Questioning Transphobia

I found this news on Tough Like a Creampuff.

I didn’t know Ian Guarr. I don’t know what his favorite food was, or what he watched on television. I don’t know what his plans were for his future. I know very little about him. I know that he was a trans boy. I know that his family supported him.

I know this:

Dear [name removed],

It is with a heavy heart that I share the tragic loss of one of our community’s beautiful children. Ian Guarr, a 16-year old transgender young man from West Michigan, took his own life on Monday. The Guarr family have been staunch allies and good friends of Triangle Foundation from the beginning of their journey. Ian’s mother Amy is a founder of TransYouth Family Advocates (http://imatyfa.org), a national organization addressing the issues facing transgender youth and a national partner of Triangle Foundation’s Camping.OUT program.

Ian was one of my daughter Chloe’s dearest friends. Ian was sensitive, thoughtful, brilliant, hilarious, and painfully shy. Our world is less bright without Ian’s presence. Even with an amazingly supportive and loving family such as Ian had, the youth of our community face an incredibly difficult path. In the United States, every hour an LGBT youth commits suicide. The statistics for transgender youth are even more harrowing — the attempted suicide rate is higher than 50%!

Ian’s family did everything right. They loved, cared, and advocated for who Ian knew he really was –not just for who society wanted him to be. This community owes the Guarr family a debt of gratitude for all that they have done for Ian as well as for all transgender youth.

Triangle Foundation joins our friends at TransYouth Family Advocates and TransActive Education & Advocacy in once again renewing our commitment to working with and on behalf of transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual and questioning youth who, like Ian, are struggling with a society that is often unwilling to accept them for the unique and beautiful people they are. Our work will continue until no young person feels that suicide is their only option.

Please join Triangle Foundation in sending our loving thoughts to Ian’s family, loved ones, and the community which joins them in mourning his loss.

Sincerely,

Colette Beighley and the Triangle Foundation family

PS. Please reply to this email if you would like Triangle Foundation to pass a message along to Ian’s family.

If you are, or you know, a young person thinking of suicide, please know that you are not alone and help is available. Contact The Trevor Project immediately at 1-888-488-7386 or visit www.thetrevorproject.org for help and more information.

I know how many times I’ve attempted suicide, and how many more times I’ve thought of it.

 My heart and sympathies go out to Ian’s family and friends.

Fred Clark of Slacktivist unpacks some of the reasons the christian right targets homosexuality so harshly. This is about homophobia, but I don’t believe it’s possible to completely disentangle transphobia and homophobia; evangelical Christianity applies these arguments to us without really considering transgenderism and transsexualism as orthogonal to sexual orientation:

Theory No. 1: The Safe Target - Here, he explains how homosexuality is a “safe” sin, because most of the congregation never feels the temptation to engage in it.

Theory No. 2: Inner Demons - This one is about closeted homophobes.

Theory No. 3: The Innocent Backlash - Blaming the victim – “If you weren’t so insistent on being treated like human beings, we wouldn’t try to smack you down so much.”

Theory No. 4: The Exegetical Panic Defense - I’ll use Fred’s words here:

“We see through a glass, darkly,” St. Paul said, warning against the temptation to chase the will-o’-the-wisp of certainty. But American evangelicalism is largely based on the idea that certainty is not only possible, but necessary. Mandatory, even. This certainty can be achieved thanks to the one-legged stool of the Evangelical Unilateral.

That’s a made-up term, but it describes something real. It’s a play on the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” — an approach to theological thinking that relies on the four foundations of scripture, tradition/community, reason and experience.

The evangelical approach to theological thinking is exactly like this Wesleyan method, except it doesn’t include tradition or community. Or reason. Or experience.

Theory No. 5: It’s the Politics, Stupid - Discusses why, of all biblical prohibitions, those against homosexuality are emphasized.

This isn’t an attack on Christianity in general. It’s specifically an examination of the homophobia from the evangelical christian right – something that is an undeniable cultural influence in present-day America.

I named this blog directly in opposition to another website, called “Questioning Transgender Politics” (google it if you like – I will quote it here, but I will not link them directly). This website is devoted to countering a nebulously defined transgender political movement. The authors never really come out and explain the political movement they’re countering – they don’t name any activists, quote any books, or link (or just name) any websites that demonstrate the politics they’re reacting against. There’s a very good reason for this: There is no such political movement.

I’m not saying that transgender people have no politics, political organizations, or activism. We do, we have a lot. What we don’t have are the straw trans people attacked on this website. I can point to 300 GLBT-rights organizations who opposed the passage of a transgender-exclusive ENDA, who all fight for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. I can point to Donna Rose, formerly of HRC who resigned in protest when HRC decided not to oppose Barney Frank’s GLB-only version of ENDA. I can point to Monica Roberts, whose political awareness and knowledge of our history I’ve come to admire greatly in the short time I’ve been reading her blog. I can point to GenderPac and NTAC, but those are simply examples, and not the sum total of transgender activism.

What do these people and these organizations fight for? Well, looking at GenderPac’s website, it says:

The Gender Public Advocacy Coalition works to ensure that classrooms, communities, and workplaces are safe for everyone to learn, grow, and succeed – whether or not they meet expectations for masculinity and femininity.

As a human rights organization, GenderPAC also promotes an understanding of the connection between discrimination based on gender stereotypes and sex, sexual orientation, age, race, and class.

Pretty scary, yes? NTAC says:

NTAC works for the advancement of understanding and the attainment of full civil rights for all transgender and gender variant people in every aspect of society and actively opposes discriminatory acts by all means legally available.
NTAC works to achieve equality for all transgender and gender-variant people. We know that no person is more equal than another, is more entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is more worthy of love or respect, than any other. We are human beings, and basic human rights are all we demand.
We envision a time in the near future when ALL people are treated equally under the law. A time when marriage, family, employment/workplace rights, medical care, and housing are no longer reserved for the privileged few, but are basic legally-guaranteed and protected rights for all people, regardless of gender identity or expression.

We are not willing to tolerate people being mistreated, assaulted, robbed, murdered, or neglected, simply because they are perceived as gender-variant. All human beings must be protected from hate crimes based on gender expression or identity by law, and those who perpetrate crimes against gender-variant people, must face prosecution and enhanced penalties for the crimes of passion they have committed.
We will not stand idly by while government, at any level, passes legislation that will adversely affect gender-variant people’s ability to live, work, and conduct their lives in safety, with security, without undue bureaucratic issues, and with privacy in their personal and professional lives.
We will not let another day go by without our voices calling out injustices. Nor will we allow government to turn a blind eye in our direction any longer. We are human beings and deserve and demand the same human rights most Americans take for granted every day – no more, no less.

Now that we’ve established a good example of the terrifying spectre of transgender politics, I’m going to refer to Questioning Transgender Politics’ front page:

Introduction
Against Politics, Not People

This is semantically like saying “hate the sin, not the sinner.”

This website is not about discrimination against people. It is about understanding the political ramifications of the politics that accompany the transgender movement–politics that go beyond human rights and civil rights and have the potential to destroy much of the social change and institutions that feminists have worked for.

As I point out above, this is worded just vaguely enough that it doesn’t really mean anything. No politics are addressed here – just alarmist statements about how those politics will destroy feminism’s gains. But, I’ve provided some transgender politics above to maybe address this terrifying possibility:

NTAC works for the advancement of understanding and the attainment of full civil rights for all transgender and gender variant people in every aspect of society and actively opposes discriminatory acts by all means legally available.

Maybe I found the wrong politics. It looks like this statement says that NTAC’s transgender politics are about civil rights and human rights, about equality and opposing discrimination. How does this oppose feminism or its gains? What possible hidden message could be in here? Could this just be the standard tactic of inducing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt?

We do not advocate against people who feel that they are transgendered. We believe they, like all people, at a minimum have a right to decent housing, jobs that pay a living wage, comprehensive health care, and a life free from violence and abuse.

This is very magnanimous of them, but opposing transgender politics opposes these particular things, because transgender politics are about ending these things. Which is it?

We do not, however, share the political vision of those who espouse transgender politics. To the extent to which the transgender politics include the insistence that transgender individuals be served by human services designed by and for women, to the exclusion of women themselves, and the extent to which transgender politics question our ability to say that there are two socially created classes of human, male and female, and that there are social, economic, and power differentials between these two classes that amount to the oppression and domination of one over the other, we must stand opposed to trans politics.

Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s still vague, but we’re getting complaints:

The insistence that transgender (I assume they mean trans women in context*) be served by human services designed by and for women, to the exclusion of women themselves

This is vague. I assume they mean domestic violence shelters specifically, for example, Kimberly Nixon’s lawsuit against Vancouver Rape Relief. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what they mean by “to the exclusion of women themselves,” beyond denial of trans women’s identities. I’m not sure what else they’re referencing because of the unwillingness to go into actual detail and provide citations for these claims.

They seem to be saying that trans women should not receive access to these services, even though the infrastructure exists to help women in bad situations – trans women are apparently supposed to sink or swim, or maybe somehow magic up our own services that keep us safely segregated away from cis women. I would like to know how access to these services actually has the potential to harm cis women, but this information is frustratingly unavailable on Questioning Transgender Politics.

the extent to which transgender politics question our ability to say that there are two socially created classes of human, male and female, and that there are social, economic, and power differentials between these two classes that amount to the oppression and domination of one over the other, we must stand opposed to trans politics.

I find this complaint strange and inconsistent. It seems like the problem is that trans women move from the oppressor class to the oppressed class, and that trans men move from the oppressed class to the oppressor class, and that this social mobility somehow invalidates the existence of sexism and misogyny. This is only a guess on my part, because I’m not sure how trans politics can deny that men and women exist, or deny the existence of sexism.

Additionally, we do not believe that the philosophical basis for transgender politics addresses the problem of male power or the significant problem of male violence across the world which includes violence against women as well as violence against transgender people.

The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act says differently on that – it addresses violence against GLBT people specifically, but I challenge these women to extract a statement from NTAC, GenderPAC, or any other trans-oriented activist group to defend violence against women or even deny that such violence exists.

This complaint appears to be that transgender politics doesn’t put feminist issues before transgender issues, rather than doesn’t care about or work against feminist issues. Of course, trans people have a whole slew of oppressions to deal with in addition to dealing with sexism and misogyny. Feminism and transgender activism are complimentary movements – or they should be, as long as people on one side don’t arbitrarily declare the other side to be the enemy.

I admit, this is not as clean or precise an examination of the introductory page as I would have preferred. It’s hard to refute points that are as substantial (and visible) as smoke, and it’s no easier to find evidence of transgender politics that would destroy **feminism due to the lack of their existence. Transgender politics are about equality – equal opportunities for employment, housing, education, not being murdered. The stuff many cis people take for granted. What is the point of demonizing these goals and antagonizing men and women who would otherwise see you as allies? Why is it so important to define transgender politics as harmful, even dangerous?

The premise is suspect. As I point out at the start, the “politics, not people” statement mirrors “hate the sin” rhetoric the Christian right uses about homosexuality. Claims that transgender politics threaten women’s access to services or that they threaten to deny the existence of male violence against women have their own parallels from another quarter, against other targets. After all, a popular way to discredit an oppressed minority is to assert that they endanger your way of life. Same-sex marriage will undermine marriage, desegregation will cause the mongrelization of the white race. This introductory statement clearly tries to define transgender politics (that is, our attempts to achieve equality in all areas of life) as a threat to feminism. This is textbook bigotry – in this case, transphobia.

* The writers at Questioning Transgender Politics seem to view transgender people as primarily transsexual women and don’t spend much time addressing transsexual men, or addressing transgender people much at all.

** The feminists who wrote the articles at Questioning Transgender Politics probably all identify as radical feminists. However, I hesitate to imply that this is the standard radical feminist approach to dealing with or discussing transgender people.