall, I like it and the discussion. There's a commenter who goes way over the top, IMO, criticizing the person who asked the question for even asking the question, since it supposedly objectifies trans* people and portrays us all as a monolith, which kinda bugged me. There are things that are generally good to do and generally good to avoid when writing about trans* characters even though we're all individuals. For instance, avoiding stereotypes and language that cis people don't get to use, or making sure the character's multi-dimensional and realistic, not defined by being trans.
At some other point a commenter called palacinky says:
I find this advice interesting and am not sure about it. Yes, get at least 2 trans Latinas if you're writing about trans Latinas--but I'd actually have given the advice to specifically include reviewers from other identities under the same umbrella. You don't want to accidentally write things that affirm trans women while denying the existence of trans men or nonbinaries. Similarly, even if your character's white, you probably want a beta reader of color to screen for racism. I think with the trans umbrella in particular it's really easy to fall into definitions and explanations that completely erase entire swathes of people, and while your character is going to be an individual with experience as only one specific trans person of a specific identity, you do run the risk of characters or authorial voice saying or implying something offensive to other sorts of trans people.
So, I'd say, ideally both, but specific is probably more important than broad.
Overall, I like it and the discussion. There's a commenter who goes way over the top, IMO, criticizing the person who asked the question for even asking the question, since it supposedly objectifies trans* people and portrays us all as a monolith, which kinda bugged me. There are things that are generally good to do and generally good to avoid when writing about trans* characters even though we're all individuals. For instance, avoiding stereotypes and language that cis people don't get to use, or making sure the character's multi-dimensional and realistic, not defined by being trans.
At some other point a commenter called palacinky says:
I agree with the advice about getting feedback from several trans women (ideally people who have a vaguely similar backgrounds and identities to that of the character you’re writing). In other words, don’t ask trans men what they think about the trans woman character (and vice versa), don’t ask a gay man who does drag what they think about the character, if the character is black or latina, then ask a black trans or latina woman for their feedback. Try to not be defensive when you hear the feedback but also understand you’re writing a unique person, hopefully not a trans cardboard cutout or token. And first and formost, you’re writing a WOMAN character not “a man who wants to be a woman.”
I find this advice interesting and am not sure about it. Yes, get at least 2 trans Latinas if you're writing about trans Latinas--but I'd actually have given the advice to specifically include reviewers from other identities under the same umbrella. You don't want to accidentally write things that affirm trans women while denying the existence of trans men or nonbinaries. Similarly, even if your character's white, you probably want a beta reader of color to screen for racism. I think with the trans umbrella in particular it's really easy to fall into definitions and explanations that completely erase entire swathes of people, and while your character is going to be an individual with experience as only one specific trans person of a specific identity, you do run the risk of characters or authorial voice saying or implying something offensive to other sorts of trans people.
So, I'd say, ideally both, but specific is probably more important than broad.
Upset with Cheryl Morgan's Review of The Bone Palace
Okay, this is neither here nor there and nearly 3 years old, but since it's linked from http://hellyeahagender.tumblr.com/resources, I came across it. Can't leave a comment on the post, so here it goes:
Cheryl Morgan critiques Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace as being transphobic. This is mostly based on the fact that the main trans character didn't surgically remove her testicles/penis despite presumably having the ability and Cheryl Morgan apparently thinks that invalidates her as a trans woman:
(I say that this is the main basis for the criticism both because she describes this as the turning point, and because the other criticisms have strongly different readings that have been pointed out in the comments.)
When readers, including someone who's very vocal about being another trans woman who did find herself well-represented in the character in question, object in the comments, Cheryl ignores the main criticisms and claims without substantiation that she's not objecting to a particular type of trans person being portrayed, but that the portrayal was somehow transphobic beyond that. She fails to actually consider--after being explicitly told so at length--that she herself is creating/perpetuating transphobic norms by quotes like the ones I put above, which denies the identity of any woman who likes her penis.
She responds to an articulate argument (see Quinnae Moongazer's comments) pointing these things out by saying
I'm pretty disappointed in hellyeahagender tumblr for linking to it (indirectly, through this post that's very closely related), and more disappointed that Cheryl never edited her post to note that some trans people found her comments/assumptions offensive. I don't think Cheryl's wrong to have her reactions, or to criticize potentially negative narratives about trans people in media--but it's always wrong to do that by dismissing entire swafts of trans people and then failing to address your mistake when they call you out. Saying that something's upsetting because it portrays a trans character with a similar identity to you but a different experience of sexuality/dysphoria than you, and that the character not having the same dysphoria/sexuality as you means they don't have a strong gender identity, is pretty damn clearly transphobic and that doesn't change just because you claim that's not what you're saying. You have to, you know, actually go back and change what you said, or apologize for it. Failing to realize even when it's explained clearly to you that your reading of something as transphobic is actually due to your *own* transphobia (thinking the author must not have intended this character to be a real woman since she doesn't think/act like you think real women have to/almost always do) is... a pity, really. I'm still hoping the blogger goes back to this post one day and adds an apology at the top.
Some points I want to make:
- Degree and type of gender dysphoria aren't the same thing as strength of gender identity. There are people who don't have a gender identity who needed to get surgery to reduce the dysphoria they feel for their bodies. There are people (like FTMTF types) who have body dysphoria but identify with their assigned genders. There are also very much so people with strong gender identities different from their assigned genders who only feel social, not body-related dysphoria, or who have body dysphoria in many ways but appreciate the pleasure their penises can bring them, or who find that the risks/costs of surgery would outweigh the rewards.
- Yes, it would be really cool to have another work of fiction realistically exploring a trans woman of the type Cheryl Morgan would want explored, who for instance might have resorted to castration in a world without reconstructive surgery.
- The original post didn't bother me much. It was just like, "Cool, an opinion." The fractal failure to respond upon being called out was what bothers me.
- I think I might actually find some parts of the book uncomfortably sensationalized (the pregnancy part seemed like a bit much), too.
Cheryl Morgan critiques Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace as being transphobic. This is mostly based on the fact that the main trans character didn't surgically remove her testicles/penis despite presumably having the ability and Cheryl Morgan apparently thinks that invalidates her as a trans woman:
The biggest problem for transsexual women, however, is between their legs. There is no more obvious reminder of one’s indisputable maleness than possession of a penis. Not only is it very clear physical evidence, but it has a bad habit of jumping up and demanding attention whenever its owner becomes sexually aroused. This makes it very difficult indeed for a trans woman to have any sort of heterosexual relationship prior to surgery. Testicles are a problem too. They might not be as obvious or attention-seeking, but they are a source of male hormones. If you get rid of them, your body becomes more feminine in appearance.And regarding sex
For a trans woman with a strong female gender identity, there is generally only one thing she wants to do with her penis, and that is get rid of it as soon as she can. (There are exceptions; more about this later.)And, no, she doesn't fulfill the promise of giving adequate consideration to those "exceptions."
(I say that this is the main basis for the criticism both because she describes this as the turning point, and because the other criticisms have strongly different readings that have been pointed out in the comments.)
When readers, including someone who's very vocal about being another trans woman who did find herself well-represented in the character in question, object in the comments, Cheryl ignores the main criticisms and claims without substantiation that she's not objecting to a particular type of trans person being portrayed, but that the portrayal was somehow transphobic beyond that. She fails to actually consider--after being explicitly told so at length--that she herself is creating/perpetuating transphobic norms by quotes like the ones I put above, which denies the identity of any woman who likes her penis.
She responds to an articulate argument (see Quinnae Moongazer's comments) pointing these things out by saying
I appreciate your input, but basically it seems to come down to telling me that my reading of the book was wrong.Which is basically her either misunderstanding the argument (and I don't see what's not clear about
), or she's intentionally ignoring the main criticisms and pretending the person she's responding to had made an entirely different argument. Note that Quinnae does say her reading of the book is wrong--I'm not trying to distort things here--but the point is that her criticisms in the book are grounded in her own commitment to transphobic stereotypes/assumptions, with the right or wrongness of her criticisms being a lesser matter (IMO, at least--not sure if either Quinnae or Cheryl would agree that literary criticism << transphobia in importance). In any case, it's obviously crucial that she address her own transphobia when called out on it by other trans people, and she fails that miserably.One, I was not suggesting your context was unreal or irrelevant or invalid. I *was* suggesting that statements like:“For a trans woman with a strong female gender identity, there is generally only one thing she wants to do with her penis, and that is get rid of it as soon as she can.”Distort trans women’s experience and tells cis people what they think they already know about us.
I'm pretty disappointed in hellyeahagender tumblr for linking to it (indirectly, through this post that's very closely related), and more disappointed that Cheryl never edited her post to note that some trans people found her comments/assumptions offensive. I don't think Cheryl's wrong to have her reactions, or to criticize potentially negative narratives about trans people in media--but it's always wrong to do that by dismissing entire swafts of trans people and then failing to address your mistake when they call you out. Saying that something's upsetting because it portrays a trans character with a similar identity to you but a different experience of sexuality/dysphoria than you, and that the character not having the same dysphoria/sexuality as you means they don't have a strong gender identity, is pretty damn clearly transphobic and that doesn't change just because you claim that's not what you're saying. You have to, you know, actually go back and change what you said, or apologize for it. Failing to realize even when it's explained clearly to you that your reading of something as transphobic is actually due to your *own* transphobia (thinking the author must not have intended this character to be a real woman since she doesn't think/act like you think real women have to/almost always do) is... a pity, really. I'm still hoping the blogger goes back to this post one day and adds an apology at the top.
Some points I want to make:
- Degree and type of gender dysphoria aren't the same thing as strength of gender identity. There are people who don't have a gender identity who needed to get surgery to reduce the dysphoria they feel for their bodies. There are people (like FTMTF types) who have body dysphoria but identify with their assigned genders. There are also very much so people with strong gender identities different from their assigned genders who only feel social, not body-related dysphoria, or who have body dysphoria in many ways but appreciate the pleasure their penises can bring them, or who find that the risks/costs of surgery would outweigh the rewards.
- Yes, it would be really cool to have another work of fiction realistically exploring a trans woman of the type Cheryl Morgan would want explored, who for instance might have resorted to castration in a world without reconstructive surgery.
- The original post didn't bother me much. It was just like, "Cool, an opinion." The fractal failure to respond upon being called out was what bothers me.
- I think I might actually find some parts of the book uncomfortably sensationalized (the pregnancy part seemed like a bit much), too.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Yes, I do want to end gender
Reposting a comment I left on this blog post. The original post, I don't have a problem with--haven't read either of the articles it's talking about, and the one being criticized does sound awful.
Rani Bakr replied in a way that took it too far, IMO:
But a couple of the comments hit an old nerve--reiterating this idea that somehow people who want to "do away with gender" can't be part of the trans community.
The way I experience gender is fragmented and doesn't fit either dominant models of (genitals == penis ? man : woman) or of somehow "knowing" that you're a man/woman/whatever and feeling severely dysphoric if this isn't recognized or doesn't "match" your body (whatever gender has to do with anatomy), so my political belief that imposing or requiring gender is tyrannical and unnecessary actually fills out a lot of the core of what I'll call gender identity because other people decided gender identity was a thing. Unfortunately, to a lot of people apparently politics is an unacceptable explanation for being trans. They feel threatened because anti-trans people have used politics against them in at least two ways:
1. Developing a straw-trans who's basically a "laughable" rebel and using that to dismiss the authentic and seriously-effing-important experiences of actual trans people. This is what Nat's article is speaking out against.
2. Dismissing many aspects of trans experience, such as transitioning from one [perceived/presented] gender to another, by saying we should just "do away with gender" instead of promoting trans rights. I was unaware of this phenomenon until reading the comments that I'm replying to.
I've basically been collateral damage in other trans people's fight against these attacks. It's not necessary, though--you can seriously want to abolish gender while respecting trans rights and perspectives. The necessary distinction is really simple, actually: The gender that should be abolished is coercive, other-imposed gender, while the gender that should be respected is personal expression, identity, self-definition, and experience.
So, here's the comments:
makomk said:
Think this is part of a running pattern of cis people using the idea that trans and non-binary folks are an obstacle to ending gender/gender roles/gender rules/... as a way of dismissing them, whilst actually relying heavily on binary gender and everything that traditionally goes with it. By now I may even visibly twitch when someone suggests doing away with genderI was twitching at the "twitch" comment, but still not really objectionable since it's personal experience and clearly attacking the attackers, not me.
Rani Bakr replied in a way that took it too far, IMO:
Yeah, when people say things like "doing away with gender" there's a 1000% chance they mean the elimination of people that don't display a masculine (aka "default" in our sexist, heteronormative world) gender expression.So I said (and btw disqus is really annoying, was trying to post under my real name and failed):
Umm, no? If I say something similar to "doing away with gender" (and I try not to, even though it's what I believe, since I know I'll offend people), what I mean is ending societally imposed gender labels and other forms of gender coercion. That includes but is not limited to:
Never assigning gender to a baby at birth
Using gender neutral pronouns as the default for all people unless someone expresses a preference otherwise (simply "looking" physically and socially female/male isn't an expression of a preference)
Not having gendered public facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms
Never putting gender on legal documents or ids
Actively fighting prejudice and inequality based on gender/sex
Prejudice based on gender/sex includes prejudice against interests, traits, and communication styles considered "feminine"
Not giving children names that carry heavy gender connotations (like "Alicia" or "James")--for that matter, I'd prefer if children routinely chose their own names upon coming of age
Ending all segregated activities like Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts, choirs, etc
Using gender neutral pronouns as the default for all people unless someone expresses a preference otherwise (simply "looking" physically and socially female/male isn't an expression of a preference)
Not having gendered public facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms
Never putting gender on legal documents or ids
Actively fighting prejudice and inequality based on gender/sex
Prejudice based on gender/sex includes prejudice against interests, traits, and communication styles considered "feminine"
Not giving children names that carry heavy gender connotations (like "Alicia" or "James")--for that matter, I'd prefer if children routinely chose their own names upon coming of age
Ending all segregated activities like Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts, choirs, etc
Yes, around the time I came to identify as non-binary, I was also discovering that I believe gender is an illegitimate form of social control. I am not sure whether the concept of gender would exist if we'd never tried to control or oppress people based on it, but certainly body dysphoria would exist anyway, and certainly preferences for certain styles of self-expression would exist anyway. In any case, that's hypothetical, and "gender" also has another meaning of involving personal identity and expression, and that's fine. It took me a couple years to realize the two ideas--respect for people who value being a certain gender and opposition to coercive gender--aren't actually contradictory. So I'd rephrase "gender is an illegitimate form of social control" as "imposing gender upon people or using it to control them is an abusive practice that's often made obligatory in societies and governments."
I don't think I should have to prove that my non-binary identity is based on something other than my political beliefs for it to be recognized as legitimate--and I'm tired of feeling that I do. I think it's pretty easy to make the connection that a teenager who doesn't understand the point of gender and doesn't feel that the gender binary as imposed by society is a real thing at all probably isn't experiencing their own gender in a normative way, and so I'm not saying that it *isn't* about self-expression and reducing discomfort and all that for me (now in my mid-twenties), but I am rejecting the idea that those personal factors are good reasons to be genderqueer while all the political ones are embarrassing and backwards and I should keep them to myself.
I'm not okay with other people who want to do away with gender using that opinion to erase or dismiss trans people. But I'm not okay with other trans people using stereotypes to erase or dismiss my own beliefs (and in doing so my gender identity, since I connect my non-binary identity very strongly to my beliefs), either.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Bi doesn't [always] mean "attracted to people of the same or a different gender"
So, Natalie Reed seems like an admirable blogger and all I know about her is her blog header and this one post that I am nitpicking against, but, really, I have to laugh in kind of a derisive counterstrike, intentionally offending due to feeling offended, when she says
My complaint is pretty simple: What the fuck does "same gender" or "other gender" mean to someone like me?
I don't feel like a gender. I have some elements of feeling bigendered androgynous or genderless androgynous or male or female or geek-as-gender and I'd describe both my presentation and gender experience as genderfluid. I feel a little bit like and a little bit not like most every gender I've come across. If I use the word "pansexual," it's probably to include myself.
I use bisexual as well. I adopted it as an identity first, for one thing, and I'm deeply satisfied with it as part of my history. It's also nice because it's an older and more common word, so it literally includes more people who identify as part of the bi community. My community. I also hear pansexual used by people who are actually monosexual or mostly monosexual, who explain pansexual as meaning being attracted to someone's soul, not their gender. Bi doesn't have that layer of meaning/ambiguity.
To me, "bi" doesn't have to imply a binary. It can mean flexibility, ambiguity, ambidexterity. "Ambidexterity" here summoning an image of exploration and simultaneous movement, of looking from side to side to take in a four-dimensional world, the opposite of focusing in one factor and asking whether it's a one or a zero. "Ambiguity" I guess could be offensive, but my gender is definitely ambiguous, not because there's some big mystery or I'm hiding anything, but because the question was phrased in such a way that it can't get a clear answer on its terms. And my attractions to others, who I'll be attracted to for what reason, the lines between physical attraction and sexual attraction and emotional attraction and romantic attraction, platonic vs non-platonic, all fall in misty, ambiguous territory. "Ambiguous" can mean wild, untamed, uncodifiable, and to me both my sexuality and gender fall easily into this territory. I bring up gender because the way "straight," "gay," and "lesbian" are defined make sexual orientation inseparable from gender identity. I feel happy and free to be bisexual because, in its normal connotation, it frees the bearer from the burden (for people like me at least) of defining and disclosing a gender identity just to explain who they're attracted to. The framing Reed favors takes that away from me, and I'm not about to give it up.
Another Reed quote on the bi/pan issue from that post:
This one I do partially agree with. Why on earth would people attracted to binary trans people need a new label? On the other hand, if we're saying that the gender of people someone's attracted to is a crucial issue, and that is what almost our entire society has been saying for at least decades, then why on earth wouldn't people of previously overlooked gender experiences not need acknowledgment?
I don't take our current constructions of sexual orientation and gender too personally, so I don't feel left out if someone dating me doesn't identity as androgynophile or pansexual or queer or any of the other identities that would explicitly include people like me. I actually find the term "pansexual" kind of uncomfortable at times, both for the "attraction to souls" definition I mentioned earlier and because of another formulation that says it's attraction to people of all genders without their gender playing a role. I can't meet that bar, even though I have been attracted to people of about as many genders as I've encountered. There are specific patterns of attraction that I am much more likely to have for people of certain genders, and I'm generally attracted to some gendered feature of a person I'm attracted to.
Sexual orientation labels are by their nature going to be over simplifications. I'm cool with that. What I'm not cool is with someone insisting that this definition of bisexual gets rid of all the problems and doesn't erase anyone and is totally cool when that's just not true. You are GENDERING me if you say bi means "same gender/other gender duality," and I don't feel good when people gender me. Language is fuzzy, words have multiple definitions and ranges of connotations, and people are going to prefer different labels for what's basically the same thing. That's a lot better than someone insisting their own words are the only true ones.
[1] Edit: I think the original person I heard say this attributed it to Kinsey. Didn't find a source on a quick Google, but was reminded of the Kinsey scale, which could be its own primary source.
[2] Added [always] to title, since I don't want to police other people's definitions. Phrasing things inclusively is hard.
Just like “bisexual” only means “has the dangerous connotation of “only into cis men and cis women and nothing else”, and the “bi” in “bisexual” only refers to a “male/female” binary rather than a “same gender/other gender” duality, BECAUSE WE TREATED IT THAT WAY AND BEGAN ENCOURAGING EVERY TRANS/GQ-FRIENDLY PERSON TO USE PANSEXUAL INSTEAD. We *created* the meanings and definitions we opposed, by opposing them.Now, I've heard this definition of bisexual once before and have no idea where it came from [1], but I spoke out against it then and I will do so now.
My complaint is pretty simple: What the fuck does "same gender" or "other gender" mean to someone like me?
I don't feel like a gender. I have some elements of feeling bigendered androgynous or genderless androgynous or male or female or geek-as-gender and I'd describe both my presentation and gender experience as genderfluid. I feel a little bit like and a little bit not like most every gender I've come across. If I use the word "pansexual," it's probably to include myself.
I use bisexual as well. I adopted it as an identity first, for one thing, and I'm deeply satisfied with it as part of my history. It's also nice because it's an older and more common word, so it literally includes more people who identify as part of the bi community. My community. I also hear pansexual used by people who are actually monosexual or mostly monosexual, who explain pansexual as meaning being attracted to someone's soul, not their gender. Bi doesn't have that layer of meaning/ambiguity.
To me, "bi" doesn't have to imply a binary. It can mean flexibility, ambiguity, ambidexterity. "Ambidexterity" here summoning an image of exploration and simultaneous movement, of looking from side to side to take in a four-dimensional world, the opposite of focusing in one factor and asking whether it's a one or a zero. "Ambiguity" I guess could be offensive, but my gender is definitely ambiguous, not because there's some big mystery or I'm hiding anything, but because the question was phrased in such a way that it can't get a clear answer on its terms. And my attractions to others, who I'll be attracted to for what reason, the lines between physical attraction and sexual attraction and emotional attraction and romantic attraction, platonic vs non-platonic, all fall in misty, ambiguous territory. "Ambiguous" can mean wild, untamed, uncodifiable, and to me both my sexuality and gender fall easily into this territory. I bring up gender because the way "straight," "gay," and "lesbian" are defined make sexual orientation inseparable from gender identity. I feel happy and free to be bisexual because, in its normal connotation, it frees the bearer from the burden (for people like me at least) of defining and disclosing a gender identity just to explain who they're attracted to. The framing Reed favors takes that away from me, and I'm not about to give it up.
Another Reed quote on the bi/pan issue from that post:
a problematic pattern one can also note in things like people insisting “pansexual” is more inclusive than “bisexual” (and thereby that trans men, and trans women and non-binary-identified individuals require some special and exceptional acknowledgment and consideration in people’s sexuality)
This one I do partially agree with. Why on earth would people attracted to binary trans people need a new label? On the other hand, if we're saying that the gender of people someone's attracted to is a crucial issue, and that is what almost our entire society has been saying for at least decades, then why on earth wouldn't people of previously overlooked gender experiences not need acknowledgment?
I don't take our current constructions of sexual orientation and gender too personally, so I don't feel left out if someone dating me doesn't identity as androgynophile or pansexual or queer or any of the other identities that would explicitly include people like me. I actually find the term "pansexual" kind of uncomfortable at times, both for the "attraction to souls" definition I mentioned earlier and because of another formulation that says it's attraction to people of all genders without their gender playing a role. I can't meet that bar, even though I have been attracted to people of about as many genders as I've encountered. There are specific patterns of attraction that I am much more likely to have for people of certain genders, and I'm generally attracted to some gendered feature of a person I'm attracted to.
Sexual orientation labels are by their nature going to be over simplifications. I'm cool with that. What I'm not cool is with someone insisting that this definition of bisexual gets rid of all the problems and doesn't erase anyone and is totally cool when that's just not true. You are GENDERING me if you say bi means "same gender/other gender duality," and I don't feel good when people gender me. Language is fuzzy, words have multiple definitions and ranges of connotations, and people are going to prefer different labels for what's basically the same thing. That's a lot better than someone insisting their own words are the only true ones.
[1] Edit: I think the original person I heard say this attributed it to Kinsey. Didn't find a source on a quick Google, but was reminded of the Kinsey scale, which could be its own primary source.
[2] Added [always] to title, since I don't want to police other people's definitions. Phrasing things inclusively is hard.
Some disorganized thoughts on the trans/trans* debate
Was writing this as a reply to
http://practicalandrogyny.com/2013/10/31/about-that-often-misunderstood-asterisk/
when I realized this was a good use-case for "get my own blog."
Thanks for this post, and especially for empathetically describing a wide range of gender experiences that get ignored in dominant cis and trans gender narratives.
Made me think of saying I don't have a gender identity, because on some level it seems like I've spent the past many years pretending very hard to myself and sometimes others that I have one just because you don't get admission to the table if you don't. Even contemplating changing to that self-description gets me buzzing with anxiety--the obvious-to-me argument, now that I remember it, matches "I don't have a gender identity" to the invisibility-of-privilege pattern--what if I just feel like that because I can't *see* my really-cis identity? Damn, no wonder I've spent the last few years mostly avoiding thinking about my trans(*) status and gender experience (I prefer "experience" to "identity" because I do experience gender in ways but I'm uncomfortable with the dominant-among-trans "identity" narrative).
I don't worry too much about using or not using the asterisk consistently, since I know both are umbrella terms. I have often felt the need to distance myself from the "trans" community that is binary and/or medical, since I feel like our experiences are wildly different. I changed my name to be gender neutral and that's all I really NEEDED to keep gender issues from being a regular struggle. Luckily I don't work service jobs and live in an English-speaking country so people rarely gender me to my face. And it doesn't always hurt when they do, anyway.
I'm not even sold on inclusivity across all these gender variant lines being valuable. I like other transbrellans (port-trans-teau for trans and umbrella) with vastly different experiences and seem to have an unintentional as well as intentional social magnetism for them, but if a group of medically-transitioning transfeminine people are talking about discrimination in the doctor's office, I am an outsider, and if I speak up I'm potentially derailing their conversation (recent real life example). I've experienced at least a certain amount of angst and social dysphoria over the dominant trans narrative focusing on things like gender identity, preferred pronouns, and transition, which don't fit my experience of gender variance.
Fellow commenter Sable says something similar, "I guess I wonder why gender variant was not a good term. Saying "trans*" still feels like it it trying to place some level of trans on individuals who either do not feel trans or are actively working to resist the colonizing implications of everyone being placed under some form of (essentially white, Western) trans labeling."
It resonates. I'm white and Western, but it still resonates because trying to fit the concept of gender identity on my brain just doesn't work.
I don't want the transbrella to stop hanging out together and fighting together and working for each other's rights and acceptance in society, but are we really one community? Do we have need for an inclusive word for anything other than potluck and conference invites, since using the same word leads to us accidentally speaking for each other leads to erasure leads to ;_;?
I definitely agree that the best way to show inclusivity is by actually meeting the needs of various groups. And meeting their needs often means using more specific terms. Have a group for cross-dressers and another one focusing on medical transition. Include stories from as diverse a group of people as you can in your Gender Variance 101 materials, not a list of pithy definitions of incredibly complex subjects. Facilitate mingling across lines but don't mangle identities by trying to fit everyone into a given framework.
All that said, sitting around a campfire a couple weeks ago I heard a couple of trans people discussing what I think was probably the Reed article, and they both agreed on using trans to emphasize the umbrella-ness of its original intent as opposed to trans*, and that had a positive impact on me. I was like, "Yeah, these obviously adequately trans people want/need me in their tent, huzzah!" and decided to stop erasing myself and my experience from the trans community and the larger societal dialogue about gender definitions by ceding the entire trans rights movement to people who aren't like me.
By the way, I like GSM (gender and sexual minorities) as a good biosphere-sized umbrella term to take the place of LGBT, which came along at a time when people still presumably thought there weren't going to be that many identities.
http://practicalandrogyny.com/2013/10/31/about-that-often-misunderstood-asterisk/
when I realized this was a good use-case for "get my own blog."
Thanks for this post, and especially for empathetically describing a wide range of gender experiences that get ignored in dominant cis and trans gender narratives.
Made me think of saying I don't have a gender identity, because on some level it seems like I've spent the past many years pretending very hard to myself and sometimes others that I have one just because you don't get admission to the table if you don't. Even contemplating changing to that self-description gets me buzzing with anxiety--the obvious-to-me argument, now that I remember it, matches "I don't have a gender identity" to the invisibility-of-privilege pattern--what if I just feel like that because I can't *see* my really-cis identity? Damn, no wonder I've spent the last few years mostly avoiding thinking about my trans(*) status and gender experience (I prefer "experience" to "identity" because I do experience gender in ways but I'm uncomfortable with the dominant-among-trans "identity" narrative).
I don't worry too much about using or not using the asterisk consistently, since I know both are umbrella terms. I have often felt the need to distance myself from the "trans" community that is binary and/or medical, since I feel like our experiences are wildly different. I changed my name to be gender neutral and that's all I really NEEDED to keep gender issues from being a regular struggle. Luckily I don't work service jobs and live in an English-speaking country so people rarely gender me to my face. And it doesn't always hurt when they do, anyway.
I'm not even sold on inclusivity across all these gender variant lines being valuable. I like other transbrellans (port-trans-teau for trans and umbrella) with vastly different experiences and seem to have an unintentional as well as intentional social magnetism for them, but if a group of medically-transitioning transfeminine people are talking about discrimination in the doctor's office, I am an outsider, and if I speak up I'm potentially derailing their conversation (recent real life example). I've experienced at least a certain amount of angst and social dysphoria over the dominant trans narrative focusing on things like gender identity, preferred pronouns, and transition, which don't fit my experience of gender variance.
Fellow commenter Sable says something similar, "I guess I wonder why gender variant was not a good term. Saying "trans*" still feels like it it trying to place some level of trans on individuals who either do not feel trans or are actively working to resist the colonizing implications of everyone being placed under some form of (essentially white, Western) trans labeling."
It resonates. I'm white and Western, but it still resonates because trying to fit the concept of gender identity on my brain just doesn't work.
I don't want the transbrella to stop hanging out together and fighting together and working for each other's rights and acceptance in society, but are we really one community? Do we have need for an inclusive word for anything other than potluck and conference invites, since using the same word leads to us accidentally speaking for each other leads to erasure leads to ;_;?
I definitely agree that the best way to show inclusivity is by actually meeting the needs of various groups. And meeting their needs often means using more specific terms. Have a group for cross-dressers and another one focusing on medical transition. Include stories from as diverse a group of people as you can in your Gender Variance 101 materials, not a list of pithy definitions of incredibly complex subjects. Facilitate mingling across lines but don't mangle identities by trying to fit everyone into a given framework.
All that said, sitting around a campfire a couple weeks ago I heard a couple of trans people discussing what I think was probably the Reed article, and they both agreed on using trans to emphasize the umbrella-ness of its original intent as opposed to trans*, and that had a positive impact on me. I was like, "Yeah, these obviously adequately trans people want/need me in their tent, huzzah!" and decided to stop erasing myself and my experience from the trans community and the larger societal dialogue about gender definitions by ceding the entire trans rights movement to people who aren't like me.
By the way, I like GSM (gender and sexual minorities) as a good biosphere-sized umbrella term to take the place of LGBT, which came along at a time when people still presumably thought there weren't going to be that many identities.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Oh, look, a social group claiming to be for all queer women is sickeningly monosexist
Local social group on meetup:
They're really effective at erasing non-monosexual identities right after listing them--they say, "if you are looking for a fun group for women of all orientations" and I stop breathing for a moment the insult is so outrageous. They just said they were a group including bisexuals and pansexuals. So far all they've objected to is someone marital status + gender of their partner. NOW THEY'RE IMPLYING THAT YOU AREN'T BI, PAN, OR QUEER IF YOU MARRIED A MAN. Someone's orientation doesn't go away when they get married. (This is even funnier given that they listed "poly", which often means polyamorous, among their included identities list. The list they're using to justify excluding non-monosexual women.)
And maybe this is just awkward wording, but it also seems like they're erasing transwomen's sexual orientations or gender identities, too, given that they list "and transwomen who like women" as separate from a reasonably exhaustive list of orientations. Do they think there are trans but not cis women who like women but don't identify as anything already in the list?
The second thing they want you to know is that the first problem is sheerly one of prejudice--they're not a dating site, so you being married to a man should be 100% irrelevant.
Salt Lake City Rainbow Girls Social Club, you're erasing queer identities, cutting non-monosexuals off from their community, and co-opting their identities in your slimy self-justification. What you're saying is, "It's okay if you're bi/pan/queer/poly, as long as you act gay." And I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, that this is based on trouble with one or more past members--in which case, what you're saying is, "Non-monosexuals are a lesser group and it's okay to stereotype and reject them and get them to beg to be forgiven for things they didn't do on a 'case-by-case basis'".
I suspect you think that bisexuals just have straight privilege, and, hey, a bisexual married to someone of "the opposite sex" probably does have some forms of straight privilege. But bisexuals have higher rates of poverty, worse health, and greater likelihood of having experienced intimate partner abuse than monosexual gay people. By a long shot.
I'll repeat the links from this post:
They say more things under the "things to know" header, but I want to talk about these two points--the first thing they want to know is that they're ragingly biphobic while claiming to be for all women who like women, and listing a variety of specific identities. Monosexists, please give me my non-monosexual labels back. It's only polite to abstain from using them if you're going to reject people actually expressing behavior common to those sexual identities.***THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU APPLY TO JOIN US***- For the time being, this group is ONLY open to gay/bi/pan/poly/queer and transwomen who like females. IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY MARRIED TO A MAN, there is a good chance that this group IS NOT a good fit for you (however, special circumstances will be considered on a case-by-case basis). Please respect this, and if you are looking for a fun group for women of all orientations, you should check out some of the other awesome local women's groups on Meetup! Some examples include: Sex in the Salt Lake City (Women's Social Club) or theLadies Drinking Society of Utah and many many more!-WE ARE NOT A DATING SITE! If you are looking for romance, a better option would beOkCupid or any of the other dating services available on this big ol' internet of ours. That said, if you happen to meet someone you like then that is great, but it's definitely not our focus here.
They're really effective at erasing non-monosexual identities right after listing them--they say, "if you are looking for a fun group for women of all orientations" and I stop breathing for a moment the insult is so outrageous. They just said they were a group including bisexuals and pansexuals. So far all they've objected to is someone marital status + gender of their partner. NOW THEY'RE IMPLYING THAT YOU AREN'T BI, PAN, OR QUEER IF YOU MARRIED A MAN. Someone's orientation doesn't go away when they get married. (This is even funnier given that they listed "poly", which often means polyamorous, among their included identities list. The list they're using to justify excluding non-monosexual women.)
And maybe this is just awkward wording, but it also seems like they're erasing transwomen's sexual orientations or gender identities, too, given that they list "and transwomen who like women" as separate from a reasonably exhaustive list of orientations. Do they think there are trans but not cis women who like women but don't identify as anything already in the list?
The second thing they want you to know is that the first problem is sheerly one of prejudice--they're not a dating site, so you being married to a man should be 100% irrelevant.
Salt Lake City Rainbow Girls Social Club, you're erasing queer identities, cutting non-monosexuals off from their community, and co-opting their identities in your slimy self-justification. What you're saying is, "It's okay if you're bi/pan/queer/poly, as long as you act gay." And I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, that this is based on trouble with one or more past members--in which case, what you're saying is, "Non-monosexuals are a lesser group and it's okay to stereotype and reject them and get them to beg to be forgiven for things they didn't do on a 'case-by-case basis'".
I suspect you think that bisexuals just have straight privilege, and, hey, a bisexual married to someone of "the opposite sex" probably does have some forms of straight privilege. But bisexuals have higher rates of poverty, worse health, and greater likelihood of having experienced intimate partner abuse than monosexual gay people. By a long shot.
I'll repeat the links from this post:
Does your college/community have a writing center?
In college, I worked as a writing consultant at my school's writing center. People would come in with a paper, other piece of writing, or idea, and we'd sit down and talk about it. Afterward I'd write a summary of the consultation while logging them out. Alyssa's post on writing to ask for a job with help from a friend reminded me of that, but in this case from the other side.
As an example of how liberal writing centers tend to be, here's the first sentence of the local community writing center's self-description on its home page:
If you don't go to a school with a writing center, look for a community writing center or contact a local college's writing center and see if they take community members (mine did, but at a lower priority than students).
It occurred to me that some disabled people/people with disabilities might have a writing center available to them, either explicitly to serve the community, at school, or at a school but open to the community like mine was, but not know about it or its benefits. As someone who spent 3+ years as a writing consultant and student with communication and executive function impairments, I think I can say something on the matter.
What is a writing center?
Writing centers are varied, so my description might not fit the one(s) you have access to, and some of this relies on hazy memory/hearsay, but I'll do my best:
Writing centers generally fall into the category of "peer tutoring"--where students work with you one-on-one to improve your skills or develop a particular piece of writing collaboratively. Not all writing center consultants (also called tutors and a variety of other things, but I'll go with what my title was) are students--some may be professors or, especially if it's a community writing center, people with degrees and experience in teaching writing--but even those with more official qualification will likely approach you as equals. When my boss, an exceptionally brilliant professor, gave consultations, students were often surprised to discover afterward that he wasn't a student as well.
Writing centers may (and probably will) serve other functions as well:
- Provide a place to write and/or resources on writing. My writing center was pretty small, but if we had room someone could stay with their laptop or pencil and paper and work without having to break their groove by driving home or going to a distracting dorm room. We were also located in the college library, and the writing books were in our room.
- Give workshops, either in the writing center space or by coming to you. We gave workshops that anyone could go to, presented in classes when a professor wanted us, and went offsite to try working with youth programs (I never did that, alas).
- Hold writing groups. The local community writing center often holds writing programs to empower groups like veterans or abuse survivors.
- Provide online tutoring (e.g. using email or Facebook) and/or other online resources
As a field of discourse, writing center pedagogy strikes me as awkwardly earnest and very liberal. We were taught to be "non-prescriptive, non-directive, and non-hierarchical," and there's a real tension between the people the writing is often for (professors, people at work) and the writing center philosophy--which wants to be non-judgmental, to value voice over prescriptive/proscriptive, usually bullshit grammar rules, to focus on process over how the end result is supposedly supposed to be, and to make "better writers, not better writing."
At the same time, we're trained with praxis in mind--applying theory to practice--and we quickly realize that adjusting to an individual's needs at a given time is really the main part of our job. And, yes, the literature has long since noticed this.
Here's a blog post referencing this because I don't have any actual academic references on hand. The post is by Sarah Groenevald and refers to Nora Brand and Logan Middleton:
Nora and Logan, both doing research on Writing Centers and disability, helped me think about this even further. Nora, in her research, ended up organizing instructors’ responses to learning disabilities into four categories: direct engagement (focused attention on aspects of a student’s writing that are affected by his or her disability), overlooking (focused attention on any element of a student’s performance that is not related to his or her disability), celebration (recognition of the positive attributes of a student’s disability) and individualization (tailoring methods to specifically meet the needs of a student). She outlined the pros and cons of each kind of response, but concluded that each of these can be appropriate at different moments and with different students. While no tutors adhered entirely to one category, all of those she interviewed did at times practice individualization. And Logan also ended up talking about how important it is “to target the individual student and give them the tools they need to succeed.”
Meanwhile, Pomona College's writing center talks about adjusting the "non-directive" stricture for students who need it:
Sidenote: I am personally not so keen with generalizing advice like this to all LD (learning disabled) writers, so I would have phrased that as, "Ask the writer if they would like or benefit from you taking care to provide structure."So, how can we apply these strategies to our consultations?-take a more direct approach in consultations with LD students; the student may require more structure than other consultations.
As an example of how liberal writing centers tend to be, here's the first sentence of the local community writing center's self-description on its home page:
The SLCC Community Writing Center (CWC) supports, motivates and educates people of all abilities and educational backgrounds who want to use writing for practical needs, civic engagement and personal expression.
The visit
You may be able to walk in, schedule an appointment online, and/or schedule an appointment by phone. Some will require rigid time slots (probably 30, 45, or 60 minutes), while others like mine are more flexible. We tried aiming for 45 minutes, if it was less than 20 minutes that was a warning sign that we weren't going deeply enough, and some stretched up to 2 hours. If you can walk in, you may be able to come back later that day after working on your writing independently, or you may have to schedule a series of appointments with maybe 2 a week.
The writing consultant will ask you what you want to work on. Note that if you have more than one piece of writing, disclose all of them at the beginning--don't finish one essay or application and whip out another stack of them. You may come in without anything already written--you can come in at any stage of the writing process, including brainstorming or getting over a mental block.
Usually, if you have a draft already, the consultant will read it silently or ask if you want to read it aloud or have them read it aloud. Some students with certain writing problems benefit a lot from reading the paper aloud--they see typos or bad wording that they didn't just on the page. Others actually correct typos or improve on the writing without noticing they're not reading exactly what they wrote, which can itself be a major clue to the consultant. However, consultants may choose to read silently either for speed, to help their own concentration, or to accommodate their own need to, say, re-read certain parts several times. Some follow pedagogies that prohibit them from writing on the page, or even taking notes on a separate pad--others may ask you if they can write on your paper and then do so, sometimes cryptically, sometimes in notes you'll understand later. (I would often use a small dot or line in the margins as my note system.) They shouldn't write on your paper without asking but might out of habit--call them on it if you can. Because many consultants benefit from marking papers, our center had a policy of preferring printed papers rather than electronic form.
Before and after reading the paper, the consultant will attempt to ask you important questions: What is this writing for, what are the requirements (bring a copy if there's anything to bring), is there anything you're unclear on about the requirements, what do you want help with, what is your writing process, why did you put this sentence here, etc. You will likely also have to provide them with enough knowledge about the specific domain to understand the paper, and whether that word means what you think it means (hey, not everyone consultant can be an expert on neuropsychology, business writing, microeconomics, Hamlet, nursing abbreviations, guppy breeding, and real estate in northern Colorado, no matter how hard we try). You can and should ask questions and work through misunderstandings, as well.
Note that it's really easy for consultants to auto-pilot into micro-level issues (like punctuation, spelling, and mechanics), especially if you're a non-native speaker or have another obvious set of issues at this level of writing. We're trained to focus on higher-level issues at first, but sometimes understanding whether the paper is clearly organized and clearly develops its ideas is hard, but micro-level issues aren't. For this or other reason, you may have to cut the consultant off and redirect the consultation yourself--and you absolutely would be right to do so. Conversely, if you mainly want help with micro-level issues and you don't have a compelling reason to need it, the consultant might balk at being your proofreader--especially if your piece has significant higher-level issues. As I said before, consultants should tailor the consultation to your needs, so if you just brought in real-world writing, like a cover letter or soon-to-be-published pamphlet, or your professor docks heavily for punctuation mistakes, they may be completely willing to take on a proofreading role. But if they start to do so and realize your paper doesn't even make sense, they'll probably try focusing on that, instead.
A disorganized list of specific things that might happen in the writing center:
- The consultant gets you talking and makes an outline based on what you're saying.
- The consultant gets you talking and makes you make an outline based on what you're saying.
- Arrows get drawn on your paper indicating rearranging paragraphs or relocating sentences.
- The consultant has a confused thought about something which prompts you to realize something and go into a flurry of writing several sentences or reorganizing things and you both realize that it is now awesome.
- The consultant takes dictation for you, because you're saying very fluent things but your writing is much more awkward.
- The consultant tries teaching you a grammatical structure but can't rewrite your sentences for you, instead modeling the use. You may or may not be able to apply it in your own writing.
- You realize you need to completely rewrite your paper.
- You butt heads. Maybe the consultant thinks you need to completely rewrite your paper and you don't.
- You reread your paper, can't tell the consultant what you meant, and start rewriting it based on a conversation with them.
- The consultant realizes you don't know how to cite things correctly and are accidentally (or maybe intentionally?) plagiarizing. Side track into citation land.
- The consultant happens to understand your domain pretty well and helps you sharpen your analysis.
- The consultant doesn't understand the domain very well but you get ideas about how to sharpen your analysis from revisiting the paper.
- You get started on a paper and that's mainly what you need, not any specific help they give you.
- You have your anxieties allieved now that someone else has signed off on your paper, and that's all you really needed.
- You become a regular and greatly improve as a writer over time.
- You become a regular and mainly get help on areas you will always be limited in, but that's perfectly fine.
- You talk through life troubles. The consultant may be happy to be a surrogate therapist or may set professional boundaries that don't include getting this personal.
- Resumes, fiction, Prezzi, cover letters, application essays, brochures, poetry, essays, personal narratives.
Finding a consultant
If you don't go to a school with a writing center, look for a community writing center or contact a local college's writing center and see if they take community members (mine did, but at a lower priority than students).
If you can, I would talk to the consultants before making an appointment and try finding someone who will work well with your particular type of writing (or even your particular issues). Note that consultants do help other writers with disabilities, whether disclosed or not disclosed. Many but by no means all of the regulars are regulars because they have disabilities (or something that isn't a disability but is a lot like one, like being a non-native speaker).
I went to a small school with a relatively large writing center staff, but in any case, if you're a student, the consultants really are your peers so you can actually make friends with them, and a friend might be the person who works best with you. Or just try different consultants.
Sometimes writing centers are very time-limited. In those cases, and some others, you may be able to hire a writing consultant as your own tutor outside of their writing center hours, or pay them to do additional work with you and your paper. I had a couple times where I worked with someone after hours or provided extensive electronic feedback on a paper and they gave me a $20.
Or, as Alyssa did, just go to a friend who doesn't ask you to pay them. I enjoyed what I did and wasn't doing it for the money, and I'd still help someone with their writing if they came to me and I had time.
Some thoughts on the writing process
Alyssa's post is basically a reflection on her writing process for this particular piece of writing. I'm certain it's a wildly different writing process than she uses for her blog posts. One thing that might help if you're facing a brain-blanking writing task likes hers, or just want to breathe new life into your writing, is to translate one form of writing to another. In the "ask for a job" example, that could mean starting with a free-write reflection on past experiences that qualify you for the job, and another on why this job opportunity is interesting. You might have to block out the "qualify you" and "job opportunity" part if you're like me and that kind of thing produces enough anxiety to freeze your thoughts. Alyssa's penultimate writing sample is basically an illustration of this, where she's written a series of responses to related questions her friend guided her through. You may be able to come up with a set of questions (or get someone else to provide you with them) that will be re-usable next time you do a certain type of writing.
Another possible step to add to your process is to get a template or example of that type of writing, especially if it's open-ended, something you don't understand well, or, conversely, a highly formal writing form. A lot of business writing, including the job letter, probably falls under that--it needs to be formal and concise, so following a tried and true format is a good idea. When someone came into the writing center needing help with a cover letter, I'd pull a business writing book off the shelf and flip to the right page. They even have different formats for email vs. print cover letters. Even for academic essays, you can google to find an example of that type of paper, or ask your professor if they can share past years' students' work. For me, seeing other students' work could give me confidence that my own way would fall within the parameters of the assignment, because the good example papers tended to be diverse.
Finally, my most specific suggestion in this post--from Alyssa's post, it sounds like the scaffold her friend gave her didn't do much for her. (It may have helped the friend, and deserves credit for that). This scaffold is basically an outline of the content of the letter, but that's not the only way to do an outline. In a functional outline, you list the purpose of whatever you'll be writing in a given position, rather than (or in addition to) the content.
Judging from the tightness of the final draft of Alyssa's letter, it's pretty clear that she and her friend had a clear implicit understanding of the functional outline of the letter. I can't help but wonder whether starting with a functional outline instead of the content scaffold would have been at least somewhat more useful to Alyssa (or maybe to someone else reading this one day!).
State
purpose—asking about research position in specific area
Remind
addressee that you were in their class and did research in a related
area under them
Introduce
qualifications: Interest and past research in field
Give
past research professor's info as reference/for
verification/credibility
Describe
research (in order to show you know what you're talking about and
that it was related)
Describe
how research went well and give evidence that professor trusted you
Relate
past research back to current project you're trying to get hired
for—shifting focus from your research to yourself as research
assistant, in order to segue into good personal attributes
Good
personal attribute is language skills
Conclude
politely with request for reply, including non-binary option in case
addressee doesn't immediately say “yes!” (offer to supply
references)
Here's
a more generic version of this:
State
purpose—you're asking for a specific job
Introduce
yourself/remind addressee who you are if you've met
Establish
qualifications:
Name
drop (technical terms you've known from working, people/organizations
more prominent in the field who you've worked with) while letting the
reader know what your experience actually is
Give a
highlight or two of your most impressive successes during those past
work experiences
Mention
any additional skills or experiences that are highly persuasive but
not tightly coupled to the specific position
Remind
the person of what you're applying for and nudge them to visualize
you in the job by saying you'd be good at it
Conclude
by saying you're hoping for a response and offer to provide further
information
So,
here's me trying out this version of the scaffold by pretending to
ask for a job at the community writing center. For kicks I'll make it
less formal, more email-y:
Hi
<Whoever>,
I'm
writing in hopes that you'll have a position available at the <name
of organization>. My name is <name>, and I worked with
<former coworkers who work there> during my 3+ years as a
consultant at the <my college's name> Writing Center under
<name of director>. I enjoyed the creativity and constant
challenge of each unique writer and each piece of writing they
brought in, working across domains of discourse, abilities, cultures,
stages of the writing process, and levels of writing. In the two
years since I graduated, I have done highly collaborative work in
information technology at <name of current company>, where I
was promoted rapidly to my current title, Software Developer II.
My supervisor describes me as passionate in pursuing the best
solution for the company and exceptional in time management and
completing tasks. I hope to translate my history of one-on-one and
small-team work with culturally diverse people, my understanding of
business and technology, and my experience as a writing consultant at
a liberal arts college into a connection with the community of <place
I'm applying to>.
I'm
looking forward to your reply and will be happy to answer further
questions and supply references. Say hi to <former coworker that
still works there> for me.
Best
wishes,
<My
name>
I've
geeked out and gone on too long in this post, so I'll end my
composition musings here, but if anyone's interested in further talk,
I say, “Bring on the discourse!” (Message me.)
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