Categories: all about me, intellectualisimus, silly blather
Right, ducks, so when last we left off, which was–Christ on a pontoon, over a month ago–your correspondent, C.L. Minou, was in love! Or like! Or crush! Something!
Well, anyway. Hey, guess what! It worked out. Kinda. Sorta. For a bit. Okay, a couple of good weekends. But it turns out that she–
What? Yes, ducks, are there questions? It’s true, I date girls now. Girls are cool.
Categories: i heart oppression, intellectualisimus, teh tranz, the transsexual empire strikes back, vive le feminisme
Greetings, ducks! In today’s Adventures in Google Reader, we have some examples of Talkin’ About Teh Tranz! (Wait, Cat, isn’t this supposed to be Back To Feminism Week at TSA? To which I reply: hold yer horses, ducks! Wait ‘n see!)
First, let us visit Feministe. Now, you may not realize this, but Feministe is indirectly responsible for the very existence of The Second Awakening. That’s because back during my recovery from surgery, when I was beginning to actively avoid trans stuff in favor of reading feminist blogs, I came across this sh*tstorm there. (If you follow the link, you can also see the stuff I was reading at Feministing at the same time–plus BitchPhD’s stupid joke. It was a grand old time to be a trans feminist.)
Feministe has taken that time seriously, much to their credit, and they’ve recently had the fabulous Queen Emily of Questioning Transphobia (one of the best of the trans blogs out there.) Q.E. did her usual bang up job. The comments thread, sadly, was a big ol’ bundle of FAIL:
If there was a pill a person could take that would “cure” transexuality, would trans people take it (even without social pressure to do so)?
Is it transphobic if a cis person will not date a trans?
I’m a college student currently taking a Gender in Humanities course and have been assigned a project to find websites that discuss controversial topics, with which I can comment and converse with lots of people.
So nice to see that a blog post that was specifically requested in order to combat a recent history of people cluelessly mystifying trans people in comments threads…we had people cluelessly mystifying and othering trans people. Sigh. Or to quote bell hooks:
I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not
expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhoods, attended our schools, or worked in our homes.
(Theres going to be a big bell hooks-loving post one of these days, soon.)
At least we didn’t get into the “cis” discussion, the great hobgoblin of mainline feminist blogs’ comments threads. (“Cis” is used as the opposite of “trans”, i.e. a cisgendered person is someone who doesn’t feel the persistent discomfort with their gender a trans person feels–but it’s not exactly hard to find that out.) I don’t use the word cisgendered here a lot–sorry, I just don’t think the Latin is all that well used in this case–but it’s without a doubt very useful for trans people who are trying not to be perpetual others. Well, most trans people:
“Cis” is not an attempt to “decentralize the dominant group”. It is an
attempt, a blatant attempt, at redefining an entire conversation so that it can’t stray into areas that might be uncomfortable. It’s being able to cry about “cis privilege”; it is not about leveling the linguistic playing field.Any civil rights cause needs articulate, reasoned argument. It needs impassioned speech, and it demands a proper feeling of being oppressed. It doesn’t need people saying that they are “oppressed” because women talk about some exclusively feminine issue, and they, as a trans woman, don’t, can’t, have that same experience. The debate about trans discrimination does not need the unwanted, unwarranted, imposition of a prefix onto those who are not transgender.
(Disclaimer: I used to know C-A personally, although I don’t remember him–he prefers male pronouns–as being such a transphobic wanker back then.)
Well, now. I suppose if I don’t mind being perpetually othered–if I don’t mind perpetually having to to put my history on display–if I don’t think that there might be some, oh, I don’t know, privilege attached to the idea that one gender history doesn’t need a prefix and one does, I might agree with Carolyn Ann. (And seriously: WTF is this about “exclusively feminine” things? In the comments, it turns out that this is–wait for it–periods! If you’ve ever felt “not so fresh,” then you qualify for a “Get out of cisgender FOR FREE” card!)
C-A provides a great example of how to talk past people, play fast and loose with your own definitions (using “Orwellian” to describe how people try to recast language to avoid their own oppression is pretty….Orwellian), and in general, not check your privilege. I’ve come to expect this sort of thing from the allmighty Google Reader–but then, comes something like this incredibly reasoned exchange, where sharply divergent points of view about the use of “Cis” manage to remain mostly respectful:
(Sungold–pro:)
I don’t describe myself as being “cisgendered” every day, but I realize that the term describes what I am and so I’m happy to claim it. I was born with female organs, I’m comfortable with being called a woman, I appear reasonably feminine despite my incompetence with nail polish, and so I don’t experience any dissonance between my anatomy, my gender presentation, and the way the world views me. That’s a big ole privilege.
(redmegaera–anti:)
My rejection of the adjective “cisgendered” stems from a belief that sex/gender is socially constructed. I don’t identify with the cis/trans binary because it reifies “gender” (masculinity/femininity) and transforms it into a biological property rather than a political construct. If you can explain to me why such a position is “transphobic”, I’d be very much obliged.
So of course I had to jump in (yes, ducks! A double post-within-a-post!):
I’m not exactly sure how rejecting “cis” isn’t in fact an excercise in privilege–that is, it allows the continual “othering” of trans people, i.e. “non-trans” is normal, “trans” is different. (Redmegaera quotes de Beauvoir, but the whole theme of “Le deuxième sexe” was how “man” is constructed as normal, default, and “woman” as permanent and irredeemably “Other.” So I’m not sure how you can use de Beauvoir to justify othering someone.)
Nor does it necessarily destroy other axes of oppression/privilege to acknowledge that another one exists.
As for the biological/social construction of gender: surely nowadays we can agree that this is not an either/or issue? The tragic case of David Reimer would seem to strongly argue that neither nature nor nurture completely explains internal gender identification. (A precis: Only a few days old, David’s penis was accidentally destroyed while undergoing circumcision. Following the advice of John Money, one of the leading advocates of “gender as social construct” theories, David was raised as a girl, Brenda. However, despite the positive reports Money published, “Brenda” never felt comfortable as a girl and continually rejected his imposed gender–even though his parents never told him about the accident, even though to teachers, friends, twin brother, etc., he was always and only a girl. After years of being suicidal and maladjusted, “Brenda” became David after his parents finally told him about the accident.)
This is why I and other trans people find construction of our transitions as cosmetic” (or a “harmful social practice”) so frustrating, and, well, insulting. It silences our voices, it implies that what we do to our bodies is somehow wrong
(isn’t control of your own body a feminist issue?) and it in general enforces heirarchical constructs based on dualisms that non-trans people would reject
having imposed upon themselves. If I am to fight against slut-shaming, abortion-shaming, body-image shaming (as I do) because I believe these are egregious impositions upon a person’s dignity by heirarchical society, why am I supposed to sit in the corner and be quiet when people do the same to me as a trans woman?
It’s the same when people use the language of trans/any oppressed group to describe a form of their own oppression; it creates the very false equivalency that Redmegaera opposes. For example, I’ve suffered both gender dysphoria and body-shaming for being female; and while they both feed similar anxieties, they are not same, do not stem from the same causes, and are experienced in quite different ways by myself. (I’ll hasten to add that I would also not claim that my own experience of having my body shamed is the same as a woman who was raised female and thus had those ideas inflicted upon her at a younger age.) Colonization of other people’s experiences is not liberation.
I’m all for discussions of privilege. I acknowledge freely the privilege I accumulated before I transitioned; I talk about it all the time on my blog, as do many of the trans feminists I know. Often we use it as a way to open up examinations of the invisible privileges that bind us all inside the insiduous system of kyriarchy. Hell, my own feminism would approach radicalism, if it weren’t for the fact that most radical feminists won’t have anything to do with me.
It does not dimish the reality of sexism and male oppression of women to note that other forms of oppression exist, or even to note that sometimes the other forms of oppression are more oppressive and urgent; but that’s what radical reduction of all issues into a sexist template does. As bell hooks says,
Sexist oppression of is primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited. It is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist. This does not mean that eradicating sexist oppression would eliminate other forms of oppression. Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.
Othering isn’t liberation. Silencing isn’t liberation. Imposing your own description on people isn’t liberation. Normalizing your own condition isn’t liberation.
Or more pragmatically, why is it, when so many trans feminists are working against the same issues cis feminists work against, that we get left out in the cold so often by those same cis people?
(I did mention I’m really loving bell hooks, right? In fact, I’m off to read more of her stuff. Keep it classy til I get back!)
Categories: dick (not sex), intellectualisimus, omphalos gazing, promises promises, sci-fi writers, the heat-death of the universe, vive le feminisme
I have too many books. In fact, I have too many unread books. In fact, I have so many unread books that I can’t find several unread books that I know I bought recently (including two Atwood novels and an Olivia Butler novel.)
Like a lot of Metropolitans of a literary bent, my apartment is not so much Where I Live, but Where I Keep My Books. I have, at present, two full-length (height?) Ikea bookshelves, and two columns of built-in bookshelves of roughly the same capacity. And I still have books overflowing off the shelves! And this was after I got rid of at least a third of my books when my ex and I moved in together!
I have a theory as to why people keep books, that breaks them down into three classes:
I. Useful Books
These are books you keep for reference purposes or utility. This would be, in my case, my collection of computer reference books (I like “cookbooks” which don’t purport to teach you how to program all over again, just tell you how to handle individual problems); my history books, language books (I collect languages and am generally in the process of trying to learn one; right now I’m teaching myself Hindi), and dictionaries/thesauruses (thesaurusi?), my rhyming dictionary, and even that big book of literary criticism that I keep around just in case I need to deconstruct something in a hurry. Also included in this category is my vast collection of genre books that I re-read whenever I’m too tired to engage more challenging stuff.
II. Books of Sentimental Value
We all have those: the book of poems that you don’t even like anymore, but they reminded you of what you felt like when you were young and in love. (Or not in love, as the case may be–woe is me!) The novels that used to be in Category I but have dropped into here because you won’t reread them, but they remind you of who you were when you were just learning how to read. The inspirational book that led you into a religious fad for several years. They have only limited utility, but you keep them anyway because of their associations.
III. Books That Make You Look Smart
Maybe it’s a Metropolitan thing, but a lot of people have books on their shelves for the sole reason of letting people know that they are the Kind of Person who would read that Kind of Book. For example, I have a copy of Ulysses on my shelf. I read it on my own while in my junior year at college, without notes, and comprehended maybe 10% of it–which I thought was a decent batting average, all things considered. (I chased it with Paradise Lost to clear out the Joycean syntax–my god, the things I could do when I was young!) Now, I’m never going to read Ulysses again (heck, I may never read Gravity’s Rainbow again, and that was a book I enjoyed infinitely more than Ulysses.) Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t with the copy on my shelf–it’s missing several pages in the “catechism” section towards the end of the book. But–and this is the key–I want people to know that I’ve read Ulysses, that I’m that kind of grand master reader of capital-L Literature. And so I keep Ulysses and Don Quixote and my Faulkner novels on my shelf.
The thing is, you’re justified in keeping everything from Category I; most of the stuff from Category II (it shouldn’t be all that big, anyway); but why in the hell should you keep anything from Category III? Sure, you’ll end up with a bookshelf of detective and sci-fi novels, plus a few computer books, but that shouldn’t matter, right?
Of course, there are problems with this schema. For example: my three-volume copy of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. Category I? I have re-read it at least three times. Or maybe Category II–I read it during the heyday of my bout of Civil War, an affliction that remains in remission but still plagues me with periodic outbreaks. And what about the rest of my military history collection? And am I even interested in this stuff anymore, when I could be reading Judith Butler or Julia Serrano?
Philip K. Dick, in his remarkable Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep (much weirder and more visionary than Blade Runner), talks about “kipple”:
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.
Now, this is actually an observation about entropy, and how the universe will eventually end up in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium called the heat-death of the universe. It also shows that Tom Pynchon wasn’t the only smart-ass virtuosic writer in the 70s to make a career out of writing about entropy–just the one reviewed in the New York Times.
In any case, it’s clear that books are my kipple. I occasionally find a book I had forgotten purchasing, lying clean, pristine, and unread: in a perfect state of literary thermal equilibrium.
In other words, I need to stop buying books until I’ve reduced the kipple in the apartment.
But, you say, O gentle reader, what on earth does this have to do with your blog? We thought this was going to be a place to hear about feminism, and specifically trans feminism, and so far your last two posts have been about what shows you like to watch, and how messy your apartment is? What gives?
Fear not: for part of my process tonight was to cull out several books that I haven’t read (or need to re-read), all of a feminist bent. Which I am going to read over the next X weeks and report back to you on. Which should be interesting; I was, after all Professionally Trained in interpreting literature. Which is why I design databases today. Life is rarely neat.