Questioning Transphobia

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:

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I was not so happy as I looked in the pictures on my parents’ walls. It was something that resonated with me as I read a beautiful, radical poem by Jo Carillo ‘And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You’ which used as a leitmotif pictures of Latinas working under the sun that might hang in the livingroom of a blanquita radfem. Like so many things in the anthology- This Bridge Called My Back- that poem is immortalised in, it made me think, not just about its own very important subject which is, alas, an all too salient issue even today… but about the pictures that were once on my wall too.

They were windows into a very particular past, a past that is assuredly a minefield on multiple levels. Much has been said, including on the pages of Questioning Transphobia itself, about those pictures. How they can oppress, or how they can liberate. It vexed me because as a budding sociologist I’m easily entranced by questions of meaning, and constantly working upon my mind was a need to decipher the meanings of those pictures in my own life. Not just the meanings of the photographs themselves, but what they represented.

And to begin the, perhaps necessary, use of ten guinea words in this piece; what the past those pictures evoked could say about my subjectivity.

What it means to be trans is one of those existential questions that excites and puzzles as surely as other such questions about the categories of human existence, the lines drawn in flesh that mark us off as one thing or the other. In the more evolved discourses of identity politics and its modern intersectional incarnations, there is an understanding that being trans carries with it a certain experience, a certain perspective on the world that only trans people have.

Certainly the vagaries of this can be disputed but one question that I’ve had and felt very troubled in answering is this one: Is my lived experience as someone who was forced to be male part of my subjectivity?

Let me be clearer still: I was never a man, no, but I lived as a male per the directions and encouragement of every social actor in my life up until the age of 21. In moving through the world in that utterly ill fitting skin, that imposed disguise whose existence tantilised the very edges of my conscious mind, I still ended up seeing things a certain way and being made to undertake certain actions, think certain thoughts. Such for me provides rich perspective, and informs my participation in discourses on misogyny. But can I talk about what that meant for me and what it felt like? What the specific experience was for me as a young trans girl- a woman forced in very deep ways to put on what society deemed a male persona? Can I say that this taught me something about male privilege or provided me with some perspective on what being a young man might be like?

Not without siring a world of trouble, that much is for sure.

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As I chronicled, approximately six months ago, Amy Winter of Feminist Reprise wrote:

Just for the record, the definitive post on transgenderism and radical feminism was written some time ago, and it is Radical feminism and the Transgendered, or, how to write a post that will infuriate everyone.

This one isn’t too bad either.

Why is this my last post on such a contested subject, you might ask? Because there’s nothing new to be said, I reply. These arguments are like cold sores; they break out periodically, they’re painful, inflammatory, unpleasant, and unsightly, and just when we think they’re gone forever they raise their ugly heads again. Contrary to what some might think, like most radical feminists I’ve heard all the arguments of trans advocates over the years, and I’m not convinced by them. It seems to me that the most vociferous trans advocates must have heard all MY arguments and are not convinced by them either. So be it.

I also commented that she hadn’t taken Questioning Transgender Politics down. I found in the past week that the website no longer exists, although per whois.net, Amy still owns the domain.

Does this look like Amy decided to take down the website as I challenged in my previous post? No. Not because she still owns the domain, but because it’s five months after my first post.

I was looking for information on why Questioning Transgender was taken down, and I thought it was possible that Amy might mention it on her blog. Imagine my surprise* when I came across this gem posted on August 6th, some five months after Amy’s last post on trans ever:

Oh, and also, if a woman calling another woman a “shithead” is misogynist, is it misogynist for a man to call a woman a “transphobe”? If calling someone a “retard” is ableist, is it also ableist to call a person or their ideas “lame”? Not to put too fine a point on it, but is stuff only misogynist/racist/ableist/classist/wrong/bad/and horrible** when people you disagree with do it?

Just asking.

Because I was pretty amused when I noticed that the people who were so righteous in calling out the theft of ideas (or whatever) by Amanda Marcotte were many of the same people who, a year before, bordered on abusive in dismissing accusations of a similar of theft of ideas — in that case because the accuser was a widely hated radical feminist “transphobe” and the plagiarizer (or whatever) was a celebrated blogging transperson.

The celebrated blogging trans woman is little light, of course. The widely hated radical feminist transphobe was Heart.

Now of course, both of the posts I linked here go over just what happened with regard to appropriation, but to make what kind of appropriation and theft of ideas that little light was accused of:

167 womensspace

Ravenm: I disagree that feminist writers benefit from owning certain words, metaphors, etc.

Ravenm, I don’t think that feminist writers benefit from owning certain words, metaphors, etc., either. I think feminist writers, as I’ve said more than once, whenever possible, ought to acknowledge one another’s work which is similarly themed, not only out of writerly courtesy but for the sake of promoting the work of other feminist writers, so that it never is erased. We’re stronger together than we are alone. In other words, out of solidarity.

While I don’t think that certain words and metaphors belong to feminists, I do think that some belong to females (goddess imagery) and ought not be appropriated by those who are factually male.

I disagree that Little Light’s goal on her blog or in her poem was to colonize women.

I don’t know that this was little light’s goal? I doubt it was her intention. I think the effect of those who are factually male invoking female/goddess imagery is to colonize females.

little light evokes goddesses from her culture (which was, I might add, colonized), and she’s colonizing womanhood. Heart, a white middle-class woman who is currently running for president, is claiming ownership of every goddess on Earth in this comment. She refers to womanhood as being colonized, appropriating all of the violence and erasure that white Europeans committed – destroying and assimilating entire cultures, establishing the people of those cultures as second-class citizens in relation to whites. Yes, trans women identifying as women is exactly the same thing as committing cultural genocide. You go, Heart.

And no, little light is not doing the same thing that A. did when she wrote her article for alter.net. Not even if you compare her piece to Robin Morgan’s poem, “I am a monster, and I am proud.” The only way you could conclude that little light got her inspiration from Robin Morgan would be if you thought that any reference to a goddess anywhere is a reference to every goddess everywhere – or rather, an extremely thin case for plagiarism and why the hell is this even coming up again? Is Amy just starved for drama?

Then there was this post on August 26th, expanded from a comment at m Andrea’s:

To straight and/or sex-role-conforming people, it makes sense that sex-role nonconforming people would want to conform to the sex role within which they “fit” the best, even if it’s not the one that matches their genitals. So because gender conformity is privileged, it becomes easier to move through the world as a “man” than as a butch lesbian, or as a transwoman rather than a “failed man.” But easier is not the same thing as feminist, or revolutionary.

Here, Amy is saying that it is easier to transition, to become a woman, than it is to live as a feminine man, because gender conformity is privileged. I want to point out why this is all kinds of wrong:

Living as a “failed man” (whatever the hell that means): Going on with life as you were living it before. Cost? Can keep family, friends, job, not pay for expensive procedures, not pay for hormones, not buy a new wardrobe, not change name, not change all legal documentation, being miserable

Transitioning to woman: Two years of electrolysis (one hour a week, say $80/hour) = $8,320. Hormones for the rest of your life: Price varies, but say $50-$100/month or more pre-surgery, and probably half that after. Assuming the ability to get surgery in two years (not always likely), that’s $1,200 – $2,400. Surgery itself ranges from $15,000 to $30,000, depending upon surgeon. Facial feminization surgery for those who need or want it, can cost another $15,000 to $30,000.  So, at a minimum, that’s ~$40,000-$70,000, not counting the cost of a new wardrobe.

But of course, the costs aren’t just monetary – there’s health risks associated with taking hormones, especially the high pre-surgery doses. Deep vein thrombosis is a possible (but not frequent) risk, as is increased chance of heart attack or stroke.  After surgery, the hormones are required for the rest of your life because without them, you get osteoporosis. Coming out can cost you your family, your friends, and often your job. Obviously, these costs are subjective and variable, depending upon how important each of these is to you and how likely they are to stick around or not fire you. Still, the social cost of transitioning should not be discounted. Further, once you have transitioned, you’re now in a population that’s ~ 10 times more likely to be murdered, you’ll have a harder time finding a job, people will generally treat you poorly just because you’re a trans person.

Now, in what world, I ask, does that mean that being a “failed man” is harder for anyone (or perceived as harder)  than being trans? The entire statement is absurd on the face of it. Why would anyone voluntarily go through this just to fit in better? Isn’t it possible there might be deeper reasons?

Well, not to anti-trans radical feminists like Amy. She’s built up her own trans mythology that she works from, one that has nothing to do with what real trans people experience. One in which it’s somehow harder to not spend tens of thousands of dollars and risk crippling your social life and relationship to your family, one in which you permanently place yourself in the category of second-class citizen than to do those things.

But it gets better:

For those of you who like your intersectionality of oppressions, I am unable to see compulsory femininity, fat hatred (as evidenced by weight loss surgery), and transgenderism as separate phenomena, because as a sex-role nonconforming fat lesbian female, I am oppressed by all three. I and others who defy sex role conditioning WHILE claiming the bodies we were born with, those of us who resist femininity and masculinity, refuse, as feminists, to see our bodies as wrong.

Yes, Amy is oppressed by trans people. And she falls back on the nonsensical “bodies we were born with” argument (hint: Amy, no, your cissexist assumption that altered bodies are less valuable than unaltered bodies is oppressing trans people). She’s also trying to claim that those who resist femininity and masculinity are somehow connected to being transgender, as if masculinity and femininity have anything to do with being male or female. This is biological essentialism – she’s equating the act of physically changing your sex with being masculine or feminine. I’m also trying to understand why she thinks sex changes are oppressive in a way that six billion men and women who also fit into the gender binary without changing their sex are not.  I suspect this has nothing to do with oppression and everything to do with Amy thinking that what trans people do are somehow her business. Boundaries, Amy, learn them, love them, honor them.

Oppression is not the same thing as feeling uncomfortable or disliking something about yourself or your life. Being born with a penis is not evidence of sexist oppression. Being ridiculed or beaten for wearing makeup when you have a penis IS evidence of sexist oppression — but men, as the sex class in power, are the ones who created and police those boundaries***, and as such, are the only ones who have the power to change them. To say, “We, as women, as feminists, should collectively resist the binary model because it is the BASIS for the sexist oppression we all suffer” is a direct challenge to patriarchy. To say, “Oh, well, do whatever makes you happy” is privileged apolitical middle-class white liberal spooge and leads us down the garden path to pomo meaninglessness. Some things resist oppression, some things don’t. That’s just the way it is, however much we may be attached to our particular collusions, and whatever our individual decisions about our individual lives may be. Are there benefits and rewards for collusion? Sure, and most of us reap some of them, some of the time. But that in no way makes collusion a feminist act.

I’m not sure why she’s talking about feeling uncomfortable or disliking something about yourself or your life as being oppression. In the context of trans people (since she mentions the penis immediately), I’ve never seen a trans person claim that being trans is inherently a matter of being oppressed. That’s because it’s not – on the other hand, the way society treats trans people is oppressive. Everything from constant dehumanizing language all the way to violent murder with few consequences.

As for collusion, I would say that demonizing trans people and misrepresenting our lives, motives, beliefs, and the personal and real costs of our transitions is very effectively colluding with the Patriarchy.

I wonder if Amy thinks that trans women collude in our own murders?

And I still don’t know why Questioning Transgender has been taken down.

* No, not really.

I don’t*. Oh, sure, I remember the post she made which was immediately overrun with anti-trans radical feminists riding their hobby horses. But the conversation got sucked into the “justify yourself, you subhuman freak” Bermuda Triangle:

One of the standard complaints of feminism, quite rightly, is that men demand access to women’s time. They demand that women clean up after them, bring them cups of coffee, do the xeroxing and so on. In more patriarchal societies, women are supposed to take responsibility for men’s uncontrollable sexuality through various sorts of ‘modesty’; in less patriarchal, but still sexist ones, women are supposed to decorate themselves for men, rather than for themselves. Straight men have privilege and one of the ways that they exercise it is by making uncompensated demands on women’s time.

(One of the mistakes of a particular kind of feminism was to assume that pleasing men and placating sexism was the only reason why a woman might wear cosmetics – certainly, though, I have known women who were perfectly prepared to wear slap to go out clubbing but who objected to being expected to wear it at work.)

My point is that the demand that transpeople constantly justify ourselves, constantly live with other people’s issues, is a similar exercise of privilege, in this case cis-gendered privilege, They are claiming the right to make us spend time we often don’t have on going over and over the same arguments time after time.

Anyway, Cedar – whose blog you absolutely must read – goes back to the root, as it were. Ze talks about the transmisogyny in Maia’s post that mostly went unexamined because of the energy-sucking vortex mentioned above. It didn’t go unnoticed, but it was rapidly swept aside, thanks to the usual antics of Stormcloud, Polly, Rich, m Andrea, and others.

As Cedar says:

Radfem recants transphobia, transphobic radfems plus one very confused and hateful person come in and attack, all the comments are about arguing with them and the legitimacy of trans people, period, and the OP never gets questioned for her remaining transphobia. (ok, she does once)

But Maia is still being really transphobic! She still sets up good transwoman [sic] bad transwoman, she still uses “woman” in opposition to “transwoman” [sic] as if we weren’t women who are trans but some other gender, she still frames woman only space as us/them, she still claims that [cis women] “we” get to “draw the line” about who enters, to “keep out the dangerous elements”, says this is SO HARD, fails to ask how other __ only spaces keep themselves safe, still engages with the notion of the over-privileged trans woman without interrogating the difference between entitlement and external privilege–and in particular says that the trans women who are most vocal about protesting our exclusion “give transfolk a bad name”, and on and on. I am especially fond of She said very little – she was attending a workshop / discussion about what it means to be a woman, and she was there to listen, not to speak.

Why doesn’t she get called on it? Because the first commenter is a class-a-asshat, that’s why.

No, that’s not why. It’s because the first commenter is a class-a-asshat, and Maia let him post, and keep posting–even after he claimed that he’d been raped by a comment.

And this actually ties back into Queen Emily’s open letter:

I have complained numerous times that the feminist blogosphere, such as it is, has one main conversation about trans people, one that is returned to again and again and again – the political implications of our transitioning. Click here if you want yet another example of pointless bloody “analysis.”

I don’t CARE about whatever horrible thing some feminist has said anymore. I care that these discussions centre on cis concerns, even (maybe especially) allies respond mostly to the slurs, but rarely address the real issues.

Now, if you want to have those conversations, here’s an idea. Subject yourself to the same kind of analysis. Honestly interrogate if and how you might have more or less privilege than trans people. And no, for the millionth time, trans women are not the fucking Patriarchy.

It’s about how any conversation about trans people gets derailed into this eternal, endless, cis-centric argument (it doesn’t even qualify as debate) about whether trans people can justify our existence. And, I admit that I often get sucked into those conversations, and use up energy I could better spend writing posts here. But, while I admit my responsibility in participating in those trainwrecks, the fact is that in each case, someone owns and manages the blog on which said trainwrecks happen. Someone approves comments that goes into moderation, someone has the power to step in and say “this talk isn’t welcome here” or even – at the least – call it out. Trans identities are not a topic over which reasonable people should be able to disagree. The debate over whether trans women should be allowed into women-only spaces is not a debate, it’s not a controversy, it’s not a point of ideological difference. It’s the institutionalized exclusion of one group of women from women as a whole. It’s saying that cis women’s needs, cis women’s experiences, cis women’s privilege are more important than trans women’s needs, experiences, and oppression under every circumstance.

And feminists who consider themselves allies, who understand that trans women are women and there shouldn’t even be a question as to whether we are women, who allow this pretense of a debate to go unchallenged, who say that this is simply a matter of opinion and not everyone needs to agree, continue to contribute to that institutionalized transmisogyny that has been a part of feminism ever since Beth Elliott was expelled from the Daughters of Bilitis. It has been 36 years since that happened.

Allies – real allies – aren’t simply accepting of trans people, don’t just accept that trans women are women. They hold others accountable for their statements about trans women. They don’t place cis women’s comfort over trans women’s safety or hold trans women accountable for cis women’s safety. How did Cedar put this? Oh, yes:

what they can do is make it seem like it is “so hard” and “a huge issue” when it’s just not. It’s not hard, in fact it’s a non-issue if you’re willing to treat it like one.

And while the last three links are aimed at one person, that’s only because she’s the most readily available example, not because she’s the only one. This post is not specifically about her, but about the transmisogyny she fails to acknowledge – and this disclaimer is not about excusing her own accountability. Is it really so hard? Is it really easier to coopt survivor voices as a shield against trans women? Or is it just more comfortable?

So, is it really so hard, when this happens – when anyone starts arguing that trans women aren’t women, or that trans women have to justify ourselves to be accepted – why don’t these conversations get smacked down? Why are they left to trans people and allies to refute over and over and over again until everyone’s exhausted or burned out or in too much pain from seeing this same argument play out over and over again? Why do cis feminists not take action to move beyond this conversation? Letting it happen makes cis women the center of all discussions about trans women, and this should never happen.

* Clarification: She did recant her transphobia, and take several positive steps. Cedar calls her out on several points where she still needs work.

[ETA: Re-arranged a bit and changed some language per discussion in comments with Zoe Brain.]

Heya everybody, GallingGalla here, she of the recently-nuked blog. Yeah, I was just getting so weary of constantly battling cis feminists defining their theories all over my body. But, there’s one subject that I felt like I need to speak out on, and I am honored that Lisa invited me to write a guest post about this subject here.

Anyway, from Wikipedia, kapo:

was a term used for certain prisoners who worked inside Nazi concentration camps during World War II in various lower administrative positions.

The German word also means “foreman” and “non-commissioned officer“, and is derived from French for “Corporal” (fr:Caporal) or the Italian word capo^[1][2]‘. Kapos received more privileges than normal prisoners, towards whom they were often brutal. They were often convicts who were offered this work in exchange for a reduced sentence or parole, however they were usually murdered and replaced with a new batch of prisoners at regular intervals.

Evangelina Carters is a therapist and an HBS woman who offers this handy classification guide to help us distinguish between the rare flawless gem that is the “true transsexual” and the rest of us, shall I say, “damaged goods”. Please go read it. I’m not going to fisk this in detail, because, really, my stomach has limits.

I think that this piece is rather well representative of the attitudes of HBS women. It is clear that she writes it from the perspective of a white, middle-class, heteronormative woman who views the world through a cis lens. In and of itself, writing from that perspective certainly won’t make you any friends outside of that narrow little world, but I don’t think you’ll be sent to the lake of fire, either. However, saying that yours is the only valid perspective, and using that perspective and your privileges to split yourself off from the community that you are part of while actively enabling those who are oppressing that same community is, in my mind, a moral outrage. And that is exactly what Ms. Carters, and many HBS women, are doing.

HBS women define an extremely narrow life trajectory that they think is the only legitimate one for trans* women to follow (I say “woman” because, like many other transmisogynist women, HBS women all but erase the existence of trans men): that of the woman who senses her target gender at an early age; who transitions fully, with the proper hormones and proper surgery, as soon as possible; who is heterosexual upon transition; who is completely and totally stealth; who absolutely will not associate, in any way, with any element of the LGBTQ community. (You’ll note that she calls trans women who do not fit that exact trajectory “transgender men”.) Those who follow that narrow trajectory account for only a very small part of the trans* / genderqueer / gender-variant population.

HBS women then proceed to argue that cis society (including, notably, anti-trans radical feminists and white, middle-class feminists in general) grant them special privileges to them and only them while at the same time they pull rank with that same cis society in oppressing those trans* / gq / gv people that are not part of their special club.

Carters uses gender-essentialist language that is ludicrous on its face:

True transsexuals have a greater number of sex markers congruent with the sex of their brain: hands tend to be smaller, feet smaller, noses smaller, physical frame smaller, and generally slightly wider hips than normal for a male. Often the effect of puberty was not as dramatic as in normal males, though not in all cases. This physicality also explained the marked difference in ages that the affected people became aware that they had something different about them.

This has to be one of the finest examples of just-so “science” that I’ve seen in a long time. Talk about warping inventing reality to fit your pet theory. Carters could teach anti-trans radical feminists a thing or two.

HBS women are:

(1) trying to carve out a chunk of special cis/heteronormative-society-granted privilege for themselves while actively and knowingly participating in the continued oppression of the vast majority of trans* / gq / gv people;

(2) making hateful statements that are very similar to those made by anti-trans radical feminists, and therefore directly participating with them in the oppression of trans* / gq / gv people, including enabling their murders. Both anti-trans radical feminists and HBS women are using cis men as their proxies to commit acts of violence that they are too embarrassed or too ‘pure-wymynly-non-violent’ or too properly ladylike to commit. This may not be their (anti-trans radical feminists and HBS women) conscious intent, but that is the *effect*;

(3) engaging in blatant classism (including statements to the effect that trans women who are so poor that they are living on the street “just aren’t committed enough, they can scrape up the money somehow”);

(4) engaging in blatant racism; they know or *should know* how race and class are tied together. Here’s a very ugly example of simultaneous racism and transmisogyny – HBS-er Cathryn Platine write regarding Autumn Sandeen, a blogger at Pam’s House Blend:

When trans identified people approach women’s space as trans, they are confirming the accusations of the radical separatists, they are essentially trying to colonize or invade women’s space. This would seem to be a no brainer to me, but is a rather simple concept that immediately raises the back hairs of the transgendered crowd. It apparently is so threatening a concept that Pam Spaulding’s of Pam’s House Blend Blog house tranny, Autumn Sandeen, branded it hate speech! Sandeen is someone who is actually trying to raise money to go to the Democratic Convention for the specific purpose of causing a bathroom incident! Holy crap Batman. If this isn’t a perfect example of someone who claims womanhood on the one hand and denies it on the other trying to invade women’s space, I have no idea what would. It would seem self evident to me that if you are not woman identified you do not belong in women’s space.

(“House tranny” references the term “House Negro“.)

(5) engaging in blatant ableism, by stating that every trans* / gq / gv person except themselves, is mentally ill / “paraphilic” / “fetishistic”;

(6) are in general creating yet another structure of privilege and therefore actively reinforcing kyriarchy;

(6a) as part of that, are silencing trans men and those on the f-to-* spectrum.

HBS women are doing this for privileges that are illusory. Calling yourself an “HBS woman” will not protect you from losing your job when you are outed. Spitting in the faces of other trans* / gq / gv people will not protect you from being beaten up in the women’s bathroom by Alix Dobkin’s friends who just clocked you, or from being arrested, abused, and possibly raped by those transphobic cops. And splitting yourself from the rest of your community will not stop the ever-present, low-level, subconscious fear of being clocked, outed, scanned, questioned, doubted, delegitimized, silenced, erased. HBS women are part of the trans* / gq / gv community whether they like it or not.

Zoe Brain has a more nuanced and complex take on HBS and the question of transsexual / intersex.  Please read the entire article.  I will say, however, that I am uncomfortable with these two paragraphs, as there seem to be some mixed messages and I will admit that I was triggered by the third sentence in the first paragraph below, and I’m having trouble fitting it into the context of the rest of the article:

I place zero weight on my own self-perceptions, that I’m just a woman with an interesting medical history . Likewise my own desires as to what “should be”. For if I had my druthers, there would be a nice neat binary, with HBS men and women easily and clearly distinguished from a variety of self-advertising publicity-seeking “TG Pride” paraphiliacs and fetishists.

For that matter, I would like to be either regarded as Intersexed or Transsexual(ie only neurally Intersexed), and not something in-between, with characteristics of both. Still, if I’m going to dream, let’s go back to conception and give me 46xx chromosomes and a standard factory model female body, one that matches my brain.

It is time to call out HBS women who actively participate in the oppression of trans* / genderqueer / gender variant people for what they are: Kyriarchists. Kapos.

And it is time for the trans* / gq / gv community to stop tolerating their behavior.

[ETA: I neglected to link to Zoe Brain's post, and also, as requested in her comment, I extended the quotation from her article.]

I linked to a post by Monica Helms about trans anger the other day, which was really me dodging writing a full post – however, Helen G pointed out that its focus is quite narrow and doesn’t really cover the reasons trans people have to be angry. And, I agree with her. I do not yet feel up to writing that full post yet, so I want to cover something that should help provide context:

I haven’t really done this before, but I wanted to go over what transphobia is and what transphobia is not. Quite a few cis people feel qualified to tell trans people what qualifies as transphobia, which always conveniently excludes whatever transphobic behavior they’re exhibiting at that particular time. It’s not unlike what I said to Uppity Brown Woman the other day about white people defining racism:

. . . white people shouldn’t be the ones to define when a racist act has occurred, because the answer will nearly always be “never,” . . .

What I mean by that is that without any reason for white people to check our privilege, we’re just going to do what we do and refuse to acknowledge that we’re hurting someone else. Part of privilege is that the pain we cause is either invisible to us, or we believe that the target of that pain somehow brought it upon herself or deserved it. Another part of privilege is interpreting events in our favor whenever possible, and expecting the dominant social forces to support that interpretation.

Also, read Uppity Brown Woman’s full post I linked, because it is all about privilege:

A dramatic metaphor:

Imagine you’re riding your motorcycle down the street. The car in front of you slams on their breaks to meet a stop light, and you swerve to avoid smashing into them, only to end up hitting a telephone pole. It’s your bike that’s a goner, but thankfully the other vehicles have no significant damage. You’re also the one bleeding internally from faceplanting. Only one ambulance has arrived so far. The paramedics are trying to help you in whatever way they can. The other person involved in the accident walks over and demands medical attention because they could be bleeding internally as well. They stopped really suddenly! Their airbag went off!

No doubt, they could be injured. Although it is a possibility, the biker is visibly in pain. The driver makes the point, “but sie must have known the hazards of motorcycles!” In this metaphor, the paramedics stop paying attention to the biker and start looking after the driver. The biker uses up a ton of energy just trying to say, “hey, wait a fucking minute! This is supposed to be about me!” and is only met with “when we’re done here, we’ll get to you. Just calm down and quit being so angry.”

This is what happens when conversations about issues surrounding disability, race, trans people, and other oppressed classes of people start: Privileged people walk in and demand to make the conversation about them. They ask to be educated, they demand justifications, they insist that they can’t be good allies if they don’t understand what’s going on. In the three threads I linked, one is about a girl with cerebral palsy whose family denied her life support machines that would improve her quality of life, and also arranged for a “do not resuscitate” order; one is about how white people often make use of work done by people of color without crediting them; one is about how a feminist made a pointed jab at the Transgender Day of Remembrance. In each case, able-bodied, white, or cis people came into the discussion and made it about them. In each case, this was highly inappropriate because the topic matter was itself sensitive to the people it directly affected: The perception of people with disabilities living incomplete lives that leads able-bodied people to think it’s reasonable to let them die; the fact that people of color do so much work and white people feel entitled to claim it; the fact that trans people cannot even talk about the fact that we have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, at least in America – the victims predominantly women of color. The average person has a 1 in 18,000 chance of being murdered. That we cannot talk about this fact that this is happening, and that we remember our dead once a year, and how we cannot even do this without a cis person begrudging the fact that we do remember our dead – and we cannot have this conversation without cis people blasting into the discussion and demanding that we justify our lives and our decisions and the medical procedures we’ve undergone before they’ll consent to both mourn and express sympathy that our mourning is begrudged.

And that’s privilege, or rather what privilege does to those who do not have it.

Nothing listed past this point is meant to be definitive, the sum total, the limits of the ways that cissexual privilege or transphobic actions manifest. They are examples, and are only the tip of the iceberg.

Cissexual privilege is the privilege of having a body that matches the sex your brain expects. Cissexual privilege is the privilege of having a body that matches what society expects. Cissexual privilege is the assumption that your sex, your gender are superior and more valid than trans people’s sex and gender, that you have the right to tell trans people who and what they really are, what their motives are for transitioning, to deny that their most basic realities are false because you cannot imagine how they can be true. Cissexual privilege is the sense of entitlement that tells you that you have the right to discuss my genitals at any time and then claim I’m the one bringing genitals up all the time. Cissexual privilege is the belief that you can declare what “being a transsexual” really is because you’ve thought about it a lot after rejecting what actual transsexual people and the entire medical profession have said about being a transsexual person. Cissexual privilege is the insistence that you have the right to shift the meaning of what trans people say about ourselves so that you can then use the reinterpreted arguments as easily destroyed straw men. Cissexual privilege is the attitude that you can interrogate and criticize everything a trans person does even though it’s no different from what a cis person does simply because the person is trans, and thus her sex and gender are not as valid as yours. Cissexual privilege is what makes you think that you can berate trans people for reifying gender roles and reinforcing the gender binary while at the same time remaining comfortably ensconced in your life as a man or a woman. A trans person claiming to be a man or a woman is doing it wrong but you claiming to be a man or a woman is only natural.

Cissexual privilege is the insistence that being called cissexual is othering and demeaning and implies that trans people are trying to make ourselves the norm and you the other, when it is simply a matter of equalizing cis and trans, defining both as normal and neither as other. It is no more othering and demeaning than distinguishing straight people from gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.

Cissexual privilege is the fact that you do not have to pay thousands of dollars for hormones, electrolysis, surgery, a new wardrobe, you do not have to risk losing your job, your family, or your friends. Cissexual privilege means that you don’t have to take hormones or undergo surgery to be comfortable – to be able to live with - your body’s sex.

Transphobia is the exercise of that privilege. It is not restricted to violence. It is not restricted to men. When you refer to a trans woman as a man, or a trans man as a woman, you said something transphobic. When you say that all trans people are fetishists, you said something transphobic. When you say that trans people are mentally ill, that is not only transphobic but also ableist. When you say that trans women should be excluded from domestic violence shelters, you not only said something transphobic, you also said that trans women should suffer emotional abuse, battering, or even die instead of possibly inconveniencing a shelter.

When you say that trans women should be placed in a men’s prison because their male history means they might rape someone, you have not only said something transphobic, but you have also said that the trans woman should be placed into a situation where she will be raped repeatedly. You have profiled all trans women as dangerous to cis women. When you say that trans women reify the gender binary, you absolve yourself of your own responsibility for reifying that same binary by simply existing and hold trans people to a standard that you simply do not demand of cis people. Plus, you said something transphobic. When you make a blog called “breathing is transphobic,” you did something transphobic, and you did it in a way that allows you to blame trans people for being too angry and bullying when we point out that you said or did something transphobic. That positions you in such a way as to dismiss everything that trans people say to you when they criticize your words and actions.

When you say that trans people should be denied access to hormones, surgery, and social transition and insist that we should instead seek therapy to help us stop being trans, you’re ignoring our voices and telling us what our real lives are like. You’re ignoring all the medical literature to date that says that the best treatment for trans people is to allow transition. You also said something transphobic. When you say that trans people are walking stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, you’re applying a double-standard to trans gender expression vs. cis gender expression – where a feminine trans woman is seen as a caricature of femininity while a feminine cis woman who presents exactly the same way is seen as natural and normal. You also said something transphobic.

When you claim that you have trans friends and that they agree with you, you said something transphobic. You also tried to claim that your friends’ voices and opinions should be more important than the voices and opinions of trans people who call you out on your cissexual privileged shit. You’re trying to establish that there are good trans people and bad trans people.

If you’re a trans person, and you participate in the bashing of other trans people, you have done something transphobic. Being trans does not make you immune to playing into cissexist normativity. It does not make you immune to saying hateful things about other trans people.

If you try to raise the spectre of men pretending to be trans women to gain access to restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, or any other space set aside for women, you have not only said something transphobic, you are trying to hold trans people responsible for what other people may attempt to do (and something other people have not yet attempted to do).

If you try to raise the spectre of trans women triggering cis women survivors because of their assumed masculine appearance or penises, you are not only saying something transphobic, you are appropriating survivor voices to justify your transphobic statements. You are also holding trans women – and trans women only – responsible for managing triggers that are not theirs. You are also defining trans women by their appearance, as if what a woman looks like somehow reflects on her womanhood, as if it’s something she can control.

When you grab for a trans person’s genitals to find out what they are, you have committed sexual assault. When you attack a trans person because he or she is trans, you have committed battery. When you kill a trans person because he or she is trans, you have committed murder. These are all transphobic acts, but they are not the sum total of transphobic acts. They do not define transphobia. You do not get a free pass out of saying and doing transphobic acts because you are not out there personally running trans women over four times in a row, or shooting them, or stabbing them, or suffocating them, or bashing their heads in. The fact is that people who commit these atrocities upon trans people believe that they can get away with it because of all of the insults, the denial of trans people’s agency, the belief that trans people are really their birth sex and gender, the belief that trans people aren’t really men or women at all, the belief that trans people are so different from cis people that the accommodations made for cis people cannot be extended to trans people, the belief that what a trans person looks like discredits his or her sex or gender, justifying ridicule and abuse on that trans person.

When you say or do the things I have described here, you are supporting a cissexist society that justifies killing trans people, that justifies slapping our murderers, abusers, rapists, on the wrist. That justifies the idea that we’re not really human. And if you insist that your own words and deeds have no importance because you are not personally out there raping, beating, stabbing, shooting, strangling trans people, then you are part of the same problem that creates Andrade, Oates, Hyatt, Blake, and men who have murdered numerous other women and men just because those men believed that transphobic words and deeds that so much of the world accepts as reasonable justified their decision to erase women and men from the world simply because they existed.

This is the system you support – a spectrum of words and deeds that ranges from “You’re really a man/really a woman” to “Man is charged with manslaughter for deliberately hunting down and killing a trans woman.”

You reify and reinforce the oppression that affects me and all other trans people.

You can’t really help it, mostly. You’re born and raised in a cissexual society, a society that programs you to believe that people who change their sex are less than you. However, once you realize that this is the case – once it is brought to your attention, once your privilege is pointed out to you, once the fact that you – like all other cis people – are complicit in oppressing trans people, if you choose to deny that such privilege exists, deny that you are doing and saying transphobic things, while deliberately increasing the intensity and frequency of these actions? You are no longer at the point where you are simply complicit due to privilege. You are now an active participant.

You can always choose to stop.

Edit: I forgot to write about what transphobia is not: Just having cissexual privilege does not mean that everything a cis person does comes from that privilege or is transphobic. For example, treating trans people with respect, treating trans people as normal human beings? That’s not transphobic, and I see cis people do it all the time.

Story here.

Terron Oates was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Alexis King. His story is that he was looking to pick up a sex worker, discovered the woman he picked up had a penis, and shot her in the heat of that reaction. In fact, he claimed that Alexis became sexually aggressive and put his hand on her penis, prompting him to shoot her twice. The defense tried to claim that Terron’s youth and naiveté contributed to him picking up Alexis instead of a cis woman.

But, from the article:

• He was out at 5 am on a school night
• He went to a strip club
• He had an illegal gun in his car
• He had the presence of mind to dispose of the firearm
• When he called 911, he told a story about a robbery and an unknown gunman
• Paramedics say that Alexis’ penis was tucked firmly away
• Sgt Daniel Dutch, an undercover john, says he’s never heard of or experienced such behavior from a trans woman sex worker – trans women tend to not draw attention to their genitalia
• Alexis was shot from the side and from behind, not from the front as you’d expect from Oates’ story.

This wasn’t manslaughter. This was a man trolling for trans women sex workers to murder. He was prepared to kill, his story doesn’t match the facts. Why did the jury let him off with a mild sentence for his crime? Because they sympathized with the trans panic defense.

And what’s the risk when you give murderers a slap on the wrist? They get out of prison and kill again. Remember that trans anger post from the other day? We have many things to be angry about, and this decision is one of them.

Fuck you Philadelphia. Do you have a single judge who respects the humanity of trans women, women of color, or sex workers?

Written by Roz Kaveney

I had hoped, I had really hoped, that we were past all this…And yet, I know we are not.

Julie Bindel is still out there, and Sheila Jeffreys, and Germaine Greer. And it does not matter how many transwoman and transmen are killed or beaten by straight guys, somehow we still remain weapons of the patriarchy in the minds of women who should have better battles to fight than turf wars on ‘The F Word’.

The excellent Questioning Transphobia” has been monitoring the current explosion of anti-trans hatred, and of feminist blogs that are prepared to defend trans rights and see them as inseparable from all other rights in general, and women’s rights in particular. QT is doing a good job and I am not proposing to do more than acknowledge that, and point you in the direction of her ongoing work on these issues.

What I am going to do is say something about how dispiriting all of this is, simply because it wastes so much of everyone’s time. I am going to go further, and talk, just a bit, about how much of my own precious personal time has been wasted by all of this down the years.

A quick summary – back when I first thought about transitioning, (at the cusp between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods say the Plain People of Hackney), I discussed it with my lesbian feminist friends because it was the early Seventies, and we all tended to submit personal decisions to the collective’s discussion because we were not individualists and thought that other people’s input was useful. And my friends sent me to talk to A Senior Lesbian Feminist, who explained to me that I suffered from False Consciousness and needed to get over it. (I was being told something similar by a psychiatric social worker, who reckoned that transpeople are incapable of ever enjoying sex even a tiniest little bit before the sacred rite of transition, and that my preparedness to say, well, sometimes I got sexual pleasure, meant that I was just not trans enough.)

So, I wasted several years in my mid-20s, made various lovers entirely miserable by being caught up in catastrophic gloom and the selfishness that derives from that, and in the end transitioned anyway, five years older than would otherwise have been the case. A key factor in this was that one of my friends died, and on her deathbed gave me a serious talking to about not frakking around any longer, and not listening to anyone except my own heart, not even her…

(Ironically, the Senior Lesbian Feminist cropped up in my life many years later as a colleague in Feminists Against Censorship, for which goddess bless her! At one of those Islington dinner-parties which characterise a certain sort of politicking, someone asked if we had ever encountered at Oxford. She was staggeringly quick to say, no, no, we never had. Which was fine with me, but amused me not a little…)

She meant well, but that is not an excuse, actually.

When I did transition, I walked into the middle of the Janice Raymond wars, because I started writing for Gay News, and got asked to review The Transexual Empire about which I was fairly rude. Somehow, I didn’t get all that much flak for that, partly because most of the ire of the transphobes was being directed at a moderately stealth transwoman lesbian friend. Also, in those days, I still slept with boysm and wore tons of slap and was less of an issue accordingly…

On the other hand, I did lose two close women friends when I transitioned, both of them heterosexual feminists who decided that they ‘could not support my decision’. I didn’t want them to support my decision; I wanted them to be my friends. I am generally a very forgiving person, but I don’t think I will ever forgive either of them – they were people I valued and needed, and they chose to absent themselves when I needed them.

A cynic might say that both of them have prospered in a middle-class careerist way and I might have been an embarrassment at smart cocktail parties. The fact is that other friends, with reprehensible politics in some cases, were loyal because they believe in loyalty – whereas those two women were not loyal and justified it in terms of their feminism.

Most of my feminist friends were loyal, and most more or less came round to seeing me as the same idiotic, loving, occasionally supportive, often amusing, sometimes insightful person I always had been, only happier and saner.

Generally, feminists have been part of my support mechanism and my community – I ended up being the reader at Virago for several years (and, when I left, it was over a political disagreement but with no particular hard feelings on either side). I’ve written for Feminist Review and for various collections of feminist and quasi-feminist criticism.

Every so often though, my friends and supporters have been screamed at for using me; there are people out there who would like to deny me access to some of the work on which I depend for my living.

Every so often, there are moments of unpleasantness – Germaine Greer had a tantrum when a mutual friend tried to introduce us and Julie Burchill clearly wasn’t happy either. No loss, of course, but it was their disrespect for the choices of their women friends who actually knew and valued me that I want to point to.

Transphobia is not just about being horrible to transfolk; it is about being horrible to people who are not horrible to transfolk.

When I stopped sleeping with boys, and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that there were women who wanted to sleep with me – I am the world’s least competent sexual predator in the sense that people really have to beat me about the head with the cluestick before I notice that they are attracted – that lack of respect became an issue in my life and that of women who loved me.

People who slept with me were threatened with ostracism by their friends, or grotesquely patronized for not being ‘proper’ lesbians even if people were still speaking to them. It was the 80s and this stuff happened.

The saddest story in some ways is the story of my friendship with Sandy Horne. Sandy was an older woman, a battered veteran of psychiatric abuse and coming out and jail and the peace movement. We knew each other – and became friends for a while across the battle lines of the Sex Wars – because we ended up sharing a table in a crowded Chinese restaurant and swapping dim sum.

She was going through a messy breakup and confided in me a lot, and asked my advice, and seemed to find that advice useful. Unfortunately, the other people from whom she was getting advice were people in the most heavy duty of Radical Feminist circles, and Sandy was called to order by eg Sheila Jeffries. No matter how friendly and helpful I seemed to be – I had the brand of Cain.

Sandy rang me up in tears and said that she was going to have to end our friendship; I missed her, because she was someone whom I genuinely deeply liked, but I got that she could not risk the friendships of her heart. I just hate that people made her choose.

She died a couple of years later.

The pattern I am trying to show here is that anti-trans prejudice is a set of views that give the people who hold them a cast-iron excuse for being mean, mean to other women. In the nightmarish world we inhabit, it is not transwomen or transmen who are burning the forests, setting off bombs, raping and murdering; on the contrary, we are almost always victims rather than perpetrators because we have no power.

Yet slagging us off and slagging off our allies is a way of taking a ‘radical’ position that does not cost much – except time. How about if all the energy and anger that has been expended over maintaining women-only spaces had gone into making them genuinely inclusive and safe.

Back in 1978, I was raped. I dealt with it. I had to deal with it because there was no chance in the world that either the police or the very early stages of victim support networks would have helped me deal with it.

The guy who raped me was a serial rapist of transwomen, a transphobe who thought it funny to use a knife on us. I take it very personally when someone like Janice Raymond accuses me of being, as a transdyke, someone who rapes the community of women by my very existence. I get quite vexed when I am told by her contemporary followers that I transitioned in order to be abused by men as some sort of weird male ritual.

We should not be having to waste our time on all of this crap any more. There are misogynist homophobe racist transphobes in high places who want to KILL US ALL. Not just lesbians, not just transfolk, not just members of ethnic minorities – all of us in the progressive community.

I just think we should remember that. And transphobic feminists should remember that their feminism is the most important thing about them, and stop making feminism all about being mean to people.

It is not hard – just don’t be mean to people.

When someone finds themselves tempted to say something like this:
This has now been enshrined in UK law, where anyone with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (no sex reassignment surgery is required) can legally demand entrance to, for example, women’s domestic violence services. The consequences of this could quite literally be the death of those women from religious and cultural backgrounds where it would be inappropriate for them to share living space with a non related biological male. just don’t say it, because it is stupid and mean.(I don’t have a link, but it is quoted here.

(Unpack that a little – transwomen who might need to escape from domestic violence should not do so because there might be women in the shelter who are liable to be subjected to honour killing because of the presence of a transwoman in the shelter rather than because of eg leaving an abusive husband in the first place. And any resulting honour killing is the fault of the transwoman!?! And then there is the feline use of racist assumptions here – women victims of abuse are all in danger of being killed for leaving their abuser, irrespective of their religious or cultural backgrounds.)

Being mean is always a temptation – heaven knows I have a sharp tongue on me – but it is a temptation that we should try to avoid. We should especially avoid creating a politics out of it, and ‘feminist’ transphobia is just such a politics.

It is a waste of time, which has cost me years of my life. Years, I tell’ee.

added later
I should add, in respect of the domestic violence shelter business, note also the assumption that transwomen do not come from minority religious/ethnic communities which put them at risk of death from family. I have had two flatmates whom that fitted. And yet I missed the point until I was cooking, and came to adjust…

Originally posted here.

Edit to add from comments:

Sorry, perhaps I needed to make this point even more clearly.

One of the standard complaints of feminism, quite rightly, is that men demand access to women’s time. They demand that women clean up after them, bring them cups of coffee, do the xeroxing and so on. In more patriarchal societies, women are supposed to take responsibility for men’s uncontrollable sexuality through various sorts of ‘modesty’; in less patriarchal, but still sexist ones, women are supposed to decorate themselves for men, rather than for themselves. Straight men have privilege and one of the ways that they exercise it is by making uncompensated demands on women’s time.

(One of the mistakes of a particular kind of feminism was to assume that pleasing men and placating sexism was the only reason why a woman might wear cosmetics – certainly, though, I have known women who were perfectly prepared to wear slap to go out clubbing but who objected to being expected to wear it at work.)

My point is that the demand that transpeople constantly justify ourselves, constantly live with other people’s issues, is a similar exercise of privilege, in this case cis-gendered privilege, They are claiming the right to make us spend time we often don’t have on going over and over the same arguments time after time.

And time spent on this, is wasted.

Debi Crow, Belledame, Hoyden About Town, Caroline, Renegade Evolution, and Queen of Thorns have all posted responses to radfem concern trolling – whether it’s Polly Styrene’s tantrum that The F Word didn’t approve her usual anti-trans misogyny, Jo22′s concern that trans women like sex workers because we transition so we can be sexually empowerful prostitutes, or mAndrea’s deficient and morally bankrupt logic, the responses are pretty clear: These particular radical feminists clearly do not speak for all radical feminists, all feminists nor all women when it comes to trans hatred.

I don’t really like giving any of them direct attention, as there are real issues that trans women are dealing with right now. Issues that I wish could see more exposure. The vile things that these media personalities are saying about Isis and Angie Zapata are well beyond the pale and we really need to respond to that – especially since these jokes are exactly the same as Andrade’s dehumanizing description of Angie Zapata as he killed her.

But, to be fair, as much as I’d like radfem views to receive less oxygen, Hoyden About Town makes the point about how mAndrea and her commenters talk about trans women:

Isn’t that sort of contempt and disgust exactly what led to Allen Andrade beating Angie Zapata to death when he found out (through an act of sexual assault) that she wasn’t a born-woman?

This, right here. The radfems right now – not just Polly, mAndrea, and Jo22, but many many others – are having a collective – for lack of a better word – tantrum about trans women right now. They’re creating spurious blogs (“eatingblueberriesistransphobic.wordpress.com), organizing letter-writing campaigns to The F Word’s owner because transphobic hate speech wasn’t being approved.

But let them fulminate. Let them explode. Let them reveal their hatred in all its gory ugliness. Why? Before I started blogging, I looked back through the various trans wars that had occurred in the feminist blogosphere, and what I saw, as Emily pointed out:

I have complained numerous times that the feminist blogosphere, such as it is, has one main conversation about trans people, one that is returned to again and again and again – the political implications of our transitioning. Click here if you want yet another example of pointless bloody “analysis.”

I don’t CARE about whatever horrible thing some feminist has said anymore. I care that these discussions centre on cis concerns, even (maybe especially) allies respond mostly to the slurs, but rarely address the real issues.

But this particular outbreak feels different – part of it is, no doubt, that Angie Zapata’s death received a lot of attention from cis feminists. But part of it is also that this hasn’t really been a blog war – the vast majority of it is happening in radfem echo chambers, where they’re exposing all that aforementioned ugliness. And what if the radfems hold their own blogwar, and we don’t come, and the next person who pages through the trans wars finds this mess – finds mAndrea’s series of “why we should all hate trans women” articles, or Polly’s “Gender Delusion” blog, her “How dare the F Word not approve my insightful post!” when her own attitudes toward trans issues are plastered over half the trans conversations in blogdonia already? What if they have cis and trans bloggers talking about actual, real issues that affect trans women (whose concerns, as women, are feminism’s concerns) while the radfems pitch themselves into a fevered frenzy of bigoted, misogynist, hatred?

And there’s real issues that trans people are facing beyond America’s Next Top Model. For example:

Trannies! Send backup!

… was the call from a steward, at a gay pride parade, when transwomen got somewhat pissed off at being told they weren’t allowed to use the women’s toilets. A transwoman was later sexually assaulted because she was given no choice but to use the men’s toilets.

This still hasn’t been resolved, and it shouldn’t have happened at all. It is yet another instance of trans women’s safety sacrificed for cis women’s comfort.

So, while I’m not specifically asking that no one call out their bigoted assholishness, I am asking that this other stuff – stuff in the real world, that affects trans women, gets mentioned too.

But, since mAndrea wants this spread around to many blogs, I will link and quote a couple comments:

K. A.:

Basically, fetishist MtF collude with every other misogynist man and choose to participate in the dynamic in an alternate way. They spin it as a handicap when it’s really a male-entitled sexual fantasy that actively oppresses women just as any other pornsick man does. It’s the rape and total control over a synthetic female body, giving him and any other man he includes full access to treating women the way they both love to fetishize treating women. They then strengthen the conditioned response to female parts with their misogynist sex. That’s why you see so many misogynists patronizing MtF prostitutes, and MtF prostitutes happy to do it.
Sexist men look out for each other and will cooperate to control women’s bodies in any novel way they can think of.

mAndrea’s response:

K.A., that was a most brillant analysis, and needs a wider audience then what is available here. Hopefully other readers will carry your idea to other blogs, because it was perfect.

There is your radical feminist trans hatred. Rape apologism. Victim blaming. Slut shaming. Does anyone really need any more at this point?

This time, it’s from E!, from Chelsea Handler, mocking Isis’ participation in America’s Next Top Model.

First: Tranny takeover?

Second: “Finally, the transgender community will have somebody to look up to besides John Travolta.”

Third: The little skit featuring what appears to be a cis woman playing a parody of a trans woman – characterizing her as a gay man – and constantly referring to herself as fundamentally male (hairy ass, spending years “on top,” “I can bring something to this competition no other girl can bring; two balls and a shaft,” “so pick me girls, because I’ll be fierce on the runway!”

And the final shot, she gets up, with a shot centered on her crotch, showing a very large penis in her very tight shorts.

This is a vulgar, stereotyped, parody of trans women, characterizing us as gay men with breasts, which is the fundamental underpinning of trans panic defenses. Further, this obnoxious portrayal was done by a cis woman.

Anyway, I have no idea how to find contact information for Chelsea Handler or anyone else responsible for E! Online. If anyone has access to this info or can tell me how to find it, I’d be very grateful.

The best I can do now is offer CustomerSupportEonline@comcastnets.com, from the Terms of Service page.

And also notify GLAAD at this page.