A Cliché Trapped in a Metaphor’s Body
This is a crosspost from my blogthing.
When one reaches a certain point in transition and begins to delve into this riotously diverse, loose aggregate we call the “trans community” and its close cousins to whom we are the red-headed step sister (yes, quite the odd family, no?), one inevitably hits the wall of language.
Holding up other peoples' language tends to leave one looking rather harried.
What do you call yourself? To what group do you belong? How should you be addressed? How does this relate to how you address others? What language is hurtful and undermines you? On and on the questions and contemporaneous realisations go. Words, wonderful words, surround, bind, and penetrate you. At the end of the day again and again we are learning, re-learning, and un-learning language. Trans people are, along with certain other loose confederations of humanity, perhaps more deeply attuned to the vicissitudes of linguistic power and how language does power than your average bear.
And why is that? Because there is one realisation along with all the other usual ones (i.e. why it hurts when, as a trans man, someone calls you ‘she’ or a ‘woman’) that demonstrates language’s power.
The words we have often obviate any meaningful way of discussing our experiences.
Estimates on how many words exist in the English language vary widely, from 250,000, to 500,000, to nearly one million, depending on how one counts, and what one counts. Whatever the figure, it’s a staggering amount of verbiage, enough to say anything worth saying, surely.
Yet we had to invent the word “cis” and its derivatives, keep in mind. This was necessary in order to talk about us and our comparative experiences of differently-gendered people in such a way as to not undermine or degrade ourselves in the process. To avoid a dichotomy of trans/normal that brings with it a tonne of cultural baggage.
For those who do not speak English circumstances may differ slightly; different cultural traditions allow the importation or repurposing of language that existed from before the wave of European colonisation that may bear on some kind of gender-nonconforming experience, language that provides a conceptual home for a way of life and a state of being many may scorn.
Yet in a part of the world dominated by English, where Anglophone media plays a leading role in shaping thoughts, the inescapable reality for many western trans people is that our experience is defined by often imprecise, cis-centric, medicalised language that suits the purposes of almost anyone but us, in truth. This Anglophone sneeze has given a cold to several other languages, Western and non, that now take the metaphors and terms as loan words.
Perhaps the most famous metaphor of this sort is one so many of us use, one that is a media favourite, and that many “allies” use to conceptualise our existence.
I am a [true gender] trapped in a [coercively assigned gender’s] body[1].
I used this phrasing myself when I was first coming out. Coming out is, of course, a process of self-discovery and one that takes you down some very unforgiving pathways, and one of them is a crash course in the power of language. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the phrasing of this (in)famous line lays all of the conceptual groundwork needed for news outlets like the New York Post to gleefully call Amanda Simpson an “ex-man” and for those same news organisations to think, again and again, that it is quite fine to ungender our murdered sisters and brothers- and that it is pertinent information to give both the coercively assigned name, and old photographs. The public’s right to know- the public’s right to your most personal and private existence. All because this metaphor has vastly outgrown its original intent.
Let’s take a step back here and examine the power of such metaphors. We more than likely all know the one about “God the Father” yes? Metaphor par excellence. A friend of mine, a priest in the United Church of Canada, and a woman who thinks a lot about these things, revealed to me how over the course of Christianity’s existence this metaphor evolved in conjunction with the ascent of other patriarchal forces in society. God the Father became God is a Father became Father is God. All too many of us know where that left us.
Much the same process has befallen the trans community with regard to “Trapped in a Body.” Many people, some trans folk included, have forgotten that it was a poorly conceived metaphor that made the most of broken language to struggle to explain our genders and our lives to people who would not understand. We were forced to put it in terms that our parents, our friends, our bosses and colleagues, our clergy and teachers would comprehend on some level. To the highly conditional extent this works, it only works for those who identify as a binary sex/gender to boot. For those who do not, this loaded phrase is completely useless and does not describe them at all.
Yet it poorly describes me too, as a binary identified trans woman who is femme. I never felt trapped in my body. There is a lot I love about it; it’s mine, damnit. We’ve been through quite a lot together, after all.
The prison was not my body, the prison was what society was doing with it.
This is one of those paradigm shift moments where anything suddenly becomes possible and where you can go in any number of directions. It’s a bit like the “my god, it’s full of stars” moment one has when disability is conceptualised as a truth of society’s treatment of individuals rather than something wrong with a particular person.[2] Feminists call such things (at least in regards to realisations about patriarchy) “click” moments. One can debate the nature of such things and it is certainly more complicated than something that evokes the mere flipping of a switch (metaphors running away again…), but it’s a useful way of looking at this. I realised my body was not wrong, society was wrong.
This, of course, did not preclude my taking hormones, or keeping my hair long, or any number of other odds and ends I have planned. To change one’s body is not to assert a wrongness of its prior form(s) but simply part of an evolution of self. My body was never “wrong” in any cosmic sense. To say that it was is to reify a gender binary that could never accommodate me in the first place, save through a very troublesome metaphor that represents a gasping attempt to make the ignorant understand.
In that lies the origins of perhaps every dollop of problematic language that surrounds us. It was never about us, it’s about getting cis people to understand us on terms they can ‘get.’ If I tell my father I’m “trapped in the wrong body” that’s something he can put handles on and begin to gain some understanding of where it is I’m coming from. But it is not a truth of my condition as a human being. As I grew into womanhood I quickly learned things were a hell of a lot more complicated. What biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling calls “the body as dynamic history” better fit my story, conceptually. My body wasn’t wrong, it was in my control and evolving.
It wasn’t a trap, it was misread.
If anything traps us, it is that cliché of being trapped in the “wrong” body. In the end, the phrase is not ours, it was developed by a few well meaning cis people to render our experience patriarchally intelligible.
What has been of endless consternation to me is the fact that among those who fancy themselves radical we have been held accountable for the cliché’s implications. The term is not truly ours. When we use it, it is an act of survival. An attempt to keep our heads above water in a cis world. For some of us, it does reflect a deeply held belief, yes (see: the HBS set). But for many others, it is an imprecise favour to those in our lives who cannot simply believe us when we say “I’m a woman” or “I’m a man”- and does nothing for those who know themselves to be neither.
It is a lesson in how we cannot rely exclusively on old language to adequately describe our experiences. It’s why clunky neologisms like “conditional cissexual privilege” are a better fit than “passing” with all of its implications. We have no brief and simple words in English, and precious few in any other languages either, that speak to a transsexual or transgender life experience, only poorly fitting terms and metaphors that speak in terms of a cis-centric experience.
Keep this in mind the next time you may feel cowed by someone bludgeoning you over the head with accusations about making up “fake words” or “PC terms” and what not. Because the truth is, it is their language that is fake when it comes to describing who we are.
[1] “Coercively assigned” is another vital neologism. It’s not just more syllables to the word ‘assigned’- which itself made headway against the reified naturalism of one’s birth and its meaning for gender- it is a term with political power that we had to bring into the conversation to illustrate something. Not only is the M or F on our birth certificates an assignment, but it is coerced. Parents cannot say no, (just as many parents could not say no to doctors who wanted to mutilate intersex infants and reconstruct their bodies), and you cannot say no, can you? The term “coercive” adds needed meaning that reveals the truth behind natal nomenclature and assignment: the truth of its constructed nature and its oppressive effects. This is why language is important. To use the cis-centric language of “well I was born male…” as a trans woman or non-binary person is to paint one’s self into a corner before one even begins to speak at length. It immediately sets you at a disadvantage and imports the “truth” of cis power.
[2] In short, that what makes a person “disabled” is not something about their bodies but how we design society. Being deaf is a disability when aural communication is an assumed societal default, for example. In this way of looking at things, disability becomes less about the person with disabilities being intrinsically ‘wrong’ and more about how their society and culture responds to them or conceptualises their bodily and/or neural configuration. Some disabilities do mean, irrespective of this, that things will be harder for you. But in this schema, they ‘disable’ far less and are not considered a stigmatising other that is only to be pitied, and about which nothing is to be done. It is a mode of thought that empowers by removing the stigma and thus the barriers to accommodation and justice; the parallels to trans-ness are clear. The language used to squeeze us into the existing order pathologises us and erases quite a few of us. Getting away from it makes accommodation that much easier.
But…
My body was wrong. And admitting my body was wrong was essential.
Social norms expecting the ability to breathe without struggling, and welcoming the use of tobacco, perfume, and other toxins in public spaces all aggravated my asthma. But they didn’t create it. And my asthma would be a problem in almost any circumstances.
Social norms marginalizing dykes who were coercively assigned male at birth, who were somewhat tomboyish, and were were not tomboyish enough to pass for straight men, doubtless aggravated my dysphoria. But they didn’t create it. And the PAIN would still HURT without hormones. Even if they fully accepted my gender while refusing me hormones.
I tried so hard to pretend that my body was all right – to wean myself from my asthma medicine and to keep myself from transition one day at a time – and it did no good. Ultimately, I had to learn ways to do more with less albuterol, but albuterol kept me breathing, and estradiol kept me alive.
Marja Erwin
21 Oct 10 at 4:06 pm
Very well said, and thought-provoking.
Much the same problem, of ill-fitting (and/or ill-defined) labels and terms, exists in the pagan/Wiccan/etc. community/ies. Am I a pagan? What if I don’t believe in any gods? What if I don’t think that the gods exist as larger entities, but am prepared to admit that I may be wrong? What if I want to practice a thoroughly modern set of beliefs? What if I want to (help) reconstruct an older, usually pre-Christian religion? What is pagan? What about magic(k)? What about Wicca and its various forms? What about eclecticism, or solitary practice?
Blargh. In the end, I tend to say that I’m an agnostic-pagan, or that I’m exploring/studying different practices… but it’s still not quite right.
Seamyst
21 Oct 10 at 4:10 pm
@Marja:
::hugs tight:: I’m sorry if you felt I drove over your experience. Perhaps I should explain further.
I felt exactly the same as you, hormones have saved my life too; the way I feel now is amazing compared to the way I was before.
I certainly wasn’t suggesting that if transphobia didn’t exist, we’d feel no burning need to transition physically. My recent jeremiads against certain sectors of modern feminist theory should make that abundantly clear. I think I hit that point in the second footnote when I said the issue was a matter of accommodation, not non-existence.
So I’ve been roughly where you were. For me, this is a conceptual shift. My body needed to change, needed to grow but couldn’t until I did certain things and admitted certain ideas about myself. That isn’t an issue of wrongness, to me. A necessity? Yes. Something that it could be said one ‘fixes’? To a certain extent, with the right qualifiers, yes.
Do I want the bodily configuration I had pre-transition? No. But that body was still mine and it wasn’t “wrong”- it was held back, it was coerced to be something *else* against my will by my parents and society not letting me have control over it. It was alienated from me.
So that’s how I see it.
As to dysphoria, a tonne of what defines dysphoria for me is the depression, self loathing, and suicidal ideations I had before coming out. But that wasn’t because there was something “mentally wrong” with me as many cis people might suppose; it was because nothing told me that it was possible or acceptable for me to do what I wanted to do, which in my case was to express my womanhood as I saw fit. Every person in seemingly similar circumstances I saw on TV was a joke or dead. So in Utopia I would have wanted to transition, yes, but the delays and self-loathing I felt and experienced are the result of societal transphobia and would not have been nearly as much of a problem, I expect.
I think it was important for me to say my body was ‘wrong’ as well. It was for a lot of us. To say something like that takes guts and is the product of a hell of a lot of fighting, the pre-transition transition as I like to call it. But what I am critiquing is not the idea that we should feel a burning desire to transition, it’s the idea that my body is or was innately wrong. It’s not. It’s going through phases of growth that I’m directing in accordance with my feelings and self-knowledge.
I hope that clarifies things. ::hugs:: I really don’t want to erase your experience but we can certainly talk more if things are unclear still and I am open to adjusting my ideas to ensure they don’t step all over people.
Quinnae Moongazer
21 Oct 10 at 4:19 pm
How trans feels for me, is like being repulsed from being considered male. If I am alone, if I am in a circumstance where I’m not “being gendered” or “doing gender” much, then the repulsion is minimal. To the extent it’s the other way, I’m flinching. Highly gendered situations, like clothes stores, hurt. Being actually complimented on being male is a harsh blow. To the extent I’m not “trapped”, it’s because in solitude I can turn my gender off, experientially.
And in relation to the comment above:
My own feeling was closer to “my body is doing / has done wrong things” than “my body is wrong”. I think, when I was a child, I used to feel like there was a female pathway, and be frustrated I was on the wong path and moving away from it. It was a matter of action, not of intrinsic nature.
For my body to have reached an adult state felt like “having gone a long way down the wrong path”, and hormones now feel like “slowly retracing my steps in the right direction at last”.
Julian Morrison
21 Oct 10 at 4:39 pm
Yah, my body doesn’t feel wrong to me; it’s my body, how can my entire body be wrong?
But at the same time, there are things that were or are not right about it. It was missing breasts (something that I’ve been fortunate to be able to take care of), and it currently has genitals that don’t belong to me.
I think where the “[x] trapped in a [y] body” metaphor fails me is (1) [as you state, Quinnae] I’m non-binary and that metaphor assumes binary gender; (2) it’s inaccurate, as my body is not a trap – yet, at the same time, there’s that piece, those parts that don’t belong to me, that I unfortunately cannot correct, due to both lack of money and refusing to fit into cis gatekeeper’s notions of gender and femininity. That causes me a *lot* of pain.
Counter to the assertions of radfems, I think that in an ideal world where gender is not a basis for several axes of oppression (gender, gender role / expression, binary vs. non-binary, medically transitions vs. not, etc), people will transition more frequently, not less, because we will be permitted to exercise autonomy over our bodies without interference from dominant society.
GallingGalla
21 Oct 10 at 5:45 pm
Quinnae: wrt to your reply to Marja, you say things like, “As to dysphoria, a tonne of what defines dysphoria for me is the depression, self loathing, and suicidal ideations I had before coming out,” and, “It was important for me to say my body was ‘wrong’ as well. It was for a lot of us. To say something like that takes guts and is the product of a hell of a lot of fighting, the pre-transition transition as I like to call it,” that seem to situate the feeling of your body being *wrong* as something that happens *before* transition.
What about those of us who *have* transitioned, and done a great deal of personal and political work around this, and STILL experience – deeply, intensely, viscerally – our bodies as being /wrong/?
I recognise that you don’t want to drive over others’ experience, but it really does feel like you are framing this feeling as being somehow politically less evolved, unenlightened.
I’m a PWD, and while some my experiences of disability and transness are parallel, many are not. I’m down with the social model of disability, yeah, and I would probably not have so many shame issues around my disability if I had grown up in a society that didn’t see my disability as a flaw in me. But though I have felt frustration and grief, I have never experienced that same sense of agonising /wrongness/ around my impairment that I have around aspects of my body relating to my transness.
Maybe your body was never wrong. And it is crucial that we don’t allow cis people to assign a narrative of “an x trapped in a y’s body” to us. But please, leave space for those of us who *do* experience our bodies as wrong – maybe not cosmically wrong, but fundamentally wrong *for us*.
Jack
21 Oct 10 at 6:32 pm
(uh, that should read “But though I have felt frustration and grief”, not “But I thought I have”. *facepalm*)
Jack
21 Oct 10 at 6:34 pm
@Jack: Fixed your comment for you. :)
As to what you’re saying here, I understand, and I think that I could have stood to be clearer in my writing to drive that point home. What you say here:
“And it is crucial that we don’t allow cis people to assign a narrative of “an x trapped in a y’s body” to us. But please, leave space for those of us who *do* experience our bodies as wrong – maybe not cosmically wrong, but fundamentally wrong *for us*”
is something I completely agree with and is what I was getting towards, but perhaps did not state with as much perspicacity as I should have.
You’re definitely right that in my reply to Marja, what I said about dysphoria (while leavened by saying *for me* to emphasise that it was my experience) gives the impression that it’s something transition banishes, and that is most definitely not true.
What I was trying to get at was the difficult-to-thread reality that this idea of being an “x trapped in a y’s body” is a narrative imposed on us that needs to be complicated considerably by people who do not understand themselves a certain way. I think that GallingGalla and JulianMorrison articulated the ways in which the wrongness is felt that I agree with, and I’m curious what your thoughts on those conceptualisations are.
Because the “not cosmically wrong, but fundamentally wrong for [the individual feeling certain things]” distinction is what I was getting at. Moving away from a universalising definition of transness as “being trapped in the wrong body” to being more complex and self-directed.
I think a lot of this criticism is good as it will help me refine this language in the future to make sure that I don’t step in anymore doo doo, so thank you for taking the time to point these things out.
As to this:
“but it really does feel like you are framing this feeling as being somehow politically less evolved, unenlightened.”
It’s a fine line to walk certainly, and I was worried about this. I don’t want to come off as saying “I’m more enlightened than you and know better!”- In looking at the past there is a lot that I can say I *do* know better about compared to how I once thought, and I’m sure you’d say the same about yourself. Again, what I was trying to say here was that the *hegemonic* idea of ‘trapped in the wrong body’ needs changing. But I can see how in discussing my own experiences I may have come across as arrogant, and I’m sorry for that.
What I was trying to articulate was that we reach a moment where we realise “the problem is society, not me” and to me that can still include a feeling of wrongness about one’s body in part or in whole because the issue is that your body is alienated from you, cast as this thing you can’t control, whose meaning is predetermined by others.
Thus society is preventing you from *doing* anything about this feeling of wrongness, is preventing you from exercising agency to usher your body in the direction it needs to go in. It’s taken away your bodily agency. So realising the fuckedupedness of society is part of where you feel you can admit that you need to move your body in a certain direction because it doesn’t feel right to have such and such parts or be called by such and such a name.
Speaking for *myself*, the dysphoria and wrongness I feel today comes from two places. One is a specific part of my body I feel needs to evolve, and two is the fact that I feel like I’m not womanly enough in this way or that way. For *me*, with the latter (but not the former, crucially) I pin the blame on society and their horrendous standard of womanhood. I have friends who tell me I’m beautiful and all the rest, and yet sometimes I still look in the mirror and don’t truly see myself because of all the BS I picked up down the years about how women ‘ought’ to look.
So that’s kind of where I’m coming from.
I also did not mean to imply there were *perfect* parallels between the social model of disability and being trans; I was comparing the two as being major conceptual shift “oh shit” moments that occur as the result of a lot of introspection and perhaps research that are way beyond what society teaches us is normal. Neither way of looking at those dimensions of our world is hegemonic, nor are they normative, and certainly not taught by the vast majority of parents, nor in virtually any school.
What I said here: “The language used to squeeze us into the existing order pathologises us and erases quite a few of us. Getting away from it makes accommodation that much easier.” was the essence of my point in bringing up the social model and why its framework is useful for so many people. It does not say that there may not be an ontological truth to the difficulties experienced by a person with disabilities, or the sense of corporeal wrongness experienced by a trans person… it says those things are real but that society vastly worsens their burn, and that there is a responsibility on the part of others to be respectful, just, and accommodating, and not impose definitions upon them, pathologise or other them.
I’m sorry I didn’t accurately reflect or make room for your experiences, and I will keep this thread well in mind for the future.
Quinnae Moongazer
21 Oct 10 at 7:01 pm
Quinnae,
I agree with most of your reply. I moved pretty quickly from “my body is in the wrong condition for me and getting worse” to “my body is pretty close to the right condition for me and getting better.” I don’t see a difference between “my body was wrong” and “my body was in the wrong condition.”
Marja Erwin
21 Oct 10 at 8:45 pm
Something that struck to me – the passive verb in that cliché, “trapped”. Trapped by what, the weather? That’s an excuse-making phrase for the cis society and cis gatekeepers who are (active verb) *trapping* trans people by either refusing alterations, or doling them out in a way that demands a male-or-female outcome.
Julian Morrison
22 Oct 10 at 5:02 am
Julian – yes, you’re right! And even for those of us who do identify with narratives of “wrongness”, that’s important – there’s a lot of difference between being in the wrong room (“Oh dear, I should be in the kitchen, I’ll go there now,”) and being *trapped* in the wrong room (*hammers on walls*).
Jack
22 Oct 10 at 12:50 pm
I think the arguments about experience that are going on in the comments here illustrate beautifully why our experience, as trans people, do not lend themselves well to cliched explanation.
Also, it’s been said before but my body is not a “man’s body” because my body never belonged to any man!
The Untoward Lady
22 Oct 10 at 6:54 pm
I love your approach to language, and how you reveal that so much of the terms we use are simply for the convenience of those not actually experiencing our situations. I’ve been wondering lately about the terms “mtf” and “ftm”. Were our bodies and selves ever really male (mtf) or female (ftm) to begin with? Is there a more accurate way to describe our situation?
Summer
24 Oct 10 at 9:39 pm
#
@Untoward Lady: Very very true. :)
@Summer: Yes, that’s exactly why I ditched MTF/FTM because they’re terms that ultimately undermine peoples’ identities and cater to a cis-centric notion of transitioning from a cis-like male to a cis-like female or vice versa. When the truth is, we have our own unique experience as trans people; I was never a man or much of a boy, really, I was a trans girl.
For me, I just say trans woman or trans man as appropriate- it emphasises the trans person’s proper gender, the one they know themselves to be.
As to talking about what knobbly bits one had when they were born, it suffices to say “coercively assigned male/female at birth.” It says everything that needs to be said and in a few short words upends the whole way we’re raised to look at birth and the essentialness of sex. I have QT to thank for teaching me that phrase. ;)
Language matters; it helps structure how we know our world. Just think of the difference between those two phrases- “born male” or “coercively assigned male”- and look at the two vastly different stories they tell. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Quinnae Moongazer
24 Oct 10 at 9:53 pm
I got the phrase from anarchafemme.
Lisa Harney
25 Oct 10 at 1:22 am
It IS all about the words. This is an excellent post.
EM
25 Oct 10 at 10:53 am
I went to a most excellent Institute on Disability Justice at Creating Change last year, which really shook up my way of thinking. I did not entirely agree with the presenters, but I came away with the notion of simple human variation. Human beings are variable in shape, size, color, gender, etc., and so much is made of that, when so little should be. If the variation causes dysfunction, pain, or psychological distress to the person, they have a right to have it addressed if they wish. If we were all born exactly identical, like a bunch of clones, what a boring world that would be. Looking at it this way, it almost seems ridiculous to base prejudice or an “ism” (prejudice + a story justifying that group’s inferiority + institutional power) on deviation from the “norm.” Indeed, variation is so interesting; it is precisely those friends of mine who are NOT from my same background that I learn the most from, even sometimes painfully about my own blind spots and prejudices.
Estraven
2 Feb 11 at 1:38 pm