Categotry Archives: teh tranz

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Pepper

Categories: teh tranz

Ducks, I beat up on the NY Times sometimes. OK, quite a bit! Sometimes not even on my own blog! But today I found something I actually liked there. (Besides Paul Krugman. Thank you, Paul, just for being you.)

It’s from their photo/multimedia series, One in Eight Million, about interesting New Yorkers. Today’s spot, The Night Keeper, is about a transgendered woman living in Brooklyn:

For nearly 30 years, Pepper has lived in the same building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She used to hustle and shiplift, snagging designer clothing to flaunt at drag balls. “I can be very dangerous,” she explained, “it depends on how far you push me.” Once, a man hit her in the face with a beer bottle, breaking her nose and cutting her cheek. “That devastated me for a long time,” she said. Pepper stopped taking hormones four years ago because they were making her sick; now she spends nights cooking, cleaning, talking to her mother on the telephone and “looking out for her building.”

It’s a fascinating piece, evocatively photographed by Todd Heisler, especially as Pepper is a living link to New York’s more frentic drag heyday, when the lines between transgender and gay, drag and transitioning, were much blurrier.

And it’s fantastic to have a piece on a transgendered person who isn’t white, middle-class, and post-operative for once.

There are criticisms I suppose I could make, like how an element of the “sad life” meme creeps into the story (poor Pepper is all alone because she is trans), but in my opinion they are drowned out by her remarkable strength and will to survive and go on, head high.

So go read it…if for no other reason than ghu knows how long it will be before I send you back to the Times.

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Adventures in Transition: Faster, Evil Space Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill!

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, stuff i like, teh tranz, This Was My Life

I am a child of the video game era.

Like most white, middle-class kids of my era, we owned an Atari 2600 (the real thing, not the cheesy Sears version.) And while we enjoyed the hell out of the system, we also knew…it sucked.


Plate 1: This was once considered cool!


Like I said, we lived in the golden age of video games, and arcade games–with their superior graphics and gameplay–were all around us. Things weren’t helped by how poorly most arcade games were ported over to the 2600–the infamous Pac-Man port is widely credited as causing the North American video game market crash of 1983.

Plate 2: You’ve heard the legends, but I actually played it–and it was really that horrible.

I didn’t care that much for video games.

You probably think that it was because I was some high-falutin’ intellectual, with my nose in a book all the time and too much of a nerd to be any good at sports. But that wasn’t the reason…well, it wasn’t the only reason.

The reason was that I generally stank at them. I have a rather low eye-hand coordination, so most of that generation of video games were full of FAIL for me–I didn’t have the reflexes to be any good at them, or rather, I just got too frustrated to actually learn how to play through my difficulties.

So I watched a lot of other people play video games–hell, I just hung out for weeks while a buddy of mine played Ultima IV, which is about as interesting as watching people play D&D…in a language you don’t speak.

Once I got to college and had a computer of my very own, however, I got interested in games again. There were actual genres that didn’t require me to have the fast-twitch reflexes of a chihuahua who’d drunk too much coffee, and I played those–SimCity, Civilization (I racked up insane hours conquering various planets), baseball games where you only had to “manage,” and even less-athletic, more strategic games like Sid Meier’s Pirates.

So when I was finally out of college, and got a “real” computer (well, a Packard-Bell–26% new parts!), I made sure to pick up a few games to go with it. One was Doom, which I had played in multi-player mode and enjoyed. (I didn’t get too far in that one: have I mentioned my reflexes?) The other was Wing Commander IV. And that one hooked me.

I’d heard about the Wing Commander series for years, but never owned a machine powerful enough to run them–the closest I’d come was playing on a friend’s Nintendo once. But the third and fourth versions of the game were really different–they used movies to forward a plot line between missions, and you could actually make choices in how to respond during some of the movie sequences. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book! (Yes, I am a child of the ’80s.)

It certainly didn’t hurt that Mark Effin’ Hamill played your character.


Plate 3: Hey, isn’t that the guy from Star Wars?

While I understand while this kind of video game (usually called Full-Motion Video or FMV) didn’t catch on (costs were high, graphics got good enough to do all the stuff inside the game itself), it was extraordinarily compelling for the time–they really managed to come close to the state objective of making it an interactive movie. I ploughed through WCIV in about a month, and for my birthday my girlfriend gave me a boxed set with the first three games. Which I slogged through as well, even though the first two were more standard video games–no movies, but there was an overarching storyline for both. I started playing WCIII, the climax of the series…and stopped.

I was changing computers, I had a girlfriend, I was taking aikido–I had a bunch of reasons. So I never finished the third game, never got past the third mission. And I mostly stopped playing anything resembling shoot-em-ups; I had the occasional game of Civ going on, but for the most part I didn’t have any time to play videogames. I did reload Wing Commander I on my machine a few months after my wife and I separated, played it all the way through again, but didn’t bother to play the next game.

And then I transitioned.

Now, obviously, video games are a huge minefield of misogynistic crap. (Just check out the ongoing saga of Fat Princess over at Shakesville.) Most games are marketed for men, often in the crudest, most sexist way possible–and then you play the game, and it just gets worse when you see how women are depicted inside the games themselves. Plus so many video games are filled with non-stop, wall-to-wall violence, domination, and macho posturing.

So it makes sense for me to avoid video games, and for the most part I’ve had no interest–not even in my beloved Civ. Until recently.

Because on a whim I dug out my copy of Wing Commander III, and after wrestling with Windows for a few days, have been flying missions again. And loving it.

This is full of irony for me. First, aren’t I the person railing on about kyriarchy and how we need a culture freed from the evils of domination? Aren’t I generally opposed to violence of almost any kind? And don’t I love cats? Hell, don’t people call me Cat?

So why in the hell am I zipping around space blowing up evil space cats and following a plotline that ultimately ends with a shocking act of genocide?


Plate 4: I’m sure with a big enough lap to cuddle up in, he’d stop trying to DESTROY ALL HUMANS.


I have no idea. I’m sucked in, again, by the storyline, and the gameplay remains challenging but not impossible even for a slow-fingered person like myself. There are even female characters in the game, and they’re not decoration–two are highly competent fighter pilots, and one is the ship’s chief mechanic. (Of course, one set of choices leads you to have a relationship with one of them, which is a bit squicky, but on the other hand it is remarkable to have a video game that was a combat sim even mention the word love.)

I’ve noticed a few things different this time around. I’m not any better or worse a pilot than I used to be–I always played the game the way I thought my character really would fly, so I don’t try to run up my score if the mission can be finished otherwise. My adrenaline reactions are…different nowadays, though. After a long session at the game, I can get a bit twitchy, and somewhat spatially disoriented, like I keep expecting the constant motion the 3D sim provides. I don’t recall that stuff happening the first time around, and I wonder how much my current endocrinology has to do with that.

Of course, playing a video game–playing a violent, combat-oriented video game–brings up all sorts of gender crap for me. (But then, getting the paper in the morning has the potential to do that.) Mostly it’s societal stuff that I, of all people, should know better than to listen too–women aren’t violent, women don’t play video games, women should sit down and watch the damn Lifetime Movie Network and keep careful notes of the cleaning products they must buy next trip to the store. Like I said, mostly crap.

But on the other hand, I haven’t talked much about this with other women I know. Maybe because I fear that the women who know about my history will view this as one more way I’m not like them–and the women who don’t know about my history might get ideas.

Silly. But there you have it.

In any case, I’m close to the end, and I’ll drop The Big Bomb on Kilrah and win the game pretty soon now. Maybe with more qualms than the designers might have expected their players to have–they may be evil space kitties, but that doesn’t make me happy to blow up their home planet, for goodness sake. And then maybe I’ll head over to Women Gamers; I’ll be needing a new fix soon.

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Womyn Born Better…Than You

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, teh tranz, Your RDA of Outrage

Over on Below The Belt there’s this piece about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

If you’re trans, the festival is fairly notorious. This is because of its “womyn-born-womyn” policy: only those people born female are allowed to participate; trans women need not apply.

Now, I’m all for safe spaces for women, and I can even see having places and services that might deal with the stresses of having grown up female. But I’m not sure that a music festival has much to do with it, at least not everywhere, at all times during it.

What makes it even more fun is that, much like Lu’s Pharmacy in Vancouver, the festival has historically included trans men. So the “born womyn” thing obviously trumps the “womyn” thing.

Like I say, biology equals destiny is such a feminist point.

Supposedly the festival now allows trans women to attend, although still (in the words of organizer Lisa Vogel) “If a transwoman purchased a ticket, it represents nothing more than that woman choosing to disrespect the stated intention of this Festival.”

Nice.

While I believe in community spaces, and even in community leadership for groups that advocate for a community even if the group doesn’t restrict its membership (for example, I think a male president of NOW would be…disturbing somehow), I’m not a fan of separatists of any stripe–not even trans separatists. (For a taste of how that looks, check out this thread of fail at Bilerico.) Too often, in my experience, separatism and division only leads to each group acting out a shadow play of their own oppression against other groups–like they were building sandcastles instead of tearing down real castles.

Of course, I won’t attend MWMF. But that’s not about politics; I just hate camping.

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Lies the Internet Told Me

Categories: double bound, teh tranz

Sady at Tiger Beatdown, who is having an awesome week, wrote an amazing post about the (false) rumors that Lady Gaga is intersex:

So, yeah. It will always puzzle me when cisgendered people don’t see how the marginalization and oppression of trans people affects them. Because the fact is that there are a ton of trans people in the world, and you don’t necessarily know who they are, and they’re not required to tell you. But when people get a case of the Deceptive Tranny Fever, nothing – not decency, not tolerance, not basic fact-checking, not even Google – will get in their way.

So true. The whole “deceptive tranny” thing is the old double-bind in action as well, ergo: if you’re trans, and you don’t tell the whole wide world, aaaand you sleep with some cisgendered dude or lady, aaaand they find out, then you are a deceiver and deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out; but if you’re trans, aaand you tell the whole world, then people call you a thing or refuse to use your correct gender, aaaand you deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out.

That is, you get it both ways: you’re punished for both telling and not telling, because the culture punishes “deception” without rewarding “honesty.”

Go read the post, because like most things Sady, it is awesome.

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A Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities

Categories: double bound, teh tranz, the transsexual empire strikes back, vive le feminisme

I’ve been thinking about privilege lately. Not exactly a surprise, there.

One thing I’ve been pondering is this idea: that privilege is rights without responsibilities.

That’s not completely accurate: another important definition of privilege–at least , you know, the oppressive kind–is that it is unearned. But they both point to important features of privilege.

That is, to accept something as given without any responsibility to pay for it is a privilege.

You can see this in action in one of the more pervasive defences of white privilege: “I’m not a racist, I never owned slaves, I didn’t vote for Jim Crow laws, so why should I have to accept affirmative action/learn about African-American culture/give up one iota of what I have?”

The answer is, because you were robbed.

You were robbed, because your ancestors stole from other people and passed the bill along to you. You were robbed, because they got to have something without paying for it, and now the bill is come due. And you’ll keep getting robbed, as long as people like Pat Buchanan still insist that great American experiment involved only hard-working, superior white folks–as if the very temple of democracy in this country itself, the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t built with slave labor.

My post today at Shakesville has me thinking about another side of this question: when does a person have the right to claim membership in a group? Or more specifically, just who’s a woman, anyway?

For me, the answer is simple: if you claim to be a woman, I’ll respect that claim. It’s not because I believe in some mystical gender essentialism and can recognize a “spiritual sister” because of my super-special TrannyvisionTM. I believe that there are about 6.75 billion genders in the world: that is, each of us has a gender unique to ourselves. That doesn’t mean there aren’t classifications that can be made, anymore than believing in human individuality means there aren’t Buddhists or Frenchpeople or…women.

Rather, my feeling is that if someone wants to claim the title of “woman,” I’m perfectly happy to agree. But then it is my feeling that I will apply to them the same standards I apply to other women (and myself.) Is she a feminist? Does she help break down oppression, or support it? Does she support other women, does she support sexist stereotypes, is she, in short, helping?

Just as I would never question the gender of a woman whose politics and personality I loathe–say, Sarah Palin–I wouldn’t question the gender of a trans person. (That is, I wouldn’t use bad woman to mean bad at being a woman. Heck, I wouldn’t use bad woman at all, I think.) Or to put it another way, judge my claim for a right on how well I live up to its responsibilities: look at what I do and what I believe, what I fight against and what I stand for. And I’ll do the same.

It’s the only human thing to do.

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Adventures in Transition: Everybody Cut Footloose Edition

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks! Yesterday I decided to drag myself out of the cave also known as my apartment and force myself to have some of that dreaded “social interaction” people are always on about–specifically, I decided to jerk myself around to a syncopated rhythm while obeying patriarchal orders and occasionally crashing into people.

Yes, I went dancing.

Here in the Metropolis, there is a series of Sunday dances down on a pier during the summer. I used to go to these things long ago, long before my transition–hell, long before my brief metrosexual days. I enjoyed going–I had been one of those people who never thought she could dance, until my then-girlfriend convinced me to take some lessons, and I discovered I could do it, after a fashion. And that I liked to do it.

This time, however, would be different.

This time I was going to be there as a woman.

I managed to miss the free lesson they give before the dance, which was a shame, because not only was I rusty, I haven’t danced that much swing as the follower, and I had to sort out which leg went where. That was one worry.

The other worry was whether or not anyone would actually want to dance with me.

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to get anxious around highly gendered spaces–and you don’t get more highly gendered than a partnered dance. (To be fair, I did see some women dancing together, but I have no idea if they were queer or just straight people without partners; I know for a fact I didn’t see any men dancing with each other.) So I had my usual uncomfortable thoughts: what if people read me? am I too tall for anyone to want to dance with? am I not pretty enough for people to want to dance with me? will I suck? (that last one wasn’t all that gendered, but an anxiety is an anxiety.)

Fortunately for me, plenty of people did end up dancing with me, some good, some bad. It was interesting to see the various styles of leading–having been a leader, I know how hard it can be to do well. One guy I danced with was maybe the best lead I’ve ever danced with–I always knew exactly what he wanted me to do–but the experience left me a little cold because I felt like I never got to do anything creative; I like to do some of my own moves when in open position, for example.

It was an interesting counterpoint to when I had first started to go out to dances as a man, and had to overcome decades of painful shyness and ask people to dance with me. I’m not sure which is easier, to be honest, to ask or wait to be asked.

I also ran into my ex-wife and her fiance. Which was a little weird; we’re on good terms, but it was definitely an odd interaction. Even weirder is that we met at this very same dance all those years ago (we met movie-cute.) I suppose I cold have upped the ante and danced with her, but I think we both felt that would have pushed the awkwardness skyward.

My anxieties then were mostly for naught. More than that: at one point I stood watching the sunset behind the bandstand, listening to the music and feeling the breezes blow on me, and I was just so damn happy–because this is how I wanted it to go, to finally feel at peace with myself and my body and who I wanted to be, to bask in the same beautiful weather I had enjoyed all those years ago when I went to my first dance, except this time it was so much better, so much deeper, so much more right.

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Normal

Categories: cis-o-rama, internuts, teh tranz

I have an abnormal relationship with–normal.

For most of my life, I looked normal, but never felt normal. Sure, I moved around the world as a (sorta) guy, even acted like one–ok, hell, sometimes even felt like one; but I was always aware of this thing about me that made me not feel normal: this awkwardness, this discomfort, this constant wondering if I was the wrong gender, and if so, should I do something about it.

Nowadays, I feel much more normal, but to large chunks of my world I don’t look normal: the friends, family and coworkers who knew me before transition now have to look at me a different way, and who knows what they think? And even beyond them, I’m tall for a woman, broad-shouldered…well, you get the picture.

But inside? Inside I feel right as rain.

I bring this up because of the recent controversy surrounding a very short word: cis. This word has apparently caused the Internet to catch fire and burn down. Well, at least my part of the internet–sure, it may only be a studio apartment with a kitchenette, but when there’s a fire it’s still quite alarming.

It all started with this post on Pam’s House Blend, and specifically this comment:

There has always been a certain amount of animosity between the L’s the G’s the B’s and the T’s. We all know this. When I start to tune out of a debate is when someone describes a whole group of our community as “cisgendered, transbigoted, privileged assholes”. Cisgendered is not even a word that gay men identify with but one created by people to single them out in a way that I personally find offensive and derogatory especially when used in this context. Not all white gay men are privileged, nor are they transphobic, lumping them in this category serves no purpose to a greater dialogue.

That’s how it started, but it didn’t end there. There was a huge pile-on in that thread about the use of cisgendered, followed by this thread at PHB (including this now-infamous comment) and then another follow-up at Questioning Transphobia and then the next thing you know cis isn’t allowed to be spoken at PHB but then it is (along with a–sorry, Autumn–“we need to struggle against the real oppressors” derail.) But by then it was all over the internet and even our old friend Carolyn-Ann had to check in.

All over a rather obscure Latin prefix. Color me impressed, I guessed: I mean, even the real c-word has four letters.

By now perhaps you are shaking your head: most likely in confusion. What is this cis you might wonder, and how may I get some? Or, maybe I should get rid of it? What, C.L., is the dish with cis?

It’s actually very simple. Cis– means not-trans.

That’s it.

Would, of course, that it would be so simple.

It comes from Latin, likely via biochemistry, where cis– and trans- are used to distinguish isomers from each other based on where the molecular bonds fall: on the same side, then cis (meaning within or on the same side), on opposite sides then trans (meaning across or on the other side.) The term has been kicking around for about two decades, but gained prominence thanks to Julia Serrano’s extensive use of cissexual in Whipping Girl, her groundbreaking work about transfeminism.

Julia does a much better job than me at talking about why cisgender/cissexual isn’t a pejorative word, so I’ll just quote her quoting Emi Koyama

I learned the words “cissexual,” “cissexist,” and “cisgender,” from trans activists who wanted to turn the table and define the words that describe non-transsexuals and non-transgenders rather than always being defined and described by them. By using the term “cissexual” and “cisgender,” they de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the “norm” against which trans people are defined. I don’t expect the word to come into common usage anytime soon, but I felt it was an interesting concept – a feminist one, in fact – which is why I am using it.

Yet as the brouhaha above shows, a lot of people–cis people, natch–seem to somehow feel that somehow it is pejorative. That somehow trans people are forcing an identity onto non-trans folk. That somehow it lumps them in with all the other bigots out there–racists, homophobes, chauvinists.

To which I say: you bet your ass it does. That’s the point.

By which I mean not that all cis people are bigots, but rather that they belong to a bigoted power structure. So do I. So do we all–we are all caught in the trap of kyriarchy, and pretending not to see the chains that bind us doesn’t make them not exist.

The thing is, there are privileges to being not trans–I doubt much that anyone is going to fight about that. I’m just going to refuse to agree that one of them is the right to be normal.

Because that’s what it comes down to. I’d have no problem ditching the term cis in favor of another term for people who aren’t trans; I’m just not going to concede that we don’t need one. Because every time I write not-trans instead of cis, I’m calling attention to myself; I’m pointing out that I’m the weird one, the one with a problem, the one that needs to be differentiated. And fuck it, I’m just not going to put up with that forever.

It does not invalidate other axes of oppression to demonstrate that another one exists. Kyriarchy is complicated; it is devilishly difficult to sort out. But that does not refute it’s existence–quite the contrary.

Now, it may well be true that cis is a unique term in one respect: it is being used by a disprivileged minority as a term for a privileged majority–some would say, forced upon a majority. This seems pretty different from some of the other terms that have evolved out of usage, like homosexual or heterosexual–in both of those cases, they were conceived by the privileged majority as decentering terms. But again, I say: good. Because we should celebrate the fact that so many people of privilege (cissexist privilege, that is) are willing to decenter themselves based on the suggestion of a disprivileged group. That’s not tyranny: it’s progress.

Telling other people what normal should be is where the tyranny begins.

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How Not To Have A Conversation

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!)

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Adventures in Transition, Special North Dallas Forty Edition: Face the Pain

Categories: all about me, beauty mythology, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas, where today it didn’t crack 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That actually made the news. Today, we continue our unintentional Trans Week (good week for it, though) with yet more about body modifications:

In the 26 months since I decided to transition, I’ve made a number of physical alterations to my body, both to make me feel better about myself, and to make it easier for me to blend in the world as a woman. The vaginoplasty you already know about; I’ve made oblique mention to the fact that I had breast implants done at the same time. (The rumors are true about that: the augmentation hurt more than the GRS; it’s one thing to not be able to sit up for several weeks, and quite another to not be able to move your arms for four days.) And seventeen months ago, right when I went fulltime, I had plastic surgery to trim down my jaw and chin, which were quite heavy once upon a time.

None of these visible surgeries were to make me more conventionally beautiful, not even the breast implants–it was always about just trying to have something resembling the female body I feel I should have had, if things had only turned out differently. (Seriously, Scout’s honor, and you know, I was a Boy Scout once.)

But my longest investment in time and money has been electrolysis, to remove what’s left of my beard.

Getting rid of my facial hair was actually a project I began long before I began to seriously consider transition; I started laser treatments about a month after I separated from my wife. Even though I wasn’t really thinking of it as a step towards transition, I still had a lot of trepidation about it–after all, ti was the first thing I had ever tried to permanently feminize my appearance, and as such it became a mental Rubicon of sorts; if I crossed that barrier, would I inevitably start on a transition path? (Er–yes, but not because of the laser.)

Unfortunately, I have light hair and light skin, which is only one half (the light skin) part of the ideal candidate profile for laser treatments. While it definitely helped somewhat (I was fairly quickly able to stop wearing heavy foundation and switch to tinted moisturizer), laser was never going to be the final answer for me. So two years ago, after I had started hormones, I began getting electrolysis.

Ducks, you need to know this: I am a wimp about pain. Sure, I can take it when I need to, but in general I try to minimize it as much as possible. And since I also had the disposable income, I decided to go to Electrology 3000, in Dallas. I chose them not only because they are really good at hair removal, but because uniquely amongst electolyisists in North America, they use anesthetic during the sessions. That is, they inject your face with lidocaine.

This has a lot of advantages–since you have to let your hairs grow (so they can tell which ones are active) for several days, there’s an advantage to having your whole face cleared in a single day, something not really possible without anesthetic. (I’ve felt electrolysis without the lidocaine–not something you’d want to sit through for a couple of hours.)

The problem is, the lidocaine hurts: it gets injected at a shallow angle, multiple times, and it burns like acid under the skin. Sure, it’s just for a few minutes, but those few minutes are pretty hellish–I cried the first time.

I still think it’s worth it. Not because I couldn’t be a woman with some facial hair; I’ve known plenty of women like that. No, it’s worth it because of what it does for me–because shaving was the most masculine thing I did every day; because the things I had to do to cover up my beard were so frustrating and annoying, and such a reminder of who I wasn’t; and because stubble is one of the things that remind me most of who I was.

So I keep coming. After a while, the lidocaine gets hurts less. And so does my past.

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Erasure

Categories: teh tranz, we don't put the "T" in LGB, your RDA of intersectionality

(warning: any links from the New York Post should automatically be considered triggery.)

I was married once.

It was a rather ordinary marriage, except that we both got unnecessary blood tests; our information about New Jersey law was out of date.

In case you’re wondering, I was the groom. As if you needed to.

That was the easy one. If I ever get married again–to a man or a woman–things will be likely more difficult, depending on whether the state I’m in recognizes a) legal sex change and b) gay marriage (just in case, either way.) It’s one of those nebulous things about being trans–for example, as Jenny Boylan notes, had I stayed married and gotten all my paperwork done, my (ex-)wife and I would have had a legal, lesbian marriage. Except that it didn’t start that way.

Now, most progressive places don’t have any trouble sorting this out, while a few (Ohio! I’m looking at you! Let people change their birth certificate gender, for pete’s sake) have more–difficulty. But even in the heart of the most progressive regions, you can get something like this, from the New York Post:

Wedding Crashers

I dupe, I dupe!

While political arguments rage, New York City has certified its first gay marriage — of two men who fooled the City Clerk’s Office into letting them tie the knot.

Hakim Nelson and Jason Stenson married on May 26 with nary a raised eyebrow among the oblivious city bureaucrats who not only OK’d the marriage license, but conducted the ceremony, despite gay marriage being illegal in the state.

The plucky couple filled out their marriage application online at the Apple Store on 14th Street in May. A few days later, they went to the City Clerk’s Office on Worth Street to complete the form and get their marriage license.

Nelson — who goes by the name “Kimah” and hopes to one day have surgery to become a “full female” — wore an orange dress and white leggings, his straight, brown hair falling to his shoulders.

The gullible clerk didn’t seem to notice that both Nelson, 18, and Stenson, 21, have male first names.

They both had to present identification to obtain the license. Stenson used his state ID card, and Nelson gave a state Benefit Card, which he uses to collect food stamps.

By a fluke, Nelson’s ID card has an “F” for female on it, because the official who issued it in April assumed from his appearance that he was a woman.

Good morning, transphobia, how are you going to fuck up peoples’ lives today?

It’s almost pointless where to start here–that it wasn’t a same-sex marriage because trans women aren’t men, that “duping” is an insanely insensitive thing to say to trans people (it’s what the people who commit violence against us use as their defense), that it’s not a “fluke” that Kimah’s ID had an F on it–you only need a letter from a therapist to change your gender on your driver’s license in New York State–and for fuck’s sake, enough with the Pronoun Fail.

I won’t quote further from the Post–I feel all icky inside already–but here are the headlines of their follow-up stories; that should give you a feel for things:

Unwed Dudes A Happy Couple

Marriage License Of 2 Nyc Men Revoked

N.Y. Unwittingly Marries “Same-Sex” Couple

Oh wait! That last one isn’t from the Post, it’s from The Advocate.

I can’t say I’m surprised.

The erasure of the “T” from LGBT is not exactly a new phenomenon. Whether it’s ignoring Sylvia Rivera (who was one of the instigators of the Stonewall riots but was later given the cold shoulder by the gay movement) or deciding trans people don’t deserve equal rights yet, there has been a long history within the gay rights movement of ignoring or denigrating trans issues.

And while I understand that often there are very different issues involved–for example, the marriage issue is more or less resolved for heterosexual trans people in most of the country–that still doesn’t mean there isn’t a convergance of issues. Removing the gender-identity provisions in ENDA didn’t just throw trans people under the bus–it said to the femmy gay guys and butch lesbians that they didn’t deserve rights either; that the protections that ENDA promised–most of all, the right to live your life the way you want to live it without worrying about losing your job or not finding a home–only applied to “normal”-looking queers.

That eraser gets a pretty good workout.

But hey, if the Advocate wants to be on the same page as the Post, who am I to complain?

After all, I’m naturally deceptive, don’t you know.

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