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.