I Am Whoever You Say I Am
In the long march into academia one naturally becomes intimately acquainted with the geeky and esoteric minutiae of whatever discipline one has chosen for their career. Over the last two years I’ve found myself up to my eyeballs in gender studies text and find it utterly fascinating. I’m often seen scurrying to and fro with a book or two tucked under my arm and my desk is covered in all manner of books appertaining to my passions. But importantly, when you are trans-anything and delving into the wild and woolly world of gender studies you have to be ready for the fact that there will be lots and lots of highly credentialed, intellectual academics theorising about you who do not know what the hell they’re talking about.
This occupational hazard is, to put it bluntly, both annoying and the reason I’m doing the sociology of gender in the first place. The only way this is going to be truly fixed is when we start writing the theory and we start conducting the research, casting our eyes not just on this wild and strange tribe of “transgender” but also on cis people whose views are far more powerful in shaping how our fractioned community is gendered and understood. What I’m looking at today is a particular strain of thought that is increasingly common in Third Wave feminist theorising; it is ostensibly trans positive but ends up being highly fetishising, stereotypical, and ultimately transphobic. It stands in contrast to that Janice Raymond school of theorising that constructs us purely in terms of an outsider, an enemy who constitutes a patriarchal invasion-cum-Body Snatchers. This vision instead sees us (or some of us) as ‘useful’- we have utility in the quest of certain cis feminists to smash the gender binary. Yet what unites both of these seemingly oppositional philosophies is that they are theories formed by cis people about us, relative to their gender ideology, and that construct us as ‘other.’
There are a few strains of thought in this new feminist theory that merit deconstruction and they will likely be familiar to most readers in one way or another:
You Don’t Exist in Utopia
This is probably one of the most infamous and is actually another idea that unifies both old feminist transphobic theory and its newer supposedly pro-trans form. The gist of this idea is a phallocentric one that defines transsexual people as people who get genital surgery, and then goes on to state that in an equal society where gender did not matter, no one would get SRS ever and thus people who feel the need to transition in part through bodily expressions that may require surgery will also not exist.
This is a lynchpin in an idea of modern feminist theorising that holds transsexual people (defined erroneously and narrowly as binary identified people who get genital surgery and retain hetero/cis-normative identities) are inherently conservative and that we are an artefact of an oppressive gender system. What they neglect to explain in this airy theorising is any of the following.
- Transsexual people who do not get SRS, or people who do but do not identify as transsexual, and/or who do not have a binary identity (i.e. do not consider themselves men or women).
- Why people get such surgery in the first place.
Furthermore there is an additional, theoretically more complicated idea that is elided here. Some theorists have correctly identified that our system of binary gender rests heavily on genitalia being an immutable and ineluctable base to the superstructure of gendered expression. In short, genitals are seen as being ‘everything’ in determining and attributing gender/sex. Thus these theorists argue that when we reach a point where we no longer see genitals as these all important moorings of identity, no one will ever get SRS. What this conceptual argument neglects is an explanation of why anyone wouldn’t get SRS in such a world. Remember (as if you could forget) that much of the revulsion to trans people is about how we ‘mutilate’ ourselves. Genitals are seen as so sacred and inviolate that cis people project onto us their own fears about their genitalia and use that to question our sanity, agency, and genders. “Only a madman would cut his penis off!” might go the usual, blokey transphobia. Thus, let us imagine a world where genitals were seen as far less vital and integral. Why would someone not get SRS? If there is no stigma attached to such surgeries, it is conceivable (especially in a high technology environment) that people would make the switch, as it were.
For trans people, SRS is more than simple body modification a la a tattoo, certainly. But at the same time examining how all expressions of bodily agency are mediated and policed is critical to any theorising about trans people’s surgeries, rather than this shallow ideology that simply renders it obsolete in whatever utopia feminists may imagine. Its meaning may shift, certainly. But simply saying it would disappear strikes me as a very basic failure of imagination.
It is also, whatever the intent of the theorist, a call for cultural genocide.
He’s Transgressive, She’s a Conservative
This is another dominant theme in this modern feminist transgender theory, and it is one that rests on creating a pyramid of identities with non-binary and transmasculine genders at the top because they are intrinsically ‘transgressive’, and binary, and/or transfeminine genders towards the bottom because they are ‘conservative.’ There are so many things wrong with this that it’s difficult to know where to begin. A useful starting point would be the relatively recent work of two cis women who have made it their business to describe trans people: Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna. Their recent 2006 article “Transgendering” says the following:
Transsexualism, on the other hand, has never created such a challenge because it has been conceptualised as surgically changing a person’s genitals, not changing their (“real”) gender. The assumption that one could be born into the wrong body supports the belief that there are right bodies and wrong bodies for each of the two essential genders. This deep conservatism probably accounts for transsexualism’s relative acceptance.
There is a lot to vivisect here, to be sure. First on the list is that the operative words in this excerpt are “has been conceptualised as.” Note how that is very different from saying “is.” Yet clearly the authors make no distinction between the two concepts. Even though they readily admit that what they are articulating is a conception, they treat it as though it simply ‘is’ an ontological property of being transsexual. Secondly, a very salient question is who is doing the conceptualising? Not me, certainly, as a transsexual and transgender identified woman. What they say is, nonetheless, familiar to me because that is how cis people, from vox pops to scientists to judges to therapists see us and choose to interpret us. In short, this is how they fit us into their gender schema.
Yet, Kessler and McKenna hold us responsible for this, and indeed so do many modern feminist theorists, which leads them to spout absurdities like “transsexualism’s relative acceptance.” Relative to what? Leprosy? They more than likely mean that it is relative to the “transgendering” identities they celebrate which they define as:
…[M]ainly young people, mainly “born women,” who did not identify as either women or men. Many of them made this transition while in college… referring to themselves as tranny boys, transmen, FtMs, or “bois.”
We will leave aside the fact that they incongruously say that trans men and FtM people “did not identify as either men or women” when that is likely untrue and thus might fall into the category of “transsexual” that is “conservative” and enjoys “relative acceptance.” When we look time and again at who it is that ends up dead, dismembered, and summarily disrespected in the media it is very often binary identified trans women, and all too often trans women of colour in particular. I should not have to festoon this article with links to recent tragedies to make a point that most readers of this column know all too well. The notion that transsexual people, particularly binary identified women, are “relatively accepted” is a fantasy based on an extremely selective interpretation of events.
The fetishisation of trans men and other transmasculine people as being innately more transgressive or non-gendered is also the product of a serious, often unchecked, problem within feminism: the internalisation of the patriarchal ‘male-as-default’ norm which expresses itself in this case by seeing men or masculine people as more androgynous, and less ‘gendered’ than those who are feminine and/or women. This is a relic of patriarchal thinking that sees women as sexed and men as normal, women as distinct and men as neutral, women as having gender and men being human. The idea expressed by some theorists and the claque of feminists who follow that line of thinking is that trans people with masculine expressions and who are not binary-identified are somehow less gendered or androgynous or even beyond or ‘through’ gender altogether. This neglects one critical reality:
There is no outside to gender.
They are doing gender as much as I’m doing gender as much as your average feminist theorist is doing gender as much as the administrators of Michfest are doing gender as much as you’re doing gender. One does not ever possess quantifiably ‘less gender’ than someone else, they are just gendered differently. Their genders and their bodies may be seen differently and constructed differently, but the idea that one has escaped gender entirely or is somehow closer to doing so than, say, a binary identified person is misunderstanding what gender actually is.
To come back to an earlier point, however, this confusion and conflation of trans identity with cis interpretation and rationalisation is extremely common in academia unfortunately and represents an unchecked privileging of cis people’s often wrong ideas about us over our own lived experience and self-understanding.
In short, I am whoever you say I am, in this line of thinking. And who I am, riding roughshod over everything I know and believe in, is apparently a conservative individual who loves the gender/genital binary, is invested in it, and won’t let it go.
Transsexualism and Transgender! It’s the Latest Thing!
Most theory about us proceeds from the premise that we are a recent phenomenon that emerged in the 20th century with the rise of modern medicine. Even a lot of people who claim to support us, like the theorists I am criticising here, will often say that they are speaking of a population that came into its own with the growth of SRS technology and facilities in the 1950s and 60s. Let me sum up my feelings about this in one sentence:
Science ‘discovered’ trans people in the same way Columbus ‘discovered’ America.
We have, one way or another, existed for a very long time. I hesitate to say that this is down entirely to biology, but the existence of people who broke out of their society’s gender norms and gender systems is very long and rich, if often part of a subjugated knowledge of human gender expression. Much like Columbus’ “discovery,” science’s resulted in colonisation and exploitation as well as overt expropriation. Our bodies were no longer ours, our identities were to be strictly managed and mediated, and our lives were to be pre-planned and predetermined so we did not disrupt the gender order. We were and still are exploited by men and women of science to buttress their theories- be they psychological, anthropological or sociological- but rarely able to speak without the cis man or woman in a white coat interpreting our words and interpolating an identity for us.
Thus we have theorists who say very cackhandedly that transsexuals are conservative and transgender people are progressive. Nevermind that the categories overlap a lot, mean different things to different trans people, that people’s self-understanding and self-identity overrides that neat cleavage, and that these categories are based less on truly understanding us than watching us from a distance through the filter of your own gender ideology. Tied into that is the erroneous and cis-centric notion that we’re a new thing. Certainly the bounded concepts of transsexual and transgender are relatively new, but that’s like saying homosexuality was invented in the late 19th century. As a medical, juridical, and social construct, the notion of exclusive hetero/homosexuality is new to our collective consciousness, but acts, relationships, and lives we would now say are some shade of queer have gone on for centuries. Trans people are not extended the same complex conceptual courtesy.
The Very Long Conclusion
Outlined here are three dominant philosophical streams in this new gender theory but they are by no means the only one. In many ways what unites them is an understanding of trans people that blames us for what cis people think of us as. To be sure, there is no doubt some people have used transsexual transition to underscore their belief in biological determinism and in pure sexual dimorphism. Some trans people themselves believe this and may even see themselves as examples of intrinsic sex’s inevitability.
But many of us don’t and we matter quite a bit too. Many of the people who use trans folk as proof of the gender binary’s rock solid truth are cis. But here is what is happening there on a deeper level. Using an ethnomethodological[1] perspective, the one Kessler and McKenna claim to see their research through, we can better understand what cis people are doing when they theorise about us. Whether you’re talking about far right fundamentalists who see us as satanspawn, Janice Raymonds who see us as spies of Patriarchy, or more modern gender theorists who see some of us as intrinsically political, what is happening is the following: trans people “breach” cis-normative explanations for gender in the world. When such breaches occur, almost inevitably people will rush to make rational explanations for this unexpected phenomenon they are beholding. They will try to ‘fit’ this aberrance into their schema for understanding their world.[2]
Thus when cis people of any political persuasion behold us, many will try to rationalise us in whatever way best buttresses their views of gender. Hence it is understandable some people will use us for conservative ends, to reify dimorphic sex, and biological essentialism. But you should never think that anything other than convenient using is going on. We are not intrinsically that thing, or any other thing. People are rationalising us in the most opportune way possible, but that says more about 1) how we are disrupting the social order, and 2) what peoples’ beliefs about it are than it does about anything innate to us. How transsexual people who get SRS are construed by cis people says more about cis people than it does about trans people, in other words.
This way of thinking can be applied to most of these studies and articles written by cis academics. What most of them are writing is less about us and more about how they see us. A meta-analysis of all this research may well prove useful in a study of cis ideologies about transgender people, so they certainly retain a good deal of empirical utility. But not for understanding trans people.
This perspective is also responsible for the utterly shameless victim blaming that many theorists have engaged in, confusing our psychiatric oppression with our own deeply held desires. We are certainly forced through cookie cutters of gender at the hands of conservative psychiatrists- much more so in the past than today, but this still happens- and were often made to fit hetero and cisnormative perceptions. But we were blackmailed into doing so. Does anyone, least of all feminists of all people, really believe that the medical establishment passively responded to the expressed wishes of trans people who would then go on to direct the medical and psychiatric programs they became embarked upon? It’s a facile idea. We did not willingly and lovingly submit to it anymore than cis women loved the suggestion of having “hysteria.” Some trans people did internalise oppression. But they do not speak for all of us, anymore than cis feminists would allow Sarah Palin to be presumed to speak for them.
There are other pernicious effects that accrue to this ideology, ones I am personally less qualified to speak about but nevertheless merit urgent mention. Earlier I alluded to the gender theorist’s pyramid of transgressive identities and said trans feminine people were towards the bottom; this most certainly includes people who do not have binary identities yet adopt various signs of femininity, or people who are non binary but have had vaginoplasty performed on them. These people are systematically erased by a discourse that casts trans women as a reactionary foe, and non binary trans masculine folk as a vanguard of transgression. Whither those who are femme or feminine and weaving their own genders? Their very existence is inconvenient to this particular narrative. While all femininity, however and whoever it is expressed with, can potentially be transgressive, the combination of femininity with non-binary identities poses a special conceptual threat to this kind of theorising that all but guarantees the erasure of such people with this discourse.
Lastly, one of the more vexatious obsessions of cis researchers is that of SRS. For many cis Third Wavers they often apportion judgement of us based on whether or not we get The Surgery, which is itself an internalisation of a cis centric perspective that holds surgery on knobbly bits is the sine qua non of trans identity and experience, particularly transsexual experience. Take an example from some recent neurological research:
““I expect a lot of criticism,” Ramachandran says. “Those who study transsexuality tend to be territorial because they themselves have made so little progress. There is no literature that illuminates the underlying mechanisms, other than psychological mumbo jumbo. And then someone comes striding in and spends two weeks solving the riddle. It must be infuriating.”
The “riddle” Dr. Ramachandran solved is why trans people may feel an overriding drive to get genital surgery. Of course… he hasn’t actually solved it; he’s provided one of several possible explanations, he spoke only to genitalia and none of the other conditions of transition which are far more salient and life-altering, and the idea that we even are a riddle when we’ve been trying to tell people who we are for so long is again a testament to the cis-centric nature of trans academic discourse. But most important to remember here is the fact that Ramachandran believes he has figured it all out because he’s provided an intriguing hypothesis for the SRS drive felt by some trans people.
What becomes particularly maddening about this is that we then find that cis people are saying we are the ones obsessed with genitalia. Fixation on the fact that some trans people include their genitals in a much larger program of transition is then projected back onto us as being our own fixation. It is summed up in a recent interview conducted by Oprah with Dr. Christine McGinn, a trans woman, where Oprah spoke of SRS as “the surgery that made you a woman.” These are cis people’s ideas, not ours. This is how they read us, not how many of us know ourselves. Some trans people may see no problem with such phrasing, but they have no right to define us all.
If the point of the academic canon is to provide a comprehensive and holistic understanding of a given subject, it is going to continue to fail badly if it relies on these half-truths, mirages, misinterpretations, and quasi-bigoted notions.
[1] Ethnomethodology literally means ‘study of the method of the people’- it is a theoretical framework that sees people as constantly and methodically weaving social order and meaning in their lives. Thus how we understand the world around us is a mutual project we share with everyone we interact with in creating the meaning of a given event. “Breaching” came from ethnomethodological research- it basically means doing something unexpected in a given social situation where everyone ‘just knows’ to behave a certain way. The most famous (and boring) example is to stand in an elevator facing the back of it rather than the doors like everyone else is doing. Thus we are constantly involved in the work of creating and sustaining social meaning. Ethnomethodology is less concerned with how we come up with meanings than with how we sustain and reproduce them.
[2] See Garfinkel 1967 and… Kessler and McKenna, 1978. What is baffling is that their own research makes my point for me about the very things these two women need to be criticised for. They themselves pointed out that cis people or “non-transsexuals” as they called them back then, when confronted with a trans person will try to fit us into their vision of gender which they themselves would say was useful to elucidate facts about society’s gender ideology rather than anything intrinsic to us as trans people.
What most of them are writing is less about us and more about how they see us.
Yeah, I think this is a key criticism to make of a lot of academic work on trans identity.
My work is mainly in film (audience/cultural) studies, and it never ceases to amaze me how many theorists working in this area analyse a film that is produced by and for cis people as if the film can actually tells something about being trans. No! It tells us a lot about what cis people think being trans is about, though.
nix
1 Oct 10 at 6:28 pm
“Relatively accepted”? Gag me with a spoon. 4 states protect gender identity from discrimination, the UK is trying to write us out of equal treatment, I believe Canada is (or trying to) dropping funding for medical transition, and that’s without getting into the other problems or the intersections that happen when you don’t have privilege in another area and are trans. Relatively accepted compared to what?
And I still have issues with the trans[masculine/feminine] idea. My understanding of it is that trans people who were mis/assigned and socialized as female are trans”masculine” while those who were mis/assigned and socialized as male are trans”feminine”. If this is an incorrect assumption, you can probably reject the rest of this post- but that’s how I’ve seen it used.
My problem with it is this- what about hte mis/assigned and socialized female people who are feminine and the mis/assigned and socialized male people who are masculine? I was misassigned female, raised with the mistaken idea I’d be a woman, and I’m still fairly feminine. I know that there are trans men who are as well. There’s not much masculine about me- but I’d still be fitted into the “transmasculine” spectrum.
And it’s annoying because it seems like at least a bit of why “Transmasculine” people are accepted and “transfeminine” people aren’t is femmephobia- which would probably apply to feminine “transmasculine” people. I wonder if trans”masculine” people would be seen the same if more of them were obviously feminine.
Z
2 Oct 10 at 12:43 pm
This post is perfect, and I’m going to share it with all my gender/sexuality studies friends.
Thanks for writing.
qout
2 Oct 10 at 3:44 pm
This is excellent, and articulates very well a lot of my own periodic irritations with the ways cis people constantly study us and somehow utterly fail to get it, largely because so many of them will do absolutely anything but actually listen to trans voices. I’ve had the ‘being trans means you are narrowminded and buy into gender stereotypes’ argument thrown at me by my own mother; I was too busy choking on the irony to really construct a good counter-argument, but this has got it nailed.
Also, as someone who used to use feminism as their coping mechanism as a child, the whole ‘internalised male superiority’ thing has been a real struggle for me, and something that what I was reading didn’t do anything to challenge. It took accepting I was trans to finally accept that being feminine and liking it was not a state of retrograde delusion but a perfectly valid and potentially progressive way of being; until then I hadn’t been able to comprehend that some women actually *wanted* to be women.
Z – your take on those terms interests me, as I always read them as meaning someone else; eg. that ‘transmasculine’ individuals were FAAB people who were on the trans spectrum, but didn’t necessarily identify unequivocally as men (and vice versa for MAAB people who are trans but not binary-gendered women).
What I do agree with is that it’s not right to use them as terms that are meant to encompass all variations of transsexual and transgender. Being binary-gendered and quite conventional in my gender presentation, I’d be quite irked at being described as ‘transmasculine’ because it implies there’s some kind of special quality to my masculinity that isn’t the same as a cis man’s.
I’m sure the phrases are useful to some people, but they strike me as too imprecise.
Tab
2 Oct 10 at 4:49 pm
Unless we redefine what it is to be feminine, my being trans has nothing to do with being feminine. I think I am closer to butch than femme.
Also, has anyone else had trouble with the comment system? I tried posting this, with some more discussion, three times before, and just ran into trouble with OpenID.
Marja Erwin
3 Oct 10 at 10:29 am
“transmasculine” and “transfeminine” are kind of rubbish anyway, IMO. There’s femininity and masculinity, and I don’t think there’s an actual distinction whether it’s cis or trans.
Tab, that’s how the words are used, but they box people into gender expressions that they may not fit into.
Lisa Harney
3 Oct 10 at 10:57 am
Marja,
Unfortunately, when OpenID has troubles there’s not much we can do about it. I’ll check the spam filter, though.
Lisa Harney
3 Oct 10 at 10:57 am
Growing up, I didn’t see myself as particularly feminine, but some other people saw me as feminine enough to throw misogynistic, transphobic, and homophobic insults at me, and sometimes beat me. In my teens, one of the other kids took me aside and explained that I walked in an unusually feminine manner and explained how to walk in a more masculine manner.
So I go back and forth on claiming femininity and the transfeminine label. I just recognize that I’m neither femme nor conventionally feminine. It is sometimes tempting to borrow some of the concepts of our attackers – from originality to gyn/affection to butch femininity – but I’m not sure whether this creates more trouble than it’s worth.
Marja Erwin
3 Oct 10 at 12:13 pm
Um – when you say that no-one can have ‘less gender’ than anyone else, do you mean the gender that others see that person as having?
I do not have a gender – I have tried to have both binary genders and at least one non-binary one, and failed miserably. However, others assume I do have a gender, so in that sense I do have one (some? I get taken for everything).
Other than that, love the post! It says a lot of things that need to be said.
JKBC
3 Oct 10 at 12:15 pm
Yeah, I think I’m getting it. The terms are incorrect even applied to the people they’re meant to describe. It highlights the traits a person has that contradict the gender they were socialised as, but ignores the ones they have that don’t. It also seems to be trying to place non-binary identities back into the binary – you can be male, masculine, female or feminine, but there’s no allowance for people to be several of those things, or none of them.
Tab
3 Oct 10 at 12:25 pm
Thanks for this post.
I admire you for continuing with academia. Personally, I could not continue with gender studies because it was highly frustrating to read all these false conclusions. (Plus, I never quite had the level of geekiness required to puzzle out the meaning of words like ‘ontology.’) So yeah it is great to see people in academia righting the accepted facts.
maxporter
3 Oct 10 at 1:41 pm
Honestly, I think it makes more sense to start with texts by cis-spectrum womyn and men who feel the need to reclaim their own genders (even if the authors are transphobic cultural feminists) than to start with texts by cis-spectrum womyn and men trying to analyze our genders and/or assuming they have no genders (even if the authors are nominally trans-allied queer theorists).
Marja Erwin
3 Oct 10 at 2:19 pm
I think that the problem with much cultural anthropology is that of unchecked privilege, many researchers assume that their mode of being is ‘natural’ – and therefore people with different ways of being are ‘cultural’, or unnatural.
If they place themselves in the position of unmarked and study the ‘marked other’ they’re typically gonna screw it up. The unfortunate thing is that the current mode in cultural anthropology seems to consider that people who are unaffected by an issue are more objective, instead of simply uneducated.
I’ve pretty much given up reading gender studies now, too much of it is focused on establishing a pecking order of legitimacy.
Em
3 Oct 10 at 2:59 pm
Thank you all for your very insightful comments.
@Tab: Internalised male superiority is a good way to put it; in my own case I certainly had to get over a lot of deeply engrained ideas that feminine was somehow bad and masculine was virtuous or good. I’m still navigating that, in fact, as I suspect many of us are. The broader, cultural internalisation of femmephobia by the broader feminist movement is, I think, one of its lingering problems. Some currents like the Riot Grrl scene or elements of “Third Wave” feminism have been more forward looking in this respect but it remains an uphill battle.
I actually sent an email (with slightly nicer language) to Suzanne J. Kessler; she is yet to respond to any of my criticisms.
@JKBC: Yes, ultimately, I am referring to the perceptions of others and the privilege/disadvantage that can accrue to those perceptions. Gender, like many other cultural signifiers, is only ‘half ours.’ I will also say, however, that when I say there is no outside to gender what I mean is that everything that gets done is gendered. When you’re talking about someone who identifies as, say, androgynous and has short hair, wears baggy clothing, speaks in a certain tone of voice, and so forth, they are doing a form of masculinity to which certain ideas attach themselves. It’s not truly beyond gender, it’s using gendered signifiers in a particular way to form a particular (perhaps new) gender identity.
What I am criticising is the fundamentally patriarchal idea that these things are indeed somehow androgynous while, say, skirts would be considered feminine and thus gendered. The idea that holds that trappings of masculinity are more inherently neutral and agendered than those of femininity. I think there is a difference between identifying as having no gender and recognising that one is doing gendered things in the world- and that this gendering is a process of mutual recognition of gendered signifiers like clothing, names, speech, hairstyles, and a host of other things.
The tacit idea that people who adopt masculine signifiers are gender ‘neutral’ is an oppressive fallacy that leaves those who are considered feminine at a disadvantage, not just in a broader world where misogyny and its attendant femmephobia run rife, but also in social justice movements that privilege “neutrality” over being “gendered” (which is almost always being feminine) because one is seen as inherently transgressive and the other inherently reactionary.
This is something I’ve thought about because I do not want to overwrite or talk over people who claim certain gendered identities, or people like yourself who claim no gender at all. What I am going after here is really the *value judgements* people attach to these myriad expressions.
@Max: Thanks. I do fear sometimes that the overwhelming nature of everything one has to disentangle will cause me to wash out sometime, but I feel like I was meant to do this, so I think I’ll plough through one way or another. ;)
@Em: Certainly not just cultural anthropology. Most of the social sciences suffer from this malaise, whether you’re talking about psychology or sociology, and you’re absolutely right about the self-centralising-as-normal thing. It infuriates me so much because I’m just thinking, screaming in my own head, “You should know better!!!” These are people who are well placed to know and understand how ideas, personalities, and cultures are constructed, yet mysteriously never turn the lens inward. For me this is a desecration of what sociology is supposed to be about, to say nothing of the immense harm and oppression that the reification of such a perspective can create.
@Everyone: Sorry about the transfeminine/masculine thing- your deep critiques of the terms are excellent and insightful and I will definitely keep this in mind in the future. I was trying to be inclusive but I see now that there are some issues with the terms in the context that I used them in. I do think that the terms might be useful, but only heavily contextualised as something that does not overinclude certain trans people (i.e. transmasculine swallowing up trans men who are not very masculine at all)
Quinnae Moongazer
3 Oct 10 at 4:02 pm
Good post.
One of the things that annoys me about apparently sophisticated queer/gender theorists writing about us is they feel free to categorise our political approach to the binary by our body configurations. We’re mute, our identities do all the talking for us – since they don’t bother listening to us let alone reading trans theorists – whereas they with their binary identity and cissexual speaking position allow themselves the privilege of divesting themselves OF the binary simply through their theoretical production. But unless you’re Kate Bornstein or Riki Wilchins and decide to stake a claim on *not* being a man or woman, the intellectual production of binary trans people is by and large ignored. Butler especially has failed to engage trans critiques of her work, though Halberstam does a better if ultimately unconvincing job of engaging Prosser if not Namaste.
It’s fascinating that there’s no recognition of the kind of basic Foucaultian ideas that gender studies writers otherwise use – that is, that the discourse on genitals is compelled by cis people and then attributed to us as a form of power.. including the writers who claim to be breaking down these very power structures…
Queen Emily
3 Oct 10 at 5:05 pm
@Queen Emily: Thank you.
Also very interesting that you should mention Foucault because that was very much on my mind as I was writing this; fashionable as he has become in many academic circles several of his ideas seem to be forgotten when it comes to cis academics writing about us.
I also really liked the point you raised here:
“We’re mute, our identities do all the talking for us – since they don’t bother listening to us let alone reading trans theorists – whereas they with their binary identity and cissexual speaking position allow themselves the privilege of divesting themselves OF the binary simply through their theoretical production.”
Because it’s exactly right and raised a point that I was going to make about the academic objectification of trans people in future writing: we can only do politics through our expression, while cis people do politics through a variety of complex means and in more than one discourse, potentially. Thus for a trans woman, the possibility of being radical is foreclosed because her identity as a woman has consumed all of her politics and has come to embody it. But a feminine cis woman- say, Naomi Wolf or Jessica Valenti- does not lose significant credibility in feminist circles for either identifying as women or wearing lipstick. Their politics and their writing are understood as their radicalism and transgressiveness. Their posture has multiple dimensions, but trans people (particularly trans women) are allowed only one configuration.
A literal body politic?
Anyway, thanks for making me think, as always! I’ve notes to take. Also, I really must read some Namaste one of these days. It’s a travesty that I have not, yet.
Quinnae Moongazer
3 Oct 10 at 5:21 pm
I’d like to echo maxporter’s admiration. I refuse to take a gender/women’s studies course because I’m afraid that if anything touches on trans issues it’ll be treated badly. It’s too personal for me, I can’t walk into a room of cis people condensing my experiences and who I am into a “theory” for them to talk about as casually as the weather. And everything else you’ve talked about- I just could not do it. It would be fascinating, but those parts would get to be too much for me.
@Tab- I’ve heard it to include, but not be limited to, binary gendered people. That’s the point- you don’t say “trans man” to mean “trans people who were mis/assigned female at birth” because it erases the other genders included, so some people say “trans masculine”. And you summed up a few of the problems with it.
@Marja- good point, the terms are kind of fluid so without defining them it’s kind of meaningless. I’ve seen some people say “Feminine defines female traits, so only women can be feminine and all women are feminine- even if they’re truck driving body builders who haven’t worn a skirt in their life” (and vice versa for masculine).
Z
3 Oct 10 at 6:03 pm
I’d just like to add that it’s not only cis academics who go on nonconsensually identifying non-cis (how’s that for normativity? ;) ) people – we can do it, too. I’m myself particularly bothered with identity-speak, ‘cos saying “I identify as x” tends to go for a substandard version of “I am x” (ever see people in power using the “identify as” -version? Me neither). And guess which one is reserved for us, and which one is for cisgendered, cissexual people?
I’m also uneasy with the structure of self-identifying as something – it seems to me to internalise the identifying that others already do, as in “other people identify me as trans, therefore I identify myself as trans”. Identifying myself (or anyone else) as something seems to imply a kind of limitation, a selection of a particular viewpoint, which then, by definition, cuts something out in order to highlight something else. I don’t like to do that to myself in a general sense, thus I don’t identify myself as anything. There’s plenty of identifying available from the rest of the world, and I don’t think the answer to all of that nonconsensual identifying is joining the crowd.
I am identified as lots of things, though, but that’s far less of a problem to me, because that reveals the agency that’s operative in the identifying – it’s the person identifying me as x who has the agency, and that puts the responsibility where I think it should be – with the person doing the identifying.
All of the above also means I’m responsible for the identifying (of myself, or others) I do: I’m responsible for the viewpoints I choose to highlight some things (and hide others). What I’d really like to see is discussion on how these powers of identifying are claimed and used, and what they’re used for: identifying is never a neutral act, it always happens in a language, in a society, in a relation – and considering the societies we live in, it always happens in a situation where power is not equally distributed. What’s hidden when people are identified as trans? What’s revealed? And what does that tell us about the people doing the identifying? I think these are very relevant questions.
Carto
3 Oct 10 at 10:54 pm
I usually see cis people describe trans people as “identifying as” far more often than I see trans people do the same. It’s actually a pretty big annoyance for me.
Lisa Harney
3 Oct 10 at 11:15 pm
For me, saying “I identify as female” is still a rather strong impulse, despite the fact that I know its a much, much weaker statement of who I am than “I am a woman.” Like, at work, most of my co-workers use female pronouns, but I always feel a bit sheepish and awkward.Fuck, even when other trans women use the correct pronouns or simply refer to me as a woman I feel somewhat unworthy. Self internalized hatred, I guess, mixed with a generous portion of low self esteem. I hate how I never have the courage to drop the “identify as” shtick and stick up for myself.
Amanda in the South Bay
4 Oct 10 at 12:03 am
Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying!
JKBC
4 Oct 10 at 8:35 am
Great post. Thanks for so clearly breaking down how speaking for trans people, needing to “explain” trans people, and internalized male superiority have made mainstream feminism so dangerous and hostile to trans women.
Grace
4 Oct 10 at 12:16 pm
@Amanda & Carto, you’re certainly both correct about how the term “identify as” is used in a very erasing way that is meant to undermine the legitimacy or realness of our genders. For me I still have the same reflex Amanda’s fighting, both with myself and with others. I’ve actually had to practise saying “I’m a woman” both in speech and in writing to really drive home the fact that “identify as” need no longer inflect my sentences.
@Everyone: Vis a vis gender studies, it’s not all bad, and I should tell you all that I have had nothing but good experiences with the Women & Gender Studies department of my university. They took point on getting the school police educated on not harassing trans people in restrooms, and when I declared my second major as WGS I came out to the two chairs of the department who were very supportive and emphasised that transphobia would not be tolerated in their department, overt or covert.
I am actually making friends with one of the professors, a cis queer man who’s quite the character and who shares my frustrations with academic bigotry of all sorts. He was also very good about pointing out transphobia in a couple of readings we did in 101 and explaining why it was wrong (I also got to help shape his syllabus to put together two days worth of trans positive readings and discussions that semester). The people I work with in the department, the students and so on, have all been really good about it; I get cis women nodding along with a “right on, sister” look when I’m lecturing against transphobia and so on, so it does give me hope. From all the talks and chats I’ve had they also do not buy into the milder, allegedly pro-trans stuff I deconstructed in this post.
I realise I may be extremely lucky considering any number of university horror stories I’ve heard, but there are also little rays of sunshine- and that, aside from sheer love of the game- is also what keeps me going.
Quinnae Moongazer
4 Oct 10 at 4:45 pm
[...] was reading something this morning that said The fetishisation of trans men and other transmasculine people as being [...]
A thought without a conclusion | Fukshot
4 Oct 10 at 11:04 pm
[...] people argue that transsexuals wouldn’t exist in a perfect society. The idea behind this is that if we lived in a society where there was complete gender equality and [...]
Would Transsexuals Exist in Utopia? | GayLGBT.com
5 Oct 10 at 9:46 pm
Well Cis me. I have to see the Cis cabal as somewhat funny because it places people like autofetishists who run the Canadian center (where M. Bailey got his training and inspiration) next to crusty Greer, who lasted only a few days in celeb big brother house before pissing everyone off and deciding to leave (so it isn’t just intersex and trans who hate her declarations), next to exclusionary feminists and the 60 year old men who seem to be in charge of gyno departments.
I once asked about doing papers as a post doc on Gender Theory, intersex primarily (something only 1 academic seems to print about, much to the frustration of the several million intersex individuals in the US and UK), and I was told it was ‘academic suicide’ by head of department. But then, so is being queer or disabled.
First, I can’t really understand why the book Evolution’s Rainbow, which is a rip of the data from Biological Exuberance published a decade before isn’t seen as secondary, sub-research? Why would the author need to present themselves as Trans in an academic work, or is it that it is supposed to be accessible, not academic and that is creating context?
Regarding Transmen, a researcher in Victoria has been doing some research with lesbians and trans interactions (dubious research, tainted questions and high levels of assumption), which seem to validate the ‘once a lesbian, always a lesbian’ style, ala the After-Ellen labelling of Boys don’t Cry as a ‘lesbian film’ and having ONLY transmen materials in the trans section (maybe that has now changed).
It seemed, that for the lesbian feminist community, the ‘cis’ I am from, transmen are superlesbians, while to the general populance, transwomen are supergay men (which is why they are murdered and the ‘gay defence’ of ‘I did what anyone would have’ is used). To the lesbian feminist community, there has been a strong denial of anyone not ‘committed’ to the ‘lesbian’ tag, particularly in the UK, where due to legislation, things can be up to 25 years behind in views (like going to a party where 100 butches show up and 4 femmes, becuase butches are better – the masculine default I think you were talking about). However, there is a general unacceptance of trans at all, including saying no inclusion, even AFTER the gender law passed – transmen aren’t men, because they are lesbians in denial, and transwomen aren’t lesbians because they are heterosexual males in denial, and bisexuals, well, unless they identify as lesbian, they are just ‘passing’ when pushed – it is the opposition against the population in a unifying identifier which seems to taint all other viewpoints. This is taken even to absurdaties as Michigan Music festival’s policy shows.
Now I understand, returning to North America, why gender studies is ‘suicide’ (and would like your opinion on this), the people making the health decisions for the NHS and Canadian Health care don’t listen or read gender studies works, and talk time TV has a greater influence on understanding or the rather insipid and privilaged views from ‘Not all there’ than gender studies. A medical degree and then studies in gender will wield results, gender studies have yet to prove they can, except in the exclusion of a population not understanding the terms used.
Not how I want it, but Alice D by being part of ISSA gets more work read, than if she simply published – she gets to make policy BECAUSE of her alliance to that group largely. And because she isn’t in gender studies (sociology I think, or medical practicies).
Challenging read. Thanks
Elizabeth McClung
7 Oct 10 at 7:58 am
Just want to say this is my all-time, most, super-duper, favorite post on QT. A huge !!!THIS!!!
ginasf
7 Oct 10 at 9:39 am
Thanks so much for this!
@ JKBC, I think one of the most frustrating things about being outside of gender is very fact that there is no outside to gender in terms of the way you are read by people. I don’t really identify as a gender at all and never really have, which is something that was really hard to reconcile with transitioning. The way I see it now is that I am a man because that’s how I exist socially, but I still don’t really feel like I actually have a gender beyond that, and I would be far, far happier in a world where gender didn’t colour people’s perceptions and interactions so much. I think there are a lot more people who feel this way than you actually get to hear about because it’s, or at least it was for me, so unworkable to live as someone who simply doesn’t exist within the majorities’ understanding, when you are being nonconsensually gendered all the time.
emergentlifeform
9 Oct 10 at 10:26 am
Check out the book Second Skins by Jay Prosser, a trans man who already criticized that type of gender theory in the 90s.
ShipofFools
23 Dec 10 at 5:15 pm
“”[M]ainly young people, mainly “born women,” who did not identify as either women or men. Many of them made this transition while in college… referring to themselves as tranny boys, transmen, FtMs, or “bois.””"
I am a man of trans experience and I wanted to say just reading this here was enough to make my heart speed up in that weird adrenaline fueled way. I cannot tell you how much I despise the way in which feminism has consistantly denied me my gender. Where am I supposed to go to have my gender seen? I cannot go to the conservatives for sure but neither the liberal/progressives. This has driven me to drink and drugs on more than one occasion and part of why, even here, that quote gave me a shiver.
Thank you for this post. Even though it is old I wanted to say thank you. Maybe one day they’ll listen.
NotaWhisper
14 Aug 11 at 1:35 pm
[...] I Am Whoever You Say I Am, a post at Questioning Transphobia that taught me a lot about how not to engage with transgender theory as an academic. [...]
Theory Thursday: Transgender Terms and Concepts | Read React Review
5 Apr 12 at 12:24 pm