A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding how someone can be transgender and what that means--but it's actually a pretty simply concept.
1) The key to getting it is to understand that you were raised with a simplistic understanding of "gender" that doesn't allow for trans people to exist. You have to let go of that definition.
What you were taught: "Gender" is male or female, only, and can be determined by looking at a baby's genitals even before birth. This anatomical fact by some magic translates into calling the person by different pronouns and other words, having them wear different styles of clothes, conform to different standards of attractiveness, go into different public bathrooms, etc.
The reality: "Gender" is a social construct made to limit people and guide them into certain roles. The underlying sexual dimorphism is (a) not really binary and (b) not a moral justification for limiting how people are treated and allowed to act in society. One example of sexual dimorphism being non-binary is intersex people (those whose reproductive organs don't fit into either "male" or "female" categories), but there are many other examples as well. Say you think "men" are supposed to do the manual labor in a household because men are stronger than women. In reality, there are some households where the strongest member is female-assigned and the weakest member is male-assigned. Or take facial hair--we in part recognize people as men because they have it and women because they don't, but many men have little or no facial hair and many women grow at least a little--the distributions overlap, forming one bimodal distribution. And there are tons of other things, like long hair being associated with female and short hair with male, that are completely made up, and seem to exist mainly to force people in that androgynous overlap into neater, disjoint categories. Think about how we color-code babies, who otherwise have no visible sexual traits when clothed.
Okay, so now you know that "gender" isn't a hard, physical reality and that it's really weird and illogical to go from a real thing--a set of bimodal distributions in biology--and conclude that we should put everyone in one of two categories and treat them differently. What does that have to do with someone being trans?
2) Since we assign everyone a made-up gender without asking them, there's nothing to ensure that gender actually works for each person. And sometimes it really, really doesn't.
Sometimes for trans people, it probably doesn't even have anything to do with the culture getting gender wrong. It's the body that got mismatched anatomy--the brain's expecting something different than is actually there. This can cause lots of different negative feelings for a person, and the treatment is to fix the mismatch with hormones and surgery. But the cultural mixup on gender still comes in, because gender norms mean people who need this medical care have to face transphobia--the culture says that they are the gender they were assigned and that the body they can get from treatment is wrong.
But it's usually hard to untangle trans-ness, even gender dysphoria about one's body, from cultural ideas of what "man" and "woman" mean. People who transition in a binary way--claiming a male identity when they'd been assigned a female one or vice versa--are those who find they're more comfortable being perceived as one gender than the other. Sometimes this is the gender they perceive themselves as, but others don't feel that either male or female is truly who they are, yet still feel better when others see them as one or the other, and/or feel better with the medical transition care that as a side-effect causes them to fit the cultural idea of one category rather than the other. Other people who know they don't fit the category they were assigned or the other binary one go for the long struggle to be recognized as some other gender (there are many non-binary genders, often described in relation to the gender binary, such as bigender), and other binary and non-binary trans people allow themselves to be perceived as their assigned gender despite not feeling that it fits.
This awareness that your assigned gender really doesn't work for you? That's what it means to be trans.
3) But isn't that just bucking gender roles?
The difference between being trans, and, say a feminist, is that if you're trans, you feel like you are not the gender you were assigned (could be all the time, could be some of the time). If you're not trans, you feel like you, as a person of your assigned gender, shouldn't have to live by those rules. Personally I think that's splitting hairs, but they're important hairs to a lot of people.
4) You should respect people's understanding of their own gender.
There isn't any objective standard for what gender is or what a certain gender category is. You aren't ever being inaccurate for accepting another person's identity. And you are being hurtful and contributing to oppression when you fail to do so.
Some examples:
If someone says they are really a woman, then they are really a woman. The definition of "real woman" is someone who feels like a real woman.
If someone says gender identity is a construct that doesn't make sense when applied to them, then don't try to label them "agender", "genderfluid", or anything like that.
If someone says their gender identity is defined by their ear piercings and Star Trek enthusiasm, try to think about how style, interests, and behaviors are prescribed and proscribed by gender categories. Ask the person to explain if they want to, because that's the best way to get closer to knowing what someone means.
If someone says their pronouns are "ze", use them! The pronouns a person chooses for zirself are more legitimate than the gendered pronouns embedded in the language as a tool for segregating people into gender categories without their consent. (And those gender categories exist, of course, for the sake of the patriarchy, oppressing women and forcing men into life-or-death competition.)
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Activism as recreational struggle, not moral cred
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).
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).
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.
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