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Below The Belt: The Umbrellas of Transburg

Categories: below the belt, i get around

My latest post for Below The Belt is now up:

I invariably use trans as short for transgendered, and transgendered in its so-called “umbrella sense”: embracing anyone with a variance with the gender assigned to them because of their biological sex. (When referring to a transsexual’s gender, however, I use trans as an adjective modifying that gender: trans man, trans woman. Although this is slightly confusing, I agree with Julia Serano and helen boyd that the space is vital in avoiding “othering” or invalidating a transsexual’s gender–something that transwoman doesn’t do, since it implies that transsexual women aren’t women but something else entirely).

You can read the rest here.

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The Times, They Are A-Draggin’

Categories: double bound, milestones, teh tranz

Several years ago, back when I was still a crossdresser myself (and working as a man), I came across a picture on an old hard drive of my boss. Wearing tight leather pants, a low-cut blouse, and makeup. And written in a pink script on the picture was a feminine name that shared his first initial.

I was caught somewhere between completely weirded out and strangely relieved to know I wasn’t the only trans person in the office.

Which leads me to events in East Cleveland, Ohio, where mayor Eric Brewer was recently defeated in a primary election. Unremarkable, right?

Well…except for the fact that like me and my boss, somebody found pictures that seem to look like the ex-mayor on his computer hard drive. Wearing lingerie.

I’m not going to reprint the photos here–you can find them easy enough, ducks–except to say that they do look like the mayor, and that they “vibe” crossdresser for me. (When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve seen this sort of thing before.)

And speaking of seeing this thing before, it reminds me of another crossdressing pol who was outed before an election: Sam Walls, a conservative Republican in Texas who lost a runoff election for the state House in 2004. Now, in Walls’ case, you just have to wonder how he didn’t think this would happen: not only (as the pics showed) had he been out and about while crossdressed, but for Pete’s sake he seems to have been the treasurer of the local chapter of Tri-Ess, the national crossdressers’ organization.

Cases like Walls’ and Brewer’s show some of the disturbing inequities of life under the transgendered umbrella. One may point out that people like Walls or Brewer retained substantial privilege and did not face everyday transphobia–something that MtF transsexuals often have to deal with every day. But. Even in Oklahoma, a trans woman can run for office and be open about her history, whereas neither of the crossdressing politicians felt comfortable doing that.

And that shows the relatively large gap in both visibility and acceptance between transsexuals and crossdressers. Television shows, news reports, books–all concentrate on transsexuals, not on crossdressers; and the leadership of many trans organizations is dominated by transsexuals. Now, again, some of this is because there is a greater incentive for transsexuals, especially trans women, to push for their rights. There is too what helen boyd once called the “fear of queer”: crossdressers can look “normal” in their everyday presentation and can fear (or feel no need) to lose that part of their gender identity in service to activism.

But that obscures–just as crossdressers themselves are obscured; no one is really sure how many there are, since so many are relatively closeted–the very real pain and angst of being a crossdresser, of not having the comforting narrative of transition–a story that seems, at least, to have a beginning, middle and end. If people now seem to understand, if not accept all the time, the transsexual narrative–“you’re a woman on the inside” or “born wrong” or whatever the current popular meme is–but how do you explain that you only need to be a woman part of the time? That you only seek temporary solutions? That you live in the shadow of, as helen has also said, the other shoe never dropping?

A crossdresser I used to know wrote about this once*:

[…]my transness will always be subordinate to other people’s experience of either womanhood or transhood. Women can look down at me because I’m a “part-time” woman, who dresses in costume and “doesn’t know what a real woman’s life is like”; transwomen can throw the same criticism at me, with the added vector that my transness can’t be serious because it doesn’t manifest itself constantly or as urgently as it does for a transsexual.

But it isn’t true; I’m trans all the time, and there are a lot of times that I feel trapped in an endless cycle of oscillation between femininity and masculinity with no way to end the cycle.

Sure, compared to transitioning, my problems are the difference between jumping off of a cliff and riding the kiddie roller coaster. But who the hell wants to ride on the kiddie coaster for the rest of their lives?

But let’s not stay all doom and gloom…courtesy of Joe My God, here’s Donna Sachet performing the national anthem before a Giants game in San Francisco–the first drag performer to ever do so! Rock on, Ms. Sachet!

*She later transitioned, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it’s a good sentiment.

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Reruns

Categories: all about me, This Was My Life

One of those days, yesterday, though not as bad as the following will make it seem–just didn’t feel much like doing anything, so sorry no post.

Thought I’d rerun this bit…from a long time ago, before The Second Awakening, both the blog and my own personal sense of it. More original stuff later on, I promise.

Ma Saison en Enfer

1. Un nuit en enfer/A night in Hell

The night your wife finally moves out of the apartment, at your request, turns out to be surprisingly shitty. You knew this day would come, probably suddenly, and you’ve wanted it, but now that it’s here you find yourself gripped with a slow-spreading, vastly deepening sense of loss.

You try to keep busy. You’ve already left work early, giving up billable hours just when you need them the most, to run home to make sure that the things you really want to keep have been clearly separated. As it turns out, you have a surprising number of purses, more than you thought.

You go to your therapy session and remain calm, and then head out to go to a gig at CBGB’s gallery with your best friend, who has been your rock through the whole thing. The singer starts launching old songs–“You belong to me” is the one that hits you the worst–and you end up in the bathroom trying to cry. As it turns out, you can sob but there are no tears, not now, not even at the end, not even for you.

2. Mavais Sang/Bad Blood

Maybe it was your fault all along; maybe it was how you were made, all the issues you never confronted. Maybe it was too much in your nature to compromise, to sacrifice. Maybe you thought that somehow, bizarrely, that made you more of who you thought you were, even as the compromises took you further and further away from that idealized, non-existant person.

Maybe it was that never in your life have you felt the need to ravish. Maybe it was that you lay fallow waiting for ravishment.

Maybe that was some taint of the genes. Of the blood, the blood of your father and your funny uncle.

But there came a day when your wife began to take potshots at you for not noticing her, and then your bad blood roared through your tortured veins, poisoning your vision, painting the landscape with loss.

3. Nuit de l’enfer/Hellish Night

There comes a night, as it must, when your wife and alcohol and your medication mix together to perfect a cocktail of hell.

A night when your wife will yell at you, when you will feel everything slipping away from you as she tells you how you are not a man, or not the man she needs, and those words will cut you apart and pare away your illusions of your own happiness.

And the ground of your hell is fertile, and her words take root and bear fruit.

In this night, she will tell you that after the next morning she is no longer sure if you will be together.

Dawn will come without sleep and you will waken to the realization that your marriage is over. You will feel nothing at first. Nothing is left to feel.

Nothing will matter.

4. Délieres/Delerium I

You waken to a wedding, and it saves you. On the dance floor she will beg forgiveness and claim forgetfulness, and you will hold her and feel relieved. You will resolve not to throw away your second chance, because you have stared into the abyss and it nearly ate you.

You will resolve all these things, though you don’t mean them. It is not in either of your natures to change course now.

5. Délieres/Delerium II

And for a while you both belive in the lie, because the lie has worked for so long. She will forget that you are not what you seem, not what anybody, even her, wants. And you will forget that she is a flesh and blood woman, not one of your fantasies that you try and shoehorn yourself into, to take the shape of your airy dreams. You will forget her impatience and her impulsiveness and your own propensity for inertia. You will forget all these things in the delerium of the most seductive drug, nostalgia.

You will forget all these things. But you will suspect.

6. L’impossible/The Impossible

She will tell you that she cannot deal with seeing you dressed as a woman anymore, and suggest that she spend the night with her girlfriends outside the city. You will be touched by her sacrifice and seduced by the thought of transgressing, for a while, the narrow boundaries of custom and biology. So you agree, though you grudge it, and hope for a day where the separation won’t be necessary.

And yet, and yet, like a canker the suspicion grows that there is more here than you suspect, more being said than you have heard. And yet, and yet, you think that what you suspect, the hair of shadow that now hovers like a flaw in your sight, cannot, must not be true.

Your plans are both disrupted for your birthday. You come home to change, still made up, in your new jeans and pedicured toes, and you sense her anger and hurt. You think it is just that she is home, alone, and confronted even briefly by your own perverted self, and you are sad, you grieve inside yourself for the you that never was and never could be.

You grieve, not knowing yet what you grieve for, not knowing that grief is going to be your lot.

7. L’Eclair/Lightning

When you finally learn the truth, discover the betrayal, it leaves you physically ill. You stumble out of the house on an excuse, and wander downtown. You sit in anger with your best friend and she has nothing to say, nothing to give but an embrace.

Later will come the confrontation, the flash of brilliance that has lit up the dark corners of your marriage, of your soul, and you know as the bolt cleaves the sky so your life has been cloven in two, and you have been put asunder.

And in that flash you see the empty plain of new possibilities, even as your future dies upon the vine and with it all that you were, all that you were trying to be for five years, all that you thought was worth having and sacrificing for. The sacrifice is returned, you look at it as a feast, but your hunger makes you sick and you don’t know how to begin, or even if you should.

8. Matin/Morning

You stay up late, far into the morning most days. Sleep is something you find only in the pills you bought at the drugstore. Even strong drink, which you avoid, does not bring it.

You find that you shared so many things. You replace a manicure set and several purses. You agree to give up the chairs in the living room, and her sister’s bed that you slept on for two years. You keep the cats but lose the rug and the toothbrush. You lose a bookcase but gain several shelves on your new built-ins, the ones she insisted on.

You find your arms aching for her at night even as your heart shrieks its anger and drowns in its own blood.

The morning after she leaves, this very morning, you come home to the apartment, the empty spaces like fading ghosts. You want to collapse and sleep, but the bed is gone and you are too tired to inflate the air mattress. You take a shower and go to work. You want to cry as you walk to the subway, but you can’t, because you are a man and there is no place to go and hide while you weep.

And you know that you will pass almost directly from this morning to another long, empty morning, despite not sleeping since the day before.

9. Adieu/Goodbye

And though she is gone, it cannot, will not be goodbye, though sometimes you scream in your soul to just be left alone, to lick your wounds alone in silence.

You know there will come a day when you can see her again without seeing him in your mind as well. You know there will come a day when you forgive each other for what you did, what you did not do, and all the myriad days that should have come but now will never arrive.

And you know this won’t be the end of everything. You know it is the beginning for both of you, and the dammed stream of frustrated posibilities is already pushing you strongly from behind.

But you still want to weep, even though you cannot. You still want your tears, so you can say farewell to them. You still want her with you, and you can never say goodbye to that.

After Arthur Rimbaud
Translations of titles by Bertrand Mathieu

February 23, 2006

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L’Affaire Polansky: autres voix

Categories: privilege stories, rape is hy-larious

The perception here is that the Polanski arrest has generated outrage in France–that the opinion of Frédéric Mitterand, the Culture Minister, reflects that of the entire country:

Both French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner stressed Polanski’s artistic gifts in their defense of him, though in theory all men — regardless of talent — are equal before the law.

Kouchner called the arrest “sinister,” adding: “A man of such talent, recognized in the entire world, recognized especially in the country that arrested him — all this just isn’t nice.”

To many here, the slap of American justice seemed particularly sharp as the arrest came as Polanski was entering Switzerland to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Zurich Film Festival.

Mitterrand said, “To see him like that, thrown to the lions because of ancient history, really doesn’t make any sense.”

Mitterrand continued with a jab against the United States: “In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”

As my Francophilia knows no bounds, I thought I’d investigate: so today I spent some time reading Le Monde, the Parisian paper of record for the Francophone world. I am happy to report that French “outrage” is exaggerated, at least based on the comments I read on this story (warning: if you can read French, it is quite douchey.) Quite the opposite: most of the commentors railed about how there seems to be two laws, one for famous people and one for everyone else, about how Polanski is an admitted rapist and should be punished, and basically how the “but he made cool movies” film is an utter failure. (One poster had an arresting image of an “evil cocktail” that the article’s author had mixed up, and ironically said she was glad she only had sons, so that no daughter of hers would have to drink it. I thought I was at a French Shakesville.)

And then there’s this article, whose title is pretty obvious even if you don’t have much French: “La Loi est la même pour les artistes et les citroyens.” It’s an interview with Maitre Eolas, author of a French legal blog, and he calmly shoots down most of the arguments against the arrest of Polanski. I like the last paragraph the best, where he answers the “objections” of the artists that it wasn’t fair to surprise him with an arrest when he came to collect an award in Switzerland:

C’est un peu le principe d’une arrestation que d’être effectuée par surprise, sinon, elle échoue… D’autres estiment qu’il ne pouvait pas s’en douter puisqu’il se rendait régulièrement en Suisse, dans sa maison à Gstaad. Cela n’a rien à voir car cette fois il venait recevoir un prix dans un festival, sa venue était annoncée dans tous les journaux. Et apparemment, la police lit le journal.

A quick and dirty translation (anyone who speaks French better than I do, please feel free to jump in with corrections!):

It is a principle that an arrest should be effected with surprise, otherwise it fails…they consider that he couldn’t have suspected it since he came regularly to Switzerland, to his house in Gstaad. But that this time he came to receive a prize at a festival has nothing to do with it; the venue was announced in all the newspapers, and apparently, the police read the news.

Waker Attie provides a better translation below–thanks!

It is somewhat the essence of an arrest that it comes as a surprise, otherwise it fails… Others think that he couldn’t have suspected it since he came regularly to Switzerland, to his house in Gstaad. But that is totally different: this time he came to accept an award at a festival, and his attendance was announced in all the newspapers. And apparently, the police read the news.

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Cahiers Parisiens: les derniers jours

Categories: kyriarchy, paris notebook, travels with CL

My last three days in Paris, I went to museums twice; since on Tuesdays most of the museums are closed, I stayed in and worked that day. (Pity, it was another beautiful day–but at least I went out and had some Senegalese food that night. Chicken Yassa is incredibly yummy!)

That Monday I went to the Louvre. Because, as I said last time, you just have to. Since I’ve been sharing my favorite paintings with you, I guess I should include my favorite painting in the Louvre not named La Gioconde (or the Mona Lisa, if you’re feeling vulgar, heh.) It’s by Caravaggio–I just love the voluptuousness of his canvases:

It’s an astonishing work, although I understand why the monks who commissioned it ended up rejecting the painting–there’s absolutely nothing transcendent about it at all, except for the all-too-human transcendence of grief. No halos (well, just a tiny one), no angels, no heavenly light, just a corpse and mourners. Amazing.

Then Wednesday, my last day in Paris…I wrote a post that you may remember, then headed out to the newest museum in the city, the Musée du Quai Branly. This is an ethnography museum. (We call it history if you can beat us in a war, and ethnography when you can’t.) And it’s a stunning place: beautifully designed, with a wonderful garden surrounding a modern building with a pleasantly chunky, open interior. Of course, given that it’s an ethnography museum, everything is done up in shades of brown and ocher, with plenty of shadows and dim lighting; c’est normal.

I don’t want to run the place down too much, because it really has an amazing collection. But there were amusing moments. If you follow the suggested path, you start in Oceania, and right at the start they have a lot of items having to do with the initiation into the various men’s societies that are a rite of adolescence in New Guinea. And I was reading one of the placards about these rites, which mentioned in passing: “women’s societies are known to exist, but very little is known about them.” Which surprised me–not. Because I’m sure the male anthropologists were a) not able to gain access to the rites and b) really didn’t care too much, either.

I get bitey sometimes.

The one part of the museum that truly stunned me, though, was a temporary exhibit on Tarzan. Being of an occasionally pulpy mindset, I thought that might be an interesting thing to see: especially because there’s certainly a lot to be looked at in the Tarzan mythos, and how it relates to Western perceptions of Africa, and African perceptions of those perceptions. And while there does indeed remain a lot to be said, this exhibit sure the fuck wasn’t going to say it.

Oh no, ducks. Instead, it started out comparing Tarzan to the heroes of ancient Greek and Roman myths, and actually went downhill from there. There were plenty of blown up pages from Tarzan comics (continuous salient feature: Africa had a lot of people in it, but almost none of them were black–there were lost Romans, lost Egyptians–drawn as Caucasians, natch–lost explorers, lost elephants, but damn few not-lost-at-all-because-we-live-here Africans.) There were video exhibits of King Kong (uncommented upon: the, uh, racism?) and in general an astonishing avoidance of the fact that the Tarzan myth is about a white English lord who rules over a kingdom of black apes. No metaphors for colonialization there, no sir, just keep on walking!

And of course this is–surprising? Maybe not really?–for a country that once claimed a significant portion of sub-Saharan Africa as its territory. And has remained uncomfortable with that legacy ever since.

That chewed up most of the day. For dinner, I went to a bistro called Boullion Chartier in the 9th. It was recommended by my exchange mate as a very traditional French bistro–so traditional that they actually keep track of your check by writing it on the tablecloth. Since I was alone, they seated me with somebody–the place was empty, but it fills up quickly. He turned out to be a montréalais who spoke excellent English, so I had one last anglophone conversation in Paris over my steak au poivre and profiteroles. Then I went home and watched the last episode of Heroes, Season 1: my exchange mate had a copy, which I was able to switch over to English, except for the subtitles for the Japanese characters; those I had to read, quickly, in French (and French as it’s spoken, at that: but now I know that Je l’ai reussi! means “I did it!” in French.)

So that was my Paris sojourn, my attempt to find out what it would be like to live in the City of Light. And I think I succeeded; it was a good fit, though I recognize to really live there I’d have to truly immerse myself in the language and not spend so much time in self-created anglophone spaces. And of course I found privilege there, expected and unexpected, much that was the same as home, and a few that were quite different.

But you knew that already; heck, it’s really not even fair: I always find privilege.

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Rapist, International Fugitive Arrested: Media Aghast

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, monday media watch, Outrage, privilege stories, rape is hy-larious, supremely sexist, your rda of misogyny

I will preface this by saying I like Roman Polanski’s movies, at least the ones I’ve seen–Rosemary’s Baby, Frantic, The Pianist, and especially Chinatown; I saw a restored print of it ten years ago that was almost a religious experience.

His sudden arrest in Switzerland over the weekend has stunned the world’s artistic community. A true cinematic artist, one who’s long-suffered and even been forgiven by his victim, opinion seems to be that…the man is a rapist and why the fuck are we having this conversation?

Yeah. Rapist. He didn’t “have sex” with a 13-year old girl. He raped her. Well, first he got her drunk and high on quaaludes. Then he raped her.

Don’t believe me? Check out the Smoking Gun’s transcript of her testimony. I looked at it for the first time on Sunday. It made me ill.

Predictably, the comments at the New York Times website were full of fail. A lot of people seem to feel that he’s “suffered enough.” They base this, I guess, because he hasn’t been allowed to re-enter the United States since he fled in 1977. Instead, he’s had to content himself with making lots of money directing movies in Europe and living in France.

Ya know, I just got back from France. That’s really not a hardship assignment.

The latest bit of doucheoisie posturing is this:

Nearly 100 entertainment industry professionals, including the movie directors Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai and Wim Wenders urged in a petition that Mr. Polanski be release, saying: “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar as screenwriter of “The Pianist,” which Mr. Polanski directed, said: “It’s really disgraceful. Both the Americans and the Swiss have miscalculated.”

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, said that for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.

“Sometimes, the American justice system shows an excess of formalism,” Mr. Lang said, “like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly.”

One wonders, however, if Wong Kar Wei, Wim Wenders, or Pedro Almodovar would feel comfortable leaving a prepubescent female relative unattended around Roman Polanski. Or if they’d be arguing about the “great artist” exemption for a shocking act of rape if it were their 13-year old daughter.

Liss McEwan, as usual, hits it right on the head:

Very few, if any, of the people who have publicly defended Polanski, or who have worked with him, make it their business to champion or associate themselves with admitted child rapists. They make an exception for Polanski for the same reason exceptions have been for other famous, artistic men – directors, writers, actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, photographers – who have been known to sexually assault women and/or children: Because geniuses get special dispensation.

Because there’s only one Roman Polanski.

So goes the breathless defense of the artiste, while the flipside of that particular coin, because thirteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, goes unspoken.

So yeah. Overaggressive prosecution! Of a child molester! Who admitted to it! That’s overzealousness, all right! Just remember, as long as you can paint a nice picture or make a good movie, you get to rape young girls!

But not boys. That would be sick.

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Cahiers Parisiens: Tout le monde parle à moi

Categories: adventures in transition, paris notebook, travels with CL

Bon jour, mes canards! Paris may be a fading memory, but I will try and catch you up on the last few days of the Cahiers Parisiens.

Maybe it didn’t come through, but I didn’t talk much with people while I was in Paris. This is not that unusual. I work either from home or at a desk marooned at the other end of the floor from everyone else; I don’t often go out to bars either home or in Europe; and in general, I am a misanthropic sour puss. This helps out in the writing game, but isn’t so much use in other places.

But…well, the last few days in Paris I actually had some interactions with people.

The first couple happened on Sunday last. I went up to the Canal St. Martin, which is a hip spot to hang out nowadays. The canal is indeed quite lovely, and they close off motor traffic along it on the weekends. I stopped at a little cafe (amusingly, when I asked for the menu, the waitress brought an enormous blackboard with the specials written on it out to my table.) While I roasted in the sun I wrote the first draft of my long screed below. (I had what amounted to a mess of egg over good country ham with some sort of vinegar sauce–it was fabulous.)

After brunch I walked over towards Buttes Chaumont park, one of the gems of non-tourist Paris, a magnificent landscape of hills, crags, and a lovely lake. Here’s a picture of the grotto in the center of the park:However, on the way over to the park, I had my first experience with…Latin lovers.

I was crossing the street when a young Tunisian guy (as he told me) came up to me to tell me how pretty I was. Which was nice of him, but I kept walking. He followed me, and we struck up a bit of a conversation in French. Admittedly, I was a bit lonely, which let me fall into the trap of talking with this guy, something I wouldn’t have done in English. And of course, he got a bit grabby as the conversation progressed. I did finally manage to extricate myself (after a bunch of “arretes” and “ma relationship est grave!”) but it left me slightly shaken. And of course this all flows into my background as a trans woman: should I be worried because I don’t have the experience that would have helped me learn the skills to deflect guys like this, or relieved because I haven’t spent my whole life deflecting guys like this?

Later that day, as I was walking home (baguette in hand, of course), another guy came up to me and began to talk rapidly in French to me. I couldn’t really follow him, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was after. I let him down firmly but gently: “S’il vous plait lassez-moi suele.” (Please leave me alone.)

And oh! On Monday, I went to pay my respects at the Louvre (you have to see the Mona Lisa while you’re in Paris…you just do.) And as I was walking to the Metro, another guy wanted to “make my acquaintance.” This time I just said I didn’t speak French.

But the best story has to be when I was walking home from the Louvre on Monday. I passed a store I had previously seen, and just had to snap a pic, because…well, because the sign is a rather weak joke:

The name of the store is Les Bonnes Compines which in French means something approximately like “The Good Girlfriends.” Fair enough…but it’s written with out the space between Les and Bonnes, making it look a bit like…something else in English.

As I said, a weak joke. I’m not proud

Like most of the stores in that region of Paris, it’s a wholesaler–I had basically landed in the Parisian garment district, with “Ne vente pas au detail” (wholesale only) in almost every window. And for some reason, when I took the pic, a woman in a telephone booth (yes, they still have them there) started to scream at me.

I couldn’t follow everything she said, but it was mostly about how I shouldn’t take a pic. I tried to explain, but only got as far as Parce que…(“because…”) before she started to scream again. She even spit on the ground. Eventually I just walked away…I guess she thought I was some sort of corporate spy or something.

Shows what you get for acting like a tourist; I should know better.

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If it’s Wednesday, it’s Below The Belt!

Categories: Uncategorized

My latest post at Below the Belt is up:

It must be something in the air: we seem to be having another round of the Great Cisgender Debate. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the question is whether or not it is appropriate to refer to people who are not trans with the term cis, short for cisgender, as trans is short for transgender.

You can read it here. And while you’re at it, there’s my companion piece down below, this post on cis and this post on the linguistics of cis at Billerico, and genderbitch’s take on helen’s post as well. When you’re done, you’ll be as exhausted about the subject as I am!

I’m off to the museums! Enjoy!

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Nonsense is as Nonsense Does

Categories: cis-o-rama, kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, we don't put the "T" in LGB

As a companion to my new post on Below the Belt about use of the term “cis,” I thought I’d amplify my issues with helen boyd’s recent post on (en)Gender (“Jeez Louise this cisgendered nonsese”: nothing dismissive there, nope!) about her objections to the term, as I found the post highly problematic for a number of reasons.

First, she claims that “cis” is unclear, because you can’t tell if it means cisgendered or cissexual:

[…]I’m going to claim a difference between cisgender & cissexual. Cisgender, the problem seems to me, is not the easy opposite of transgender. Cisgender implies, or means, or could mean (depending on who you talk to), that someone’s sex and gender are concordant. So your average butch woman, who is not trans, or is, depending on how she feels about it (see Bear Bergman), is now somehow cisgender. So is someone like me. So is a femme-y gay man who maybe performs a more gender normative masculinity for his job. That is, those of us who have variable genders, who maybe are gender fluid or gender neutral but who don’t identify as trans, are now somehow cisgender.

I have a number of issues with this. For one thing, she does not make the same objection about “trans”: that is, when we use trans, there’s no clear indication as to what kind of trans person you are talking about: crossdresser, drag queen (yes, some are trans), transsexual, etc. So it demands something more from the term cis than is demanded from trans, which in of itself is an act of privilege.

But I also don’t think that the division between cissexual and cisgender is clear, or even as important as helen (and Julia Serano) make it out to be. Yes, I know, it seems so logical: we make a division between sex and gender, so we should make a similar axis for trans and cis.

On closer inspection, however, it simply does not hold up. There are trans people, for example, who live fulltime in a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, with legal recognition of that gender, who have never had either hormones or surgery. Yet I feel more than comfortable calling them transsexual. And this just points out another issue: it puts so much focus on a transsexual’s body, and not his or her gender–and that plays far too easily into the very ways that anti-trans people attempt to invalidate trans people’s genders. Finally, I’ve met many trans people of all stripes, and all have had some sort of body issue that the cis people I know simply don’t have–the motivations are completely different. Both a straight man and a heterosexual crossdresser might pluck their eyebrows: but only the crossdresser does it to look more like a woman. So even if we were to accept that cissexual is a valid distinction, it is experienced quite differently by cis- and transgendered people.

The key point for me is that you have to be transgendered to be transsexual. That is, transsexuality is a phenomenon within the larger trans condition. It is a variety of trans experience, not an essential axis of being. Therefore, I think it is safe to say that in the absence of other qualifiers, “cis” means cisgendered and “trans” means transgendered.

So, taking helen’s two examples, can we call them “cisgendered”? I think we can, because both a butch lesbian and an effeminate gay man don’t ever identify as a gender other than they were assigned. That is, a butch calls herself a woman, a queeny gay man calls himself a man. And when they stop–we call them something else.

Telling me, & other partners whose lives are profoundly impacted by the legal rights / cultural perceptions of trans people, that we are “not trans” implies that we are also not part of the trans community. I’ve been saying for years now that we are. When trans people are killed, harassed, not hired, fired due to discrimination, denied health care, etc. etc. etc., their loved ones suffer along with them. Their families, their lovers, their kids especially. We are not just “allies.” We are vested, dammit, & a part of the trans community, so when “cisgender” comes to mean, or is used to mean, “not part of the trans community,” we are once again left out in the dark.

And…wow. This is an extraordinary statement and I am struggling to understand why it was said.

First, I’d have a lot easier time figuring it out had helen not ended her post with this:

I have lots of genders, but I’m not trans.

So…this is only a problem if trans people say it?

Second, replace “trans” with “in a wheelchair” in that paragraph and you can see how this starts to get queasy for me.

What do we mean by “community”? When we say “gay community” or “deaf community,” do we mean allies and families of gay or deaf people, or only those who are gay or deaf? I think the usage is often contextual, but most commonly we mean only those members who have the trait being discussed. And with good reason, because while an ally may simply stop being an ally–friendships can end, married people can be divorced, a person’s political alignment may change–for the person with the trait it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to remove that trait. I don’t think it is uncalled for to make the primary meaning of community those people who have the greatest self-interest in it.

This leads us to another of helen’s points:

Likewise, cisgender seems to get used a lot in place of “ignorant or unsympathetic to trans issues” which is also bullshit. Being cisgender or experiencing cissexual privilege – say by having a doctor assume correctly that I have a uterus – is not the same thing as being ignorant or unsympathetic to trans issues.

The exclusion and silencing of allies is a problem for all progressive movements, not just trans movements: witness the problematic relationships between men and feminists, for example. Some people certainly make attempts to cold-shoulder cis people from trans discussions, and often this is hurtful and unnecessary. At the same time, however, we should recognize that a movement needs both safe spaces and leaders from within its primary constituency: I call this the “no male president of NOW” theory. And just as straight or white people can condescend, obstruct, or even derail gay or black rights movements, cis people can do the same in trans movements, and trans people are well within their rights to talk about it and safeguard the goals of their movements.

This doesn’t mean, however, that use of the term cis means open season on trashing allies. Trashing is a serious problem for any movement; bell hooks talks at length about this in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Trans people have a responsibility to make sure that they use the term responsibly, and not just as a shorthand for “bigot.” But cis people have a responsibility too–to listen to trans people, and not get so caught up on a point of terminology that they use silencing tactics wholesale to shut down discussion. Men didn’t like the term “male privilege” but feminists insisted on it because it was a valuable concept that made visible a previously invisible prejudice; and while sometimes people used it in an irresponsible or even hateful way, the term has entered our discourse and is an important part of everyday discussions about gender.

i guess the point is that there are women, & gay men, who actually have legitimate & well thought out reasons for objecting to the term […] so if all these explanations of why some people criticize the term or how it’s used, only convinces some trans people that anyone who is uncomfortable being called cis is (1) ignorant, (2) unhip, and (3) unwittingly transphobic, then i guess there’s been no point whatsoever in explaining that maybe people have their reasons, & that none of them have anything to do with being any of those things.

which i suppose means i should go ahead & go back to using “tranny” since i think it’s playful & sweet, & to hell with any trans people who don’t like being called that, because obviously they’re just (1) unhip, (2) ignorant, and (3) self hating.

This comment was addressed to me on the discussion boards at helen’s site. But the thing is, and as I argued there, there really haven’t been any good reasons to object: just people who feel that they’re being called bigots, or saying that they don’t identify as cis and thus the term shouldn’t be used–on them, or really, on anyone.

But both arguments fail. First, it is not clear that every use of the term cis is conflated with “transphobic bigot”; plenty of feminist and progressive sites use the word every day in its primary meaning, “the opposite of trans.” And yet I don’t see posts by helen directed at Liss McEwan at Shakespeare’s Sister, for example. It only seems to be problematic when trans people use the term. Now, the argument can be made that trans people use it the most more often in a problematic way. And I’ll agree, but always with the caveat that trans people are also going to be the ones with the greatest understanding of cis privilege, and will call people out on it more frequently than others will. After all, who uses male privilege more often? Feminists or non-feminist guys? So yes, the most problematic uses of “male privilege” will be by feminists, but there will also be a much higher volume of overall use.

And it’s not as if there isn’t any oppression here or anything. That can make people upset.

The other argument is that cis is an identity. But it’s not; as I said on Below the Belt, it’s a descriptive term, like trans. That trans has more in common with an identity is purely a function of the oppression and disprivileging of trans people, just as it is with being black, or disabled. We use terms like “identify as trans” because there is a step you have to take, an identification you have to make: you have to reject the dominant culture’s discourse about who you are–perverted, subhuman, crippled, and instead find a positive strength in who you are. Trans isn’t an identity: it is the act of being trans, of being unashamed for what you are, that is the act of identification.

I mean, we don’t talk about whiteness or being able as identities: and neither is being cis.

So all we are left with, then, is a really elaborate tone argument. And a tone argument is never an acceptable objection–it’s a silencing technique. (As is helen’s idea that the word only be used in an “appropriate” context, like a classroom.) And make no mistake, that’s what’s happening here. By telling trans people that there can be no word for people who aren’t trans, we are being told that we are so unique and so different that we are the pure exception of the human race; that every other oppressed group gets to have de-centering language (sighted, able, hearing, straight) but we don’t. That it is impossible to talk about not being trans without mentioning being trans. (Quick: I can write an article about dating as a straight woman, put straight in the title or the first paragraph, and never mention lesbians anywhere; that is impossible to do with a term like “non-trans.”) And what happens when there is no term for non-trans? Simple. All too often, when people are talking about being non-trans, they will simply not even mention it: they will remain comfortably normal.

I am neither alien nor monster. I am not permanently othered by the accident of being born. And I will not accept a permanent second-class existence in the world simply because a three-letter word pisses some people off.

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Cahiers Parisiens: ce qui vous tenez, ça c’est ce que je prends

Categories: invasive kyriarchy, paris notebook, privilege stories, travels with CL

I’ve finally escaped my Catcave the last several days, making my way out to a few museums I hadn’t visited before. First was the Musée Carnavalet on Friday, down in the Marais. Carnavalet focuses on the history of Paris itself, and has dioramas, objects d’art, paintings, etc. from various time periods. They also had a special exhibition on the French Revolution, which engaged the military historiophile and the Francophile in me: the Revolution is one of my favorite time periods, and they had a wealth of stuff. Including some of the commemorative models of the Bastille that were actually carved from the stones of the Bastille itself.

Plus I discovered that I could read the Declaration of the Rights of Man in French. Score one for me.

I’ve been eating lunch rather than dinner the last several days, since lunch is cheaper, so I had my traditional, once a trip croque monsieur at a nearby cafe, washed down with some Haut-Médoc and a cup of strong French espresso. I’ve taken to drinking coffee in the French style after meals–espresso, with some sugar to cut the bitterness. It makes me feel all expatriate and such. Though I suppose I’d really need to drink some Pernods in a bar with a zinc counter top, and scribble furiously away in my notebooks about running the bulls at Pamplona and other homoerotic displays of masculinity.

Wait. That’s not me. That was Hemmingway. Maybe I’ve been drinking too much wine.

Saturday I had a real treat…well, not an unproblematic treat. But you’ve probably come to expect that of me. I went to the Musée Guimet, over by the Trocadero. This is the main Asian art museum in Paris. I didn’t go straight there, acutally: I had a large lunch nearby first, which included a desert of profiteroles–cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream and drenched in chocolate sause–my favorite desert in the world, and something that it is almost impossible to get (at least, impossible to get done right) back in the states:


Anyway, the museum really has an excellent collection, from all parts of Asia. The India collection was quite good; and as someone that has been interested in Shiva since my days researching Indian mythology, I was happy to see this marvelous bronze of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance:

They have an excellent Cambodian section. As I’ve been to Cambodia this year, it was quite pleasant at first to reacquaint myself with the amazing and monumental Khmer art–to see one of the gently smiling, inexplicable faces of the Bayon silently contemplating me again, to look at a marvelously preserved naga, to see a beautiful bas-relief apsara.

But something began to bother me. When I would read the labels to see where these things came from, I began to feel…uncomfortable. That’s because I’ve actually been to those places; I’ve seen the elephant terrace, the royal palace, the Bayon of Angkor Thom. And given that Cambodia was a French colony for ninety years, I thought it was a pretty good bet that they didn’t ask if they could take any of those things.

This isn’t a new issue, of course: the Louvre has the best egyptology collection outside of Egypt, because of Napoleon’s conquests there; the British plundered the Greek world to build their amazing collections; even within Europe itself museum collections are often the plunder of war.

Still, the enormous gap of wealth, privilege and power between the colonial nations of the nineteenth century and the countries they subjugated seems to lend an air of disquietude that doesn’t linger over the internecine push and shove of Europe’s long shabby history of warfare. Because they essentially stole these things from people who found it difficult or impossible to resist. Stole, and left no recompense, and often no regrets. Even the great humanist Andre Malraux got into the act, trying to steal artifacts and whole bas-reliefs from the newly-rediscovered and beautifully-preserved Banteay Srei in Cambodia.

Of course, it’s nice that people in other places in the world can see these things, and it’s good to have some of them safe in a museum–the Angkor artifacts suffered during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. But that still doesn’t make up for the crime of taking them in the first place. I mean…they could have just asked.

In any case, maybe it’s appropriate that this guy, donated by the women of the United States in the memory of Lafayette, should be right outside the museum:

(Yeah, that’s good ol’ George himself.)

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