Questioning Transphobia

So a story that’s going around the news this week is about Nikki Araguz, widow of firefighter Thomas Araguz. She’s also a Texan and a trans woman.

Thanks to the Christie Lee Littleton case, there’s precedent that says trans women are not and cannot be legally female or women in the state of Texas, which can be used to deny trans women spouse benefits, although this primarily seems to come up when the spouse’s family wants a legal hook to deprive a trans woman of such benefits. This isn’t the first or the last time this will happen, and as much as it makes me sick to my stomach to see yet another trans woman’s life dragged through the mud because American (and specifically Texas in this case) law is regressive and oppressive.

But I think this story touches on somewhat larger, more encompassing issues that trans people have to deal with. Thomas’ mother, for example, insists that her son didn’t know that Nikki was trans and separated from her shortly before his death, and that Nikki herself married Thomas for the money – that she’s a gold digger. Nikki, on the other hand, says that Thomas knew all along and was fine with it.

I believe Nikki’s telling the truth. I believe Thomas’ mother, Simona Longoria, is appealing to the narrative that will ultimately purchase cis sympathy for her plight. Simona’s claim makes Nikki out to be an opportunistic predator, a stealthy deceiver, a liar who wormed her way into Thomas’ life in order to not only feast on his assets while alive, but to cackle merrily on the way to the bank after his death. It is dependent upon (in addition to the Littleton precedent), painting Nikki as someone who deceived Thomas in order to not only get into his bed, but also into his life.

This is how many cis people love to paint trans women. This is how Focus On The Family and its affiliated activist groups around the country talk about trans women – they claim we’re pedophiles and rapists just waiting to catch cis women and children alone in a restroom, or that cis men will pose as trans women to do the same. This is how murderers get light sentences after they murder trans women of color – by claiming they found out she was trans and killed her in an uncontrollable rage. Even when she’s been strangled after having slept with him for months, or when she’s been shot in the back. And then they walk free to kill again.

This is how cis columnists talk about how trans people are discreditable and dishonest if we don’t admit up front that we’re trans, or at least say so within the first few dates. This is how cis people describe that having sex with a trans person who doesn’t disclose is akin to rape or exposure to STDs. Cis people, on the contrary, are never expected to disclose their transphobia and unwillingness to date a trans person on any date. Cis people never feel the urge to say, “Oh, by the way? If you’re trans, I will bash your head in with a fire extinguisher.” And yet who takes the blame?

And as much as we talk about these things, these conversations fail to convey any amount of depth about the variety of trans people’s lives. It presumes that trans people are gendered properly a significant amount of the time. It presumes that trans people who are not gendered properly are perhaps not worth talking about quite as much. It presumes that trans people who are gendered incorrectly and recognized as trans are not often almost immediately subjected to hate speech and harassment, let alone threatened or even outright assault and violence. One of my friends on livejournal routinely talks about her encounters with cis people hurling hate speech and threats at her. To these cis people, apparently her very existence is too offensive for them to bear.

And that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about honesty, it’s not about disclosure, it’s about existence. Often, cis people see trans people as unbearable and intolerable just because of who we are, where we dare to go, who we dare to talk to, who we dare to find attractive, where we dare to work, what clothes we dare to wear, which street we dare to walk down. That we dare to breathe and speak, and be present.

So the problem is never “she lied to him” or any of that nonsense. The problem is that she’s trans and tried to live like a cis person, and that’s just not acceptable.

So, if we’re going to ever have a useful conversation about disclosure? It has to start there. It can’t be a debate about when or if trans people should tell cis people that they’re trans. It can’t focus on the needs and problems of trans people with reliable passing privilege (or who are assumed to have that passing privilege). It can’t even be about disclosure because disclosure is not the problem. It has to be about the fact that transphobia is a systematic, institutionalized force, and its primary purpose is to deny us the right to exist.

Edit: Apparently, all of Nikki’s assets have been completely frozen and she’s living off charity. If you want to donate to help with her legal fees (because this case could, if appealed far enough, change precedent in Texas), you can find the information here. Thanks to Drakyn for the link, and Charlie Butler for this link that also has more explanation.

Randy Cohen, the ethicist*, has declared that trans people are ethically required to disclose to their dates. He says:

Getting to know someone is a gradual process. I might panic if on a first date someone began talking about what to name the nine kids she’s eager for us to raise in our new home under the sea. Premature disclosure can be as unnerving as protracted concealment. But as partners cultivate romance, and particularly as they move toward erotic involvement, there are things each should reveal, things they would not mention to a casual acquaintance — any history of S.T.D.’s, for example, or the existence of any current spouse. Even before a first kiss, this person should have told you those things that you would regard as germane to this phase of your evolving relationship, including his being transgendered. Clearly he thought you’d find it pertinent; that’s why he discreditably withheld it, lest you reject him.

So he actually does use the word “panic” in that paragraph, which is kind of ominous. He also compares disclosing that you’re trans to disclosing STDs or whether you’re currently married to someone else.

As usually happens when it comes to trans people and dating, confidentiality and privacy are thrown out the window as soon as cis people insert themselves into the situation. Cohen (who is, by the way, a humorist and not an ethicist, who has written for the historically transphobic David Letterman show) says that it is fine for the cis woman who asked this question to out the trans man she dated to her friends, that her right to process something that doesn’t actually have a serious impact on her supercedes his right to privacy or any consideration for confidentiality.

He tries to soften it by saying “No handbills, and don’t ask him to announce it from the pulpit,” but as many of us have experienced, once someone outs you, the word can spread like wildfire. Cis people seem to think that learning that someone is trans is a particularly salacious and juicy rumor, one that will get passed around from person to person. It just takes hitting one cis person who doesn’t care more about your safety than about hir ability to get a cheap thrill exposing your secrets, and in my experience the majority of cis people are like this. Cohen even describes the trans man in question as discreditable, because he withheld this information until he was ready to divulge it. This is a pretty explicit acknowledgement of how many cis people view trans people: Our transness makes us discreditable. It doesn’t matter when we’re outed (by ourselves or others), once we are, we’re discreditable. Everything we say is doubted – about our competence, about our honesty, about our gender. Everything about us is false except what cis people allow us to have by inscribing upon us, usually against our will.

For an example, remember the trans man who crashed  a trolley while texting, and how many responses implied he shouldn’t even be allowed to drive a trolley because he’s trans? How about this cis man who caused the worst train crash in 15 years while texting? Somehow his cisness didn’t serve as a warning sign, right? The first story I linked even implies that Aiden Quinn was hired strictly because he was a minority, and not because he had any competence in driving a trolley. Okay, in both cases? Texting while driving is a really bad idea. Texting while transporting passengers is many times worse. But trans man crashes while texting? Trans people are dangerous. Cis man crashes while texting? Silence.

I read about this story on Bilerico, and Dr. Weiss dissects it pretty nicely. She also suggests writing the New York Times to complain about this:

I strongly suggest that Cohen is in need of criticism and education regarding transgender people, particularly from gay and straight allies of transgender people. He ought to issue a retraction. Here’s the address to write to him: ethicist@nytimes.com Letters to the editor may be addressed to letters@nytimes.com.

It is important to also mention the racial element of anti-trans hate crimes when discussing trans panic.

* Not really an ethicist.

Sparkindarkness has a post listing some of the horrors that have happened recently.

Depressing line up of violence and pain

These lists and links are always depressing – the more so because I know they’re only the tip of the iceberg – not a fraction of what is reported and in turn that only a fraction of the violence that happened – and continues to happen – every day.

A man in Florida has a killed his lesbian daughter’s girlfriend. Friends of the daughter have said that he hated that he did it because he didn’t like lesbians. I cannot even begin to contemplate the pain of this or the hate that would drive ytou to do such a thing.

I should be beyond  being shocked by homophobiuc violence by now, but this chilled me. the mayor of Paris has claimed that the killing of 2 men – by burying them alive – was an example of a homophobic hate crime. Buried alive? My mind refuses to go there, absolutely not.

In Scotland, openly gay teenager Jack Frew has been stabbed to death A 16 year old…

In Ipswich, UK, Rodney Greenland explains to us that he stabbed Simon Amers to death because Simon Amers touched him. The gay panic defence, again aired in the court room.

Neil McMillan is now on trial for the murder of trans woman Andrea Waddell

These are just some of the instances listed there. Go look.

I didn’t watch this, so I only have others’ reactions to go on. Those reactions, however, are pretty damning. Brent Hartinger at AfterElton.com lays things out pretty clearly:

It takes a lot to shock me these days, but I confess, I was shocked by the insensitivity of “Quagmire’s Dad,” last night’s episode of Family Guy.

In the episode, Quagmire’s friends think his dad is gay. Cue Family Guy‘s regular flood of penis and anal sex jokes whenever anything “gay” is mentioned.

It turns out that Quagmire’s dad isn’t gay; he’s a transgender woman. To the episode’s credit, it does point out that “gay” is different than “transgender.” And Ida, the transgender woman, does talk about her choice to get gender-reassignment surgery, saying, “Do I want to be happy the rest of my life, or do I want to be miserable?”

But the second half of the episode is about Brian hooking up with the woman, thinking he’s found his soul-mate, but not realizing she’s transgender. When he’s informed of this, he precedes to vomit for thirty seconds straight; in a sight gag, the whole floor of the room fills up with vomit.”I had sex with her!” Brian says, before screaming like what has transpired is the most disgusting thing imaginable.

“When they move to a new place, they’re supposed to notify the neighborhood!” a character says of transgender people.On top of that Peter and Lois say a whole host of shockingly insenstive things including asking what they call “it” now.

Apparently, Seth McFarlane had this to say about this episode before it aired:

Seth MacFarlane: You have … the [gay] news anchor partners on American Dad, you have Bruce the performance artist on Family Guy, and you have my own personal abhorrence for Prop 8. That always distresses me when I hear that the gay community is upset with us, because that’s one group of people I hope would know we’re on their side. … I can safely say that the transsexual community will be very, very happy with the “Quagmire” episode that we have coming up in a couple of months. It’s probably the most sympathetic portrayal of a transexual character that has ever been on television, dare I say. (emphasis mine)

As many would rightly point out, Family Guy isn’t sensitive on any issues. I don’t think this absolves the show from criticism on those issues, however. Especially not after McFarlane pulls a trolling comment like that.

This episode features an extended remix of the Crying Game reveal, an oblique categorization of trans people as being like sex offenders, and the main characters being too fucking stupid to know which pronoun to use when referring to a woman. What the fuck. Ally McBeal’s trans story was more sensitive than this, and it was not all that good (featuring a cis guy saying he can detect trans women by sight, a trans woman as a sex worker, and her murder at the end). Alexis on Ugly Betty was better. The Bones episode “The He In The She” was probably more sensitive and the trans woman in that episode was only present as a corpse and a puzzle to solve.

This episode does nothing more than present a trans woman as an acceptable target for dehumanizing ridicule. This episode will do nothing more than confirm for everyone who already hates trans people that trans w0men are disgusting freaks who try to trick honest cis men into having sex. This kind of visibility does not do us any favors.

And I swear to god, I do not want to hear about how Seth McFarlane offends everyone. That’s bullshit. His humor is crafted for a cis, straight, able-bodied male audience. Everything you see on his shows is meant to affirm that perspective.

Sin Nombre wrote about the interplay of cis privilege, homophobia, and transphobia:

This is based on a true story; some details have been changed but none of the events have been changed.

A cis guy and a trans guy who is misgendered more often than not (i.e., he doesn’t pass as a cissexual, cisgender guy) go into a women’s restroom in a mall because the men’s room is closed, the women’s is empty, the mall is minutes from closing and they don’t know their way around. Security comes and starts yelling at them. The cis guy leaves, but the security guard starts banging on the stall where the trans guy is using the restroom, threatening to take the door off the hinges. After multiple requests to do so, the guard allows the cis guy to go use the men’s room, which had been closed before, and the cis guy does his business and leaves. The security guard starts asking the cis guy what gender his friend is.

During the commotion, a group of cis guys hanging outside the restrooms start to harass the trans guy, and offer to physically assault him for the guard. The guard keeps asking the trans guy ‘what gender are you?’ even after seeing his ID, which hasn’t been changed because he can’t afford to do so due to long-term unemployment and no family support. The trans guy doesn’t answer because he isn’t legally obliged to do so and it’s none of the guard’s damn business. The cis guy is never asked what his gender is, in fact he’s seen as more credible than the trans guy himself is. In the course of all of this, the cis guy is yelling and swearing angrily at the security guard, refuses to provide ID, and is extremely uncooperative.

The two are escorted over to the security area of the mall; the guard physically grabs the trans guy and takes his bag and accuses him of ‘getting smart with [him]‘ even though all he’s said is that he doesn’t consent to a search and has asked if the guard is an actual police officer. The cis guy remains untouched even though he is being loud and throwing out every profanity he can think of.

Another guard in the security office asks the trans guy about his genitalia, saying ‘do you have a penis or a vagina between your legs?’. Eventually the cis guy is able to talk them both out of the situation when the supervisor comes over to figure out what’s going on, after changing his tone and saying that he’s a student at a top 20 private school, that he’s trying to go to med school and is due to take the MCAT next month and that it’s ridiculous to threaten his chances of med school over something like this, that he just really needed to fucking pee and that he knows it was stupid to do that. The supervisor asks for, then looks at, his college ID. They get to leave with a ‘verbal warning’ shortly thereafter.

What’s wrong with this situation?

If you don’t know, then perhaps you should take notes on what I’m about to say.

1. Obviously, the cis guy had no business being in the women’s room in the first place. One could argue that the trans guy didn’t either, but he had more of a right to be there than the cis guy. In any case, he’s in a catch-22: according to the security guards, who believe that they make the rules, one has to use the restroom that one’s genitalia/ID dictates.
2. The reason the guard started yelling at both of them, it’s later revealed, is because of ‘homosexual activity’ that apparently takes place in the mall. Never mind that the mall is also a popular place for people to smoke illicit substances and even openly carry them…cis straight people must be protected from gayness at all costs. Never mind that they were in two different stalls, which the original guard had to have known because the cis guy came out of one stall and he walked to the other one.
3. This situation was a perfect storm caused by the confluence of male privilege and cis privilege–the guy who ‘looks cis’ is literally left untouched even though he gave the guard all the provocation in the world to be violent towards him (I’m not advocating victim-blaming, but I hope my point is clear here). The trans guy, who may have been a butch lesbian as far as the guards were concerned (and he stated this after the fact), is threatened and physically assaulted and basically asked to prove his femaleness just to take a damn piss. That he isn’t female is not the point.

Btw, the cis guy in this story was actually trans, but no one saw the unchanged gender marker on his license, making his trans status irrelevant at that time. After all, if a cis person ‘believes’ you, you’re granted the privileges that come with cisdom, even if they are temporary and fragile at best. He escaped the violence even though he should never have been in the women’s room in the first damn place. So add cisgender/’passing’ privilege to the list of what’s fucked up about this whole situation, as well as the bleedingly obvious transphobia and homophobia. This is not a knock on people who are stealth; I myself am stealth. But there comes a point when one’s gender is taken more seriously than others of the same or similar status, particularly when one is binary-IDed or perceived as such.

My hope in telling this story is that people with privilege(s) truly examine them and how they affect things that happen to them and how they are treated by others.

Gudbuytjane‘s post is at this link.

Despite being a mostly-unknown trans activist and blogger whose target audience is usually quite small, I recently found myself at the centre of some internet drama over a piece I wrote at my blog critiquing Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video for what I perceived as transmisogynist content. My arguments were initially picked up and discussed on a few feminist blogs, Twitter, and the typical places I was used to seeing these kinds of ideas debated. A few days after I put up the post, though, it was cross-posted in its entirety to Oh No They Didn’t, a pop culture community on Livejournal. Almost immediately, my page hits increased by orders of magnitude. With the shift from academic/queer/Feminist/oppression politics sites to a mainstream audience came a nearly complete disintegration of argument, and my inbox and comment queue began to fill with hate mail. In almost every letter the author concluded with an accusation like “And maybe you ****ing trannies would get somewhere if you weren’t so ****ing angry!”

I get the irony.

Of course the rest is at the link.

via gudbuytjane:

Warning: Contains quoted descriptions of violence against trans people.

With the state of appropriation of trans lives in the queer community being what it is, I wasn’t terribly shocked when I found out about Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives, a new “comedy/thriller/‘transploitation” film directed by a cissexual gay man, Israel Luna. Trans women especially are subject to being reframed in cis people’s narratives, and gay men especially seem to have a sense of entitlement over the identities of trans women. This piece does a good job of pointing outmuch of the transphobia, transmisogyny, and cissexual privilege in the movie and in Israel Luna’s attitudes towards trans people.

Follow the link to read the full takedown. This is pretty disgusting stuff.

GLAAD has a call to action up about this:

Misrepresenting the Lives of Transgender Women
Writer/director Israel Luna based his film on the “exploitation films” of the 1970s such as I Spit On Your Grave, about a woman who was raped and sought revenge on her attackers. The five lead characters in Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives are brutally attacked by a group of men; two do not survive the attack, but the surviving three seek gruesome revenge on their attackers. The film is a pastiche of graphic violence and horror movie clichés, with a few scenes of campy humor.

By marketing Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives as a “transploitation” film, by using the word “trannies” (a pejorative term for transgender people) in the title of the film, by casting transgender women in some roles, and by citing the murders of Angie Zapata and Jorge Mercado in the trailer, Israel Luna has attempted to place his film squarely within a transgender narrative.

However, while some of the actors in the film identify as transgender, the characters are written as drag queens, “performing” femininity in a way that is completely artificial. The very names of these over-the-top female caricatures (Emma Grashun, Rachel Slurr, et al.) drive this point home.

Because of its positioning as a transgender film, viewers unfamiliar with the lives of transgender women will likely leave this film with the impression that transgender women are ridiculous caricatures of “real women.” It demeans actual transgender women who struggle for acceptance and respect in their day-to-day lives and to be valued for their contributions to our society.

You can read the full call to action at the link above.

Edit: I didn’t catch it myself, and I apologize for that, but the GLAAD call for action others trans people who are outside the binary and promotes that there’s really one way to be a trans woman. I would suggest also writing to GLAAD about the problematic and offensive aspects of their call to action.

I also copied the link to this post in gudbuytjane’s excerpt above, but I want to make sure people see it. Unfortunately, one of the actors chose to defend the film in the comments, mobilizing transphobia and misogyny against trans women to do so.

If Israel Luna so desperately wanted to make an exploitation film, I think he would have been better off looking to his own community before attempting to claim ownership of trans women’s lives.

This is a guest post from Tobi Hill-Meyer.  Her blog has recently been re-launched under the new url: nodesignation.com

If you’ve been around for internet discussions on trans issues long enough, you’ve probably seen it.  Someone is being called out for their transphobic behavior and in defensive posture they dismiss the trans person talking to them as “angry,” “shrill,” or “hypersensitive.”

Of course the trans person is angry after being hurt then dismissed when they speak up – I get upset just reading such exchanges.    It’s a very appropriate response.  It’s not uncommon, though, for others to step in and lecture the individual about their effectiveness , saying something along the lines of “Yelling won’t change their mind.”  Of course trans people don’t have a moral obligation to be educators, let alone effective educators.  Many of us identify and call out this scenario as a tone argument an unfair expectation to educate our oppressors.  But please follow me for a  moment as I analyze this increasingly common situation with another anti-oppression tool.

Read the rest of this entry »

One thing that I encountered, over and over, early in transition was the suggestion (demand, even), that I document my transition.  It’d be fascinating, document something important etc.  The suggestion seemed nonsensical–I’ve never been a very visual person, I’m a writer, a poet–but worse than that, it annoyed and upset me.  Like a lot of trans people, I have a fraught relationship to photography.

This post by Rebecca articulates a lot of things.  She writes compellingly about the anger she feels at her parents for displaying photos of her pre-transition:

I’m angry at them for remembering as joyful (or even merely placid) the time I felt as painful and turbulent. I’m angry at them for happily framing and mounting photos that remind me of how horribly trapped I felt at all times. I’m angry at them for mourning the loss of someone who was never really there, regardless of how ‘normal’ he was or how little ‘fixing’ he seemed to need. And that anger, I haven’t really even started to address.

But the problem with photography goes further than simply “documenting” an unhappy period–it is that it comes with a cissexist history of interpretation which fixes the photographed trans person as “really” their assigned sex. In other words, like all texts claiming to merely “reflect” reality, the photograph constructs, placing the subject into an interpretative framework.  Like all texts, we read the semiotics of the photograph generically–family photograph, wedding photograph, advertisement etc etc.  And yet if we realise how fake magazine photos are (with its attendant airbrushing, lighting and so on), when it comes to the casual photo, we very often see it as truthful.  As Cedar said:

And it is precisely the medium of the photograph, that purports to tell the unmediated, timeless, “unavoidable,” “natural” truth, on which nothing has been written, that propagates that violence across time to the present day, that amplifies the memory of oppression. It is precisely how a camera takes a person and makes a static image, an object that can be reproduced, moved, or displayed without my knowledge or consent that reiterates cis power to determine my body, its appearance, its reproduction, and its movement, and puts it on display without my knowledge or consent.

Cedar is suggesing that, like other marginalised groups (think National Geographic), the camera has had an oppressive history for trans people.  Jay Prosser notes in Second Skins the ways in which trans narratives have been framed by photographs.  I think we’re all familiar with the placement of “before” and “after” photos side-by-side, in magazines, in books about trans people.  Their constant, almost obligatory, usage by cis people suggests that there is something important at stake for the cis gaze which is confirmed by the “before” photos–the “truth” of the assigned sex.

What I think is painfully missing from the world at large is a transsexual gaze.  And no, I don’t mean the ability of trans women to possess an objectifying gaze (as I’ve read radfem interpretations of Laura Mulvey’s infamously misunderstood thesis about the Male Gaze).  A transsexual gaze would register the changes and movements of transition, but would also begin from the position of trans legitimacy–from the straightforward proposition that trans people are our sexes.

What I mean is, we lack the ability to register across time, not “before” and “after,” but one mode of sex and then other.   It would confirm not a cissexual truth, but a sex that already existed prior to transition (for  we do not come out of nothing, creatio ex nihilio), it is that a cissexual gaze does not see the trans person there.

In other words, we need to see the woman in the pre-transition photo of a trans woman, the man in the pre-transition photo of a trans man.  That, and only that, will help begin to dissipate the painful and fraught relationship so many of us have with photographs.

The story is here.

Paul Scott is running for Michigan’s Secretary of State. One of  his top four campaign priorities is:

· I will make it a priority to ensure transgender individuals will not be allowed to change the sex on their driver’s license in any circumstance.

Why does he feel this is important?

In an interview with Michigan Messenger, Scott said the issue was about “values.”“It’s a social values issue. If you are born a male, you should be known as a male. Same as with a female, she should be known as a female,” he said.

When asked to explain how such a mandate from the Secretary of State would benefit Michigan, he said it was about “preventing people who are males genetically from dressing as a woman and going into female bathrooms.”

While Scott is aware that federal courts have ruled that gender dysphoria, the medical diagnosis for transgender persons, was a disability, he said he did not think he would run afoul of discrimination laws. For the 27-year-old state representative, the issue is about biological gender.

He said his mandate would be in place even for those who had completely undergone sex reassignment surgeries.

“That’s who you are. You can have cosmetic surgery or reassignment surgery but you are still that gender,” he said.

It’s always about scare tactics with the bathrooms. Every single time. At least, that’s what they say, and it’s an emotionally volatile argument that stirs up controversy, as happens every single time civil rights come up for trans people, and is even invoked by those who claim to be our allies:

Last Thursday deja-vu hit as transphobic Barney Frank once again opened his mouth.  From an article in the Advocate, link below:

““There continues to be concerns on the part of many members about the transgender issue, particularly about the question of places where people are without their clothes — showers, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc.,” said Frank. “We still have this issue about what happens when people who present themselves as one sex but have the physical characteristics of the other sex, what rules govern what happens in locker rooms, showers, etc.”

This is a deliberate attack on trans people – a deliberate instrumentalizing of trans people as threats that must be controlled in order for Paul Scott to win votes and energize his base. Add that Michigan state law explicitly allows trans people to change their sex on identification, and now Scott’s promising to flout existing laws in order to stage this attack.

This is, of course, a distraction. There is no way in hell that the most pressing issue in any part of the United States is that trans women can use women’s restrooms alongside cis women. Just as with every other instance this is brought up, it’s fear-mongering and a deliberate attempt to play off transphobic hatred. Unfortunately, if he succeeds, it is yet another instance where trans people are positioned as a threat to society that must be stopped and controlled at all costs, as opposed to people with reasonable and easily accommodated needs.