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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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Another Blog Note

Categories: Uncategorized

We’re back, mostly. I ended up staying an extra day in Montreal–my friend ended up needing to be hospitalized–and yesterday was too burnt out to write much. But we should be resuming our usual schedule around here, i.e.: erratic.

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Adventures in Transition: Édition Internationale

Categories: all about me, i get around, travels with CL

A dear friend of mine recently had her GRS done up in Montreal. She’s had a long history of complications from surgery, and sadly this was no exception–so yesterday her son and I hit the road and took a seven-hour road trip up to visit her. (It would have been six hours, but I always get lost–also, asking a truck driver for directions to a gas station when you speak a very imperfect French is a wonderfully Dadist exercise.)

She’s doing a little better today, and was surprised and pleased to see us, so I’m very glad we were able to run up here.

It also reminds me of a few things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve visited Dr. Brassard’s clinic; I came here last spring, when I was considering using him as my surgeon. (I ended up going to Thailand when I decided to have more things done; it cost the same to go to India and Cambodia–and fly home via business class–as it would have cost to have everything done in Canada.)

Back then, I still wasn’t sure when I would even want to get surgery; it wouldn’t be until the fall of that year that it would take on a sudden urgency. I ended up hanging out over the weekend with a few of the patients who were waiting to have their surgery done–there was a very pre-op vibe.

Appropriately enough, thios time all the patients are post-op, the last group of surgeries before the clinic’s summer vacation. And it carries me back to my own early post-operative days, the camraderie between me and the other patients who were staying at the hotel. (We had two pizza parties while I was there, and generally hung around in each other’s rooms for a while; I also met the nicest person in the world there, a trans woman who had made the trip on short notice to be with her friend who was having the surgery.)

I don’t use the word comrade lightly, either; we were like any group of disparate people thrown together by a painful shared experience–we bonded fairly tightly while we were together, but our natural differences pulled us apart afterwards. I’ve seen so many different takes on what we went through: from people who convinced this was the most important and transformative experience of their lives to grim-faced agnostics like myself who were convinced that nothing important would change after surgery. (I was wrong, though not necessarily about what the surgery did to me; it was how I felt about myself afterward that was the radical difference.)

The residence where people stay to recuperate here is quite pleasant, and is another what if place for me: because this is more or less what it would have been like to stay here had I done my own surgery here. In some ways, it would have been easier–on the same continent as my family, and my French is about eleventy-million times better than my Thai (and my French ain’t that great, so you get the picture.) Not that I regret my trip, because I got to finally see India and Angkor Wat, and even use my French when talking to Frenchwomen in Thailand for their own surgery. But it is kinda nice to make it up here and see what it would have been like.

Meanwhile, I’m worried about my friend, but happy as well to be able to be up here for her. Send her some good wishes if you can.

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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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Kapo

Categories: failings, invasive kyriarchy, why i blog

I am a racist.

That declaration is the sort of thing that usually brings friends sputtering to your defense. “But Cat, you’ve dated people of color, some of your best friends, and you voted for Obama!” Which is true, but doesn’t do a whole lot to defeat my original point.

Which is that, I am a racist.

I’m also an imperialist. A colonialist. Certainly a classist and probably a capitalist.

I’m not generally cognizant of any of this. But occasionally an incident throws this into focus. For me, it was this comment I wrote. You can go follow the link to find it; I have just enough vanity to not put it on the front page.

But the fact is, I wrote something that was racist and imperialist and I need to own up to that, and to own the privilege that let me think something like that was in any way appropriate. And own up to the fact that the only reason I’ve become chagrined enough to write about this incident is that I pissed off somebody who’d had this blog recommended to her. Only to be completely and finally turned away by what I wrote.

In other words, I was so blind to my privilege that it took that kind of embarrassment to make me notice it.

It seems useless to deny the fact of my racism. Every day I walk through the streets of the Great American Metropolis and I see the color of the skin of the people in suits heading downtown and the color of the skin of the people who are making deliveries or running deli counters, and I can see the relative worth placed on each. And every day I accept that, buy my paper at the deli, and move on to more important things, like who won the baseball game.

Likewise it is useless to deny the fact of my imperialism, not when I wear clothes made halfway around the world by impoverished people, people who had their wealth and resources stripped away by the wealthier countries, people locked into a cycle of poverty and slavery in all but name by the continued exploitation of them by those nations. I see this every day but am content to pay $8 for my tee shirts and move on to the comics section.

Sure, I try to be a good progressive. I try to speak out against open expressions of racism. I have been fortunate enough to know many people of color in my life, which leaves me less sheltered than most people of my (suburban, white, middle-class) background. I believe in all the Right Causes and critique all sorts of forms of oppression.

None of that changes the fact that I am part of a vast web of privileges that systematically elevates me by virtue of a few accidents of birth while at the same time debasing billions who don’t share those features.

That I am trapped in the system as much as they are does not change one whit the fact that I have much the better position.

I write a lot here about feminism and sexism, and transness and transphobia. This is because these are the things that are important to me; sexism and transphobia are the prejudices that single me out. So it’s fitting that I should be loudest in my opposition to them.

But what I have learned as I’ve been writing this blog, as I have grappled with the issues raised both here and in my life, as I’ve struggled to learn and understand more about feminism and how I can live a life that is concordant with it, is that my personal oppressions are not enough. That it is the whole system of oppressions that needs to be fought against.

There is a reason I prefer to use the term kyriarchy over patriarchy, cisarchy, or any number of other dominations. That’s because I see them all as part of the same system: that kyriarchy describes the multivalent oppressive nature of human society. We are locked into it by the relative comfort of our privileges over others, which palliates our own lack of privilege compared to some. To confront real liberation would mean to seek to destroy the whole system of privilege itself, to voluntarily renounce and repudiate one’s own privilege–to rip down the whole structure of oppression that has dominated human society since the Agricultural Revolution.

Too much to ask? Maybe. But it would seem to me that at the very least this process can begin with digging into my own privileges, to expose them to the light so that they stop being the invisible shackles that keep me tied to the ediface of oppression; that by recognizing them, I can find a way to be less invested in the struggle to maintain my own place. Because make no mistake: ultimately this system leads only to tyranny, the constant struggle of all against all that maintains the majority of the human race in suffering.

And it’s a small thing, oh such a small and insignificant thing to do. If I weren’t such a coward, if I weren’t so deeply co-opted by kyriarchy, I could do more. I have to trust that it might help, though. I have to trust that in time greater things can become available to me.

But what I can’t do is not keep pressing forward. Because anything is better than remaining a racist.

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In the spirit of making some feeble amends, some links Google Reader served up to me on some uplifiting things happening in India recently:

Duniyalive.com » Gay community stages rally in Bhubaneswar

Riot of colours at Delhi’s second gay pride march

India’s transgender strive for rights | GlobalPost

Chennai turns up to support gay march

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Looking for Feminism in the Texicanic World

Categories: all about me, buffy the sexism slayer, evil willow

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas/Fort Worth airport, where my Texas sojourn is finally at an end!

I usually like to take a day to recover after having my face electrocuted, although given the relatively light workload nowadays I don’t really need to. For recovery, you may read “sleep til noon, make a Starbucks run for breakfast, and then take a swim in 100-degree weather.” It also means a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon on Hulu!

I’ve mentioned how much I’ve come to love Buffy. The characters talk like I want to, except even cooler! And they’re all so cute! And I really like Willow, who like yours truly is a redhead. I’m even a bit like her–bookish, intensely interested in learning new things, convinced that knowledge is power.

There’s another side to her, of course–as the series develops, Willow become interested in magic and witchcraft, and later comes out as a lesbian. (Not at the point I’m at in the series, though; right now she and Seth Green’s Oz make an adorable couple. And then there’ the Evil Vampiric Willow, from the episodes The Wish and Doppelgangland–the inhabitant of an alternate world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale, and she and Xander are two of the meanest vampires in town.

I watched both those episodes on this trip, and maybe it’s just that I recently decided to try going off my antidepressants, but I really felt like Evil Willow for a while yesterday–that is, I seemed to be channeling my inner Bad Girl, someone who’s probably dying for a workout right about now–she sees so little sunlight.

In this mood, I decided to run out and find some books on feminism.

I’ll admit that for somebody who writes a blog largely about theoretical issues, I’m not nearly as grounded in feminist theory as I’d like to be. So, having time on my hands, I drove over to the local Barnes and Noble to see what I might be able to turn up in the way of anthologies or Large Omnibus Editions. Of course, I thought that my location might have some difficulties that I might not have in the Great American Metropolis–but Dallas is a surprisingly progressive city, I had been seeing Obama/Biden bumper stickers, and I figured what the hell, Barnes and Noble is homogeneous, that’s what everyone complains about.

As it turns out, I did end up finding bell hooks’ Feminist Theory, but it took some doing.

First I had to locate the Women’s Studies section of the bookstore. This was not immediately apparent, and I wandered through Fiction and Literature, Self-Help, Literary Theory (which in a really incongruous bit of geography, was right next to Westerns) before I found the single half bookcase that was my goal–wedged in between Gay and Lesbian Fiction and African-American Studies. My initial assessment wasn’t promising–there was a guide to mystical female symbols, a copy of Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Other Women, and The Feminine Mystique, which would be good reading from a historical standpoint but not what I was in the mood for.

In contrast, there was a four-bookshelf deep Christianity section, a whole table devoted to Twilight (vampires! cool! with Mormon values! yikes!) and a book called Surrender, wherein a woman whose husband re-enlists in the Army (without telling her) and gets shipped off to Iraq learns how to avoid temptation but submitting to God (and, presumably, her husband’s) will.

By this point I wanted to be wearing my vampiric leather corset, mutter “bored now” in my Evil Willow voice, and start flipping over bookcases.

I didn’t–like I said, bell hooks saved me–but it was a good thing I found her book before I browsed the magazines, because “women’s interests” always grates on my nerves. I mean, seriously? Besides, there was a time I wasn’t a woman, and let me tell you, I was interested.

It didn’t help that on my way to get dinner (Whattaburger: must take advantage of the cuisine de terroir), I passed a Halliburton office.

I think I’m going to adopt Evil Willow as the mascot of this blog. She’d be useful as a counterpoint to, say, Maureen Dowd. I always have such hope for Maureen–I mean, she’s a snarky redhead with a voracious sexual appetite and a ton of power; that’s pretty much my mission statement. Yet she writes stuff like this:

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

Way to go, Madame Dowd! Thank goodness sexism is over, or else I might get upset that even rich and famous women feel the need to practice it!

Sheesh.

Bored now. Wanna hunt.

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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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Blog Note

Categories: Uncategorized

Sorry I haven’t been updating more actively–been hectic here behind the scenes at TSA, plus I’m in Dallas getting my face electrocuted today. There will be posts, I promise.

Also: welcome new readers!

Also: thank you again everyone who has taken the time to comment–I love reading what you have added.

Also Also: thank you everyone who has said nice things about what I’m doing here–it truly touches me, and makes it a delight to keep pushing forward.

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Adventures in Transition, Special Zeitgeist Edition: Where No Trans Has Gone Before

Categories: all about me, gender oh eff me, let's hear it for the ladies

This post, ducks, will be a bit different in that it’s going to be personal and I won’t just be using my personal experience as a way to make a larger point. (Well, not much, anyway.)

I went to my first bridal shower on Saturday. At least, my first one as a woman; I seem to recall showing up to my fiancee’s shower back in the Pona Time before I transitioned.

Like a lot of women, I suspect, the prospect filled me with emotions, most along the lines of “do I have to do this?”

Not initially, though.

I found out that my friend Joanna was going to have a shower when I called her from Thailand, a few days before I left for home. My friend/lackey/McDonald’s wallah had returned to the States, and I finally decided to spend a small fortune and use my cell phone to call folks at home. Joanna was one of the first I called; we’ve known each other since high school, albeit with a nine-year interregnum between graduation and accidentally running into each other in a grocery store.

I wasn’t expecting her to have a shower; she isn’t having a bridal party (dashing my last, best hopes of being a bridesmaid; oh well), but her mom wanted to throw her one and she gave in. I was simultaneously glad to hear that she was having one and bracing myself to not be invited.

Except that I was.

I was very touched, because I felt so–well, accepted. Not so much by Joanna, who’s always been supportive and morphed from friend to closet girlfriend with ease. But it meant a lot to me that she was willing to bring me into such an intimate family occasion, especially one as highly gendered as a bridal shower.

That feeling lasted a few weeks. Then the dread set in.

Events like this play merry hell with my insecurities. It’s times like these when I feel most acutely my lack of a girlhood, the huge gaps in my socialization into ordinary female society. Normally, that doesn’t bother me: after all, I’m not exactly unhappy that nobody told me I shouldn’t study military history, or challenge my teachers, or be bad at math. (I took care of the last one all by myself, ducks.) But times like these, so encrusted with (ok, stupid) tradition and drenched in (ok, ridiculous) mores–these leave me feeling exposed.

Or worse, leave me fearing that I’ll be exposed.

I mean, what am I supposed to bring? What’s the etiquette? Will I make a huge faux-pas? Sure, I can (and did) ask my mom about this stuff, but I can’t help but feel a little foolish: for not knowing, for needing to ask, for feeling that I needed to ask.

As it turned out, I had no worries. Most of the people who came already either knew me or knew about me and were all really lovely. A few had no idea (as I didn’t) what the hell the wishing well was for. I had a pretty good time. Except. (You knew there would be an except, right?)

One of the women was somebody I didn’t really know. We talked and as it turns out she knew my background, and we had a…well, sure, pleasant…little talk about some of my trans stuff. But sitting across from us was a woman I had never met before, a nice lady from Oklahoma. And at one point I noticed her listening to me and the other woman talking.

The next time I heard her refer to me, she used male pronouns.

This sort of thing happens occasionally; my official rule is to give people three screwups before I correct them. But this one put me in a fix: either say something, and draw attention to it, or ignore it and let her think that she was right. (But seriously: there weren’t any men invited, I was wearing a dress, I was wearing high heels for fuck’s sake–how do you think I prefer to be addressed?) I let it go that time. But it wasn’t fun.

I rode the train home with several women from the shower. One of them talked about her boyfriend, and we all chimed in with advice and opinions. It was the very stereotypically female-gendered end to a very stereotypically female-gendered day.

My head was in a bit of a whirl. Part of my transition has been to finally put some distance between me as a trans person and me as a woman. That is, after all these years of being trans, of having that as the most important part of my life, I really want to try and just be for a while. I’ve done a gradual retreat from trans-only spaces, including a message board where I had been a long-time commentator.

But. I had been out with these other women, all or almost all of whom knew, and it wasn’t a big deal; they didn’t treat me any different than any of the other women at the party. So maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, maybe I shouldn’t care who knew and who didn’t? Maybe it didn’t matter.

But why did that make me feel so bad? Was I trying to be something I thought I had to be? (That worked out so well the last time I tried it.) Would I be happier not having anything trans in my life anymore? And if so, what about this blog, which gives me great pleasure to work on, even as it draws me back deeper into a world I am ambivalent about.

I still haven’t figured it out yet. I hope I do. Because being stuck in the twilight zone of genders got old years ago.

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We Have Met the Enemy, and She Is in the Can

Categories: i heart oppression, the transsexual empire strikes back, transphobia: now in blog format

A couple of years ago I took a trip down to Washington D.C. on business. This was before I had really decided to transition, although I was already spending most of my free time presenting female.

I took a trip down to the Mall and had a good time, despite being slightly hassled at the Smithsonian when I bought a mock-vintage pin–for some reason they needed to see ID for my credit card purchase–and was leaving the Metro stop in Arlington on my way back to my hotel when a guy caught up to me.

He was a truck driver who had recognized (as he put it) that I was “really a man” and invited me (implored, maybe is more accurate) to jump up in the cab of his semi for a while. I tried to ignore him as best I could and kept on walking, but I was obviously shaken.

I’d love to say that was the only time something like it has happened to me.

I bring this up not because this isn’t something that can happen to any woman, but because I wanted to point out that he felt doubly entitled to treat me that way because I was trans. And I am in mind of how being trans seems to sometimes double- or treble- misogyny against people because once again Google reader has brought me some love, today courtesy of the blog A Room of Our Own. Please forgive the lengthy excerpt edited to only show excerpts; see comments. But please do go to the whole post…

It is sexist to expect women (female-at-birth) to submit and allow MTFs the use of female restrooms. Why is it the females who are always expected to accommodate the males? Why is it the females who are expected to be all-inclusive? […]

Why should females protect males from males? It is the whole clean up your own backyard business before you go trying to control someone else’s backyard. Are there not so-called progressive males, pomo males that are willing to open the doors to male restrooms for transsexuals/transgenders? Why can’t they protect MTFs in the restroom from the other men? Or, could it be, there is no fucking way to tell predators apart? Yet, radical feminists are wrong and close-minded if we say aloud that all men are suspect. If all men are not suspect, then why don’t MTFs feel safe using male restrooms?

[…] If the MTFs use the male restrooms they may be subjected to harassment, even, rape? Well, exactly how are females supposed to know which of these MTFs will not take that male characteristic/behavior with them when they start using female restrooms? Should we assume/believe that the male’s urge/behavior to rape women is going to disappear simply because his penis is removed?[…]

If MTFs are really interested in being feminists, like so many of them claim to be when they are demanding to barge into female space and be escorted to the front row, why don’t they ask themselves not what females an do for them, but what they can do for females. If they did, and acted on it, then maybe I would believe they are budding feminists. Nevertheless, until then, they are just entitled men wanting to do whatever the fuck they want to do. A real feminist MTF would take one for the team and educate and rehabilitate the men in the restrooms, not run over to female restrooms and expect refuge from their own ilk.

Ah, yes. Absolutely. Forgive me–I had no idea asking for a public accommodation where I might be able to relieve a biological function was asking to be led down to the front row of female spaces. But of course I did! I forgot that I might actually be–sorry, still be–a rapist! That after a night out drinking beer and slamming down buffalo wings with all the rest of the “girls” (because, of course, all us MTF gals are just crotch scratchin’, football-rootin’, hypermasculine weirdos) if I duck into the ladies’ I might suddenly decide to do a little rape while I’m there! Which couldn’t happen if I wasn’t transsexual, because that little cartoon lady in a dress is like garlic to vampires where non-penectomized men are concerned.

And she’s right! Why, if only we crazy male-to-patriarchical-imitations-of-females were decent enough to simply use male facilities–why, nothing bad could happen–could it?

…Perez says she was feeling good, happy to be going to Manhattan to hang out with friends. In hindsight she admits that perhaps wearing a skirt wasn’t the best idea—but even though Perez was staying in a men-only homeless shelter, she couldn’t have known she was about to be raped…

…On the night of the attack, Perez says, she left the Charles H. Gay Shelter around 10, heading for the nearest bus stop. As soon as she walked out the front door, she sensed someone following her. It was a man she knew by sight, a fellow shelter resident who’d been pestering her since her arrival two days earlier. “He was always staring at me, making me uncomfortable,” she recalls. “We have to share showers, and I didn’t like how he looked at me.”

Perez picked up her pace, not wanting to miss the Manhattan-bound bus she could see idling at the curb a few yards down the road. Then, she says, “He came up behind me real fast, and shoved me to the ground. When I tried to get up, he grabbed my hair, yanked my head back, and said, `I want a piece of you.”‘ As her bus pulled away, Perez struggled to her feet and ran wildly after it. She says her attacker was hard on her heels, jabbing her in the back every few feet and driving her to her knees again and again. Realizing escape was impossible, she turned to fight. And then, says Perez, he grabbed her hair, wrestled her into a secluded area, and “he raped me. He pulled up my skirt and he raped me.”

The entire incident took less than 10 minutes, but there was more humiliation to come. When her attacker released her—after threatening to “get you again tomorrow” if she complained—Perez wandered around in a daze, sobbing and bleeding until another bus arrived. She took it into the city and went directly to Harlem Hospital Center. Hospital records show she was treated for cuts and bruises, but that a full rectal exam couldn’t be performed because the patient was “too tense.” The attending doctor noted no “visible tears” to the anus.

Meanwhile, the police had been notified. Perez says that from the minute the cops showed up—first a group of uniformed men and later two detectives—they began belittling her version of the attack. “They kept saying, `Come on, admit it, you weren’t raped. Someone just roughed you up.”‘ Faced with a room full of doubting officers, Perez says she broke down. “I started crying. I was hysterical and could barely talk.” One of the detectives asked her for identification, at which point Perez handed over two ID cards issued by Street Works, a nonprofit for homeless kids. One identifies her as Joey Perez and the other as Josephine Perez.

“The detective looked at both of them, and then stared at me like he was confused. I said, `I’m a transgender woman,’ and he made a face like he didn’t know what that was.” Then, according to Perez, the detective—who, she says, gave her his name and badge number—bent over and took a long look up her skirt. As he straightened, she claims, he mumbled that “anyone with a penis can’t be raped.”

See? Nothing could possibly go wrong! Because, you know, men always have sympathy for anyone born with a penis–look at how Matthew Shepard was just given a gentle ribbing for being gay, or how everyone just had a big laugh when they found out Gwen Araujo was trans, or how after spending a weekend with her, Allen Andrade thought it was “really cool” that Angie Zapata was trans.

Oh, I’m sorry, that’s right–they were all killed. So was Brandon Teena, but you see it’s ok to feel bad about that–he was really a woman, you know.

And speaking of women, Google delivered this up to me today too:

This is why I have talked about artificial wombs. With no mother involved the father can’t lose his kids. However, artificial wombs don’t exist yet, or do they?
I recently discovered that they do in a way. This comment on Novaseeker’s blog talked about the Rotunda Clinic in India. What the Rotunda Clinic in India will do if you pay them a little less than $10,000 is take a man’s sperm, put it together with an egg donor and surrogate mother in India to make a man a baby that is his. There’s a video on their website about a gay couple who did just that. It’s safe to say that the egg donor and surrogate mother being in India won’t be able to access the American legal system so for a man, the baby is completely and totally his. Since the Rotunda Clinic will do this as long as you pay them, a man on his own could do this. If you want you can use an artificial womb today.
Imagine Father’s Days when you never have to worry about losing your kids. This is why artificial wombs will be used by men who want kids in this way. Already men are raising their kids more. This is a natural progression.

You see? I am so the real enemy here, not nutcase guys who want to–literally, and on so many levels–colonize women.

Especially when I’m peeing.

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