Gudbuytjane guest post on Feministe: Tone Arguments and Trans Women
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.
LOL @ ‘My vagina is offended’.
It’s funny that the concept of ‘tone’ is being attacked, yet manipulated to obscure original meaning at the same time.
T-Jane quotes the video with ‘Told you she didn’t have a dick.’ But then conveniently leaves out the follow-up line, ‘Too bad.’
Which is the perfect expression of attitude i have seen *everywhere* in the ‘trans community’. A genuine regret that she isn’t transgender.
What refuses to represent group-think, or at least be dominated by it, will be scorned.
i’ve accepted that as my fate. And i’m fine with it.
Pretty sure she feels the same way.
Anonymous T Girl
30 Mar 10 at 5:04 pm
Huh?
gudbuytjane
30 Mar 10 at 5:30 pm
And okay, I am so over talking about Lady Gaga, but since this keeps coming up – a few people now have tried to suggest my lack of focus on “Too bad” as being some kind of a-ha! smoking gun moment to dismantle my critique. It’s the very next line in the video! Everyone saw it, so suggesting I was trying to hide that the guards say it to manipulate the facts to suit my argument is ridiculous. I didn’t focus on it because it doesn’t change my original critique.
Seriously, critique my ideas, but don’t make implications about my character.
As for the rest of your comment, I stand by my original “Huh?”
gudbuytjane
30 Mar 10 at 6:20 pm
I’m not sure what you mean by group think in this context?
Lisa Harney
31 Mar 10 at 12:03 am
that ppl disagree with her.
estrobutch
31 Mar 10 at 7:57 am
Perfect example occurs here- http://community.livejournal.com/human_sexuality/18310.html Someone annoyed at the cisgendered mod’s disapproval of “exaggerated femininity” is immediately labeled as combative and told to leave the community.
Portia
31 Mar 10 at 8:55 am
I’m really unsure about this one.
I did think that the original post was too definite.
I think it does make some difference whether or not rumour was of intersex rather than trans status.And I do think it was a real question as to whether the guards represented trans women or were simply intended to represent her critics as being unfeminine.
That aside, I’d put 90% of the ‘angry tranny’ trope to kneejerk inarticulate opposition to a trans woman’s substantial criticism, 60% to a woman’s, and 70% to any criticism of Lady Gaga. But I would still leave 1% that might be saying that anger may have motivated a less than perfectly considered post that may not fully confront the issues. That 1% is still offensive, but if tied to substantial criticism, eg the Captain Obvious comment to the OP, may not be wholly beyond the bounds of heated debate.
As to the main feministe post it’s hard to comment on because it’s right.
@ Estrobutch. That comment really pisses me off. I’m sort of getting married this summer, and now I’ve fallen in love with you. But maybe it’ll fade away, because I’m just another angry tranny at heart and a fickle creature withall…
Sophia
31 Mar 10 at 10:25 am
As I think on this I wonder if there is maybe a bit of cultural bias happening. It really does feel to me like USians are far quicker to assume any debate or argument is seated in anger/aggression. Although I was raised in Canada, and culturally this is not a great deal different, it still is a substantially less aggressive society than the USA.
My piece on Lady Gaga seems to be read by many as frothing at the mouth/raging about transphobia, when the voice I wrote it with was actually a mix of snark and eye-rolling.
gudbuytjane
1 Apr 10 at 3:48 am
That’s a good question, and I don’t really know.
I do think that the internet tends to breed a culture that’s quicker to assume anger/aggression, and I’ve seen this from people all over the world.
Lisa Harney
1 Apr 10 at 3:53 am
Yeah, that’s true… the internet for sure raises things to heated proportions pretty quickly regardless (although, perhaps that’s due to USian cultural dominance of the internet? Hmmn). Anyway, I guess the point is that it doesn’t matter, because a tone arguer isn’t going to be dissuaded regardless.
gudbuytjane
1 Apr 10 at 4:09 am
Yeah, tone arguers don’t care in the least about substance. Style doesn’t matter, either, just what they can pretend the style is.
It’s all a power-over ploy.
Lisa Harney
1 Apr 10 at 4:42 am
Portia, sorry, you got randomly spamtrapped. Your comment is published now.
Lisa Harney
1 Apr 10 at 7:11 am
i don’t translate well online. Although i’ve written some seriously raged-fueled things before, overall i come off as much more of a serious bitch than i actually am.
As far as GaGa goes…
http://anonymous-t-girl.blogspot.com/2010/03/awkward-product-placement.html
My point was that she got attacked by the so-called ‘trans community’ for ‘letting’ rumours of a trans status fly.
And now she’s being attacked for definitively ending those rumours. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
There’s *always* somebody, *somewhere* that’s going to pick you apart and be offended about *something*. No matter what.
You’d figure people would wise up to how it makes them appear as a whole, and learn to pick their battles.
Or at least pick battles that actually exists.
Anonymous T Girl
1 Apr 10 at 5:23 pm
She was attacked for letting rumors fly? I missed those posts.
My only post was just a “her genitals are not your business” post, and that speculation like that about people’s bodies is gross and objectifying.
Lisa Harney
1 Apr 10 at 10:43 pm
And, really, by this point isn’t it clear this was never about the specifics of the critique of a Lady Gaga video and instead about cis/cis-apologist responses to dissenting trans voices?
You’d figure people would wise up to how it makes them appear as a whole, and learn to pick their battles.
Culture in the medium through which we engage our societies, and thus it is extremely important for marginalized people to challenge dominant groups where they exert their dominance. To suggest challenging negative images of trans people in cis media isn’t relevant is as ridiculous as suggesting dismantling racist imagery in mainstream culture wasn’t relevant to the civil rights movement, or that sexist imagery wasn’t relevant to the fight for women’s equality.
The hornet’s nest of cis anger and backlash I faced for critiquing a cis pop star suggests this is far from irrelevant. I’m quite aware of the “battles I pick,” and I think that this conversation is still going on shows I probably picked the right one.
gudbuytjane
2 Apr 10 at 8:36 am
ETA: Culture is, not culture in…
gudbuytjane
2 Apr 10 at 10:03 am