Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

I think Serano's said (about halfway down this page) that she and her partner at the time had decided to marry before she was certain that she was going to transition, so the wedding seems more like a complicated emotional, legal, and practical situation than a ruse (not to read too much into your choice of "clever" there). I wasn't part of the Bay area scene in 2000, though, so I'm speaking about this from a distance.

...Though also, obviously, the ethics of anyone marrying where same-sex marriage is illegal are murky, and Yasmin Blair's arguments for the political regressiveness of state-sanctioned marriage have to be considered. (I'm sorry if this is taking your comment too seriously!)

(That should be Yasmin Nair, not Blair.)

so riverside, CA has decided thursday is the "lgbt" day of rememberance, as opposed to the trans day of rememberance

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/14382_723118074430940_4028475351544180271_n.jpg?oh=3e1a86910a1fbfa2ec5d326d123b7861&oe=54E5B5E8&__gda__=1423360183_742d174cc33f73bef4a8622645b52a69

How inclusive!!! Even Transgender Day of Remembrance as it stands is frustrating in its reticence about race and class (although at least at the TDoR vigil in my town this week I got to say that we also need to talk about structural violence, the violence of the prison industry and policing, and the reasons why the people killed by transphobic violence are overwhelmingly often trans women of color and trans women supporting themselves through sex work).

There's a solid essay about some of the limitations of TDoR here (http://www.autostraddle.com/remembering-us-when-were-gone-ignoring-us-while-were-here-trans-women-deserve-more-264792/), and also some useful comments on Morgan M Page's twitter feed in the last few days (https://twitter.com/morganmpage).

Anything that tries to play the whole "oppression olympics" game by suggesting that "trans men get a free pass" is just... well that's one way to get me to not read past the first paragraph.

I'm truly done with any kind of agitating for the rights of one marginalised group of people that comes by dancing on the backs of another group of marginalised people. I'm just done with it.

It's be one thing if they rephrased that as something more like "Trans Men's very existence is erased by the tendency to not-really-recognise their maleness in feminist spaces" but instead, that whole "gets a free pass" bullshit is just... OK, this is one more "Oh Noes! The Trans Dialogue Is Not Perfectly Centred Around The Experiences Of Trans Women" exercise, which, y'know, really, no thanks.

That's a fair reaction, but in this specific context I think it's worth acknowledging that transphobic violence doesn't affect all trans people in the same way--the overwhelming majority of the victims of transphobic murders are working-class trans women of color, so there's a strong case to be made for foregrounding intersectional issues at TDoR, which struck me as what was useful about that Autostraddle essay. (For example, I can recall how disturbed I was by the murder of Gwen Araujo in 2002, and how knowing about that and other killings contributed to my trying to bury my sense of my gender rather than come to terms with it, but I also have to recognize that, as a middle-class white person in a university town at this point in my life, there are many forms of violence from which I'm relatively sheltered.) I'm going to avoid generalizing on the gender politics of queer and trans communities, because I haven't been transitioning for long and because the queer and trans community in my current town is small enough that its hierarchies seem nebulous so far (and most of the trans men I know here are pretty chill). I can't speak to conditions in the Austin community.

Yeah, and I did see a lot of interesting and salient discussion on and around TDoR, especially on twitter, about how transphobic violence disproportionately affects Trans WoC. Which is a completely legitimate point!

Which is why it so disappointed me to open up that article, and literally in the first 2 paragraphs, boom, goes in with this whole "trans men get a free pass" BS which is not just a complete misreading of the relation of trans men to ~feminism~ but is just wilfully off topic - and a sidetrack diversion from highlighting those legitimate intersectional issues. (And then we are dragged off into what looks like this in-fighting quibbling, instead of addressing what she said we were going to talk about.) It is always important to foreground intersectional issues! But throwing trans men under a bus is not "foregrounding intersectional issues", it is erasing them.

It's the kind of deep-level conceptual error that makes me suspicious of engaging with a person's arguments further, in case they are just as deeply flawed.

The issues that trans women and trans men and non-binary people face are different - and yet related. And yes, it would be completely foolish and illogical to say "erasure is as bad as violence" because obviously violence is much worse than erasure, and violence disproportionately affects trans women and gender non-conforming men. (Though that is not to say that violence *never* affects trans men and gender non-conforming women, because, wow, would that ever be news to me! It just does not happen on anything like the same scale or severity.) But the idea that erasure somehow... does no harm? No.

(I mean, you want to talk about personal experience and how that contributes to people burying their sense of gender... when I was a teenager in the 80s and first wrestling with issues of gender, there was literally NO INFORMATION about what transgender might mean for FAAB people. It was interesting to see in Leslie Feinberg's obit, like, why had I not read this book when I was young enough for it to have made a difference - it came out in 1993, a couple of years after I had already fallen out of any queer community where I would have encountered it. But, y'know, it's pointless to be ragey about not being able to find the information that you needed at a point in such distant past.)

I'm going to be away from the internet for most of the weekend, but I want to respond to this more substantively before long--I can't speak about transmasculine experience, but I'll just say for now that in my own experience, having access online to trans women's writing about their lives and conditions that wasn't primarily intended for the cis gaze (so, for example, writing by Imogen Binnie, Elena Rose (Little Light), Casey Plett, Anna Anthropy, and others) was really helpful to me in coming to terms with myself and seeing the limits of the True Trans Narrative, so yeah, cultural erasure is definitely harmful and isolating and complicit with the marginalization of trans identities in its own way.

...Though, obviously, erasure also looks significantly different for trans women (where it tends to be a matter of the massive proliferation of dehumanizing or misleading or cisnormative representations rather than a lack of available information) than it does for trans men or for nonbinary people.

...And also, obviously, there are also important differences in the history of trans men's communities and discourses (I think in part because it took longer for trans men to secure relatively accessible medical treatment and start effectively organizing? most of Lou Sullivan's work took place in the eighties, iirc). I think it can be worth interrogating cases in which specific queer communities seem to reproduce hegemonic values (such as privileging "straight-acting" or masculine-of-center expression) but I can see why you found that essay off-putting, and I wish you'd had other resources available to you when you were first dealing with gender (growing up closeted-trans in Louisville in the 90s was isolating enough, but contending with all of this in the 80s sounds much harder).

As a postscript, Samantha Allen has a potentially less polarizing essay on TDoR and the dynamics of transphobic violence today: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/transgender-dead-and-forgotten/

Thanks for taking the time to reply, OWS. And thanks for taking the time to try to understand where I'm coming from.

Something that is important for me to remember is this:

-when I am responding with that mix of resignation-anger-eyeroll-fuckthis, that response is coming from a place of trauma.

-but similarly, I need to remember that when trans women are writing the things that provoke this reaction in me, that writing is also coming from a place of trauma.

Trauma is not an easy place to speak from. It generates strong emotions, it can even warp reactions and twist the perceived intentions that can be read in the speech. In some cases, it's important to read beyond the trauma to hear the message, because both the message, and the trauma that has shaped it, are important.

There are so many places - as someone (probably Rev?) said above - where it feels like there are, even within 'LGBT', that there are two (or more) cultures that have been jammed awkwardly together. That there is Feminist/Queer Theory space on one side, and Gay Male Space on the other, and although they should have so much common ground, in practice they have diverged so widely that they are unintelligible to one another.

But on the other hand, it feels like there's this cloud of 'masculine of centre' queerness on one side and a cloud of 'feminine of centre' queerness on the other. Which, although not inherently inimical to one another, are pointed in such different directions that their 'agendas' (for lack of a better word) appear incompatible.

Hegemonic values are inescapable: the masculine is privileged, the feminine devalued, scorned, rendered secondary.

So where there is this 'cloud of masculine centredness' it *appears*, to outsiders, like these people have access to ~hegemonic privilege~. In practice, it does not work like that. Whistling girls, crowing hens and FAAB who are masculine of centre have their own special world of shit thrown at them. You want to talk erasure, there is not even a *word*, like the useful and catchy term 'transmysogyny' to describe the unique brand of shit that trans men and masculine of centre FAAB experience. How do you describe an experience that does not even have a name?

(This has caused so much fuckery in my life - I have spent my life interrogating, and being interrogated by others, wondering, do I actually *feel* masculine of centre, or do I just want access to male privilege? At this point in my life, it no longer matters. Even if I were to wake up tomorrow with a penis and and one of those long, thin male bodies I covet so much, having lived 40+ years being treated as if I were a woman, I would *still* not have access to certain aspects of Male Privilege on a psychological level.)

Femme is devalued by everyone, because of the privileging of Masculinity. However, there is a difference between 'femme is devalued because: privileging of masculinity' and 'a masculine of centre FAAB person viewing 'femme' as a pink prison with which they have imprisoned against their will from birth and are actively rejecting in pursuit of an authentic life'. They are not the same thing at all, even if they may *appear* similar to trans women and femme of centre MAAB people looking from outside.

We can talk about this, and we can interrogate the hegemonic problems induced by being masculine of centre in a male-privileging world.

But what I also want, is for Trans Women and femme of centre MAAB to interrogate the common or garden misogyny that they so often bring to the table! Our society is soaking in misogyny and sexism! That shit gets *everywhere*. Trans women are not exempt from internalising misogyny any more than cis women are! Trans women do *not* get some special 'get out of misogyny free' card if they add 'cis' before 'woman' when complaining about 'shit girls do' (that boys also do, but boys are never criticised for). And I do acknowledge that there are deep problems within feminism regarding trans women. That is a legitimate complaint! But! But, but, but!

But I am fucking *tired* of "Feminism" being held to standards that Cis Men are never held to! I am not even a Cis Woman, but I am still tired of criticisms of 'Cis Women' that are never, ever applied to 'Cis Men'.

I read pieces on violence against trans women. I read TDoR pieces that talk about the terrible litany of assaults and deaths. And then sometimes I read a nice, neat little conclusion about how feminist spaces need to be more accepting towards trans women. And there's this disconnect, like, yes. I agree that something needs to be done about violence against trans women. I agree that feminist spaces need to be more trans-women-inclusive. But reading this litany of violence, and counting the number of times the words 'women' or 'feminist' get used (search is good for this) and counting the number of times the word 'man' or 'men' gets used (usually 0). You know... it would not be a leap to come to the conclusion that there is some cabal of Cis Feminist serial killers going about the world murdering trans women. Because this is what is being problematised - 1) violence and 2) feminism.

Who the fuck is going about the world murdering trans women? Is it Feminists? (Well, B*g Br*nn*n excepted) No. We talk about the police that fail to investigate, the judges that fail to prosecute, the unfair sentences - all of those people involved are supposed to be Feminists? No, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, the majority of them are Cis Men. So why, why, why, in this list of "people who are oppressing or failing to support trans women" is the number one target *never* Cis Men? What about the men? Why do they seem to get a 'free pass' from trans women? Why do we never discuss the role of Cis men in Cis Oppression?

Because that's how sexism works. "Feminists" or "Cis Women" is a singular group, all of whom are responsible for the actions of all them and if one feminist is trans-exclusionary that means all of feminism is up for critique and problematisation. But "Cis Men", oh no they are all individuals, individually responsible for their individual actions, even when those actions include, as a group, the assault and murder of many, many trans women. "Cis Men' as a group are not responsible for the violence against cis women, or the violence against trans women, even though the majority of that violence, is committed by cis men. Why do cis men not get named, as the source of that violence? Picking on or problematising women is easy. Picking on Cis Men, not so easy.

Name the fucking problem. Cis Male Violence. Who kills trans women? Cis Male Violence. Why are 'feminist spaces' often closed to MAAB people? Cis Male Violence. Wow, who gets the eternal fucking free pass forever? Cis Male Violence.

Tired of it. Feel like a broken record. Speaking from a place of trauma. Not fun.

I mean, I get it, about the intersectionality. That white supremacy means that PoC are devalued, therefore the deaths of trans PoC are ignored.

Feminism has a huge race problem! Because of the privileging of Feminism within the western world, that is riddled with white supremacy, and that shit gets *everywhere*.

The intersectionality that Morgan brought up - in terms of how many working class trans people end up in Sex Work. And Sex Workers are devalued in our culture (because of a complex knot - often involving class and gender and christianity). Therefore the deaths of PoC trans people who are working class, and engaged in Sex Work are double, triple, quadruple devalued and ignored.

There is a long dialogue within Feminism about Sex Work, and that issue is far from straightforward or resolved, because guess what, Feminism exists within that same space of the complex knot of class and gender and christianity which devalues sex workers because that shit gets *everywhere*. Like, I do understand why feminism gets brought up, given its problematic relation to these issues.

I don't want to seem like I'm ignoring the issues that were brought up in the series of articles, because I need to vent my personal... crusade against endless double standards. I acknowledge those issues. I just want to point out that the same shit that gets *everywhere* is also there, too.

(Sorry for the word vomit)

doubly sad news from my home state: Transgender woman dies suddenly, presented at funeral in open casket as a man

enraging

Seriously, can we try to refrain from turning this into another "thread of link-dump outrage", please?

Like, if a non-depressed person went into the "depression and what it's like" thread and posted links about terribly depressed people killing themselves in awful ways, it would probably be recognised that this was not a productive or helpful way to act.

Similarly, I understand that you mean well, but going into a thread for trans* people to talk about our lives and the issues we are facing, and posting "terrible, outrageous and enraging things happen to trans* people" might not be the best or most helpful use of this space?

Sorry. Should've known better.

fuck you branwell

you are such a fucking hypocrite

i'm sorry for that, i get what you're saying.

there's a cultural / geographical element to that particular story that makes it worth sharing. not everyone is as advanced on these issues as you are.

it's one more reminder to get a will
my friend from twin who shared this went to hs with her
shoulda just kept it to social media

shouldn't have even said that
this is not an area where i can comment
:/
sorry again

It's not an area where "you can't comment*" it's just a request to think about what you're sharing, and why, and where.

*except you, Matresslessness, because seriously, if "fuck you" is the level of your discourse, please leave. (Or just make another fakey-fake "I've chaaaanged" non-apology and do nothing about controlling or moderating your responses to things and people that make you angry. Because that is what you do. I do not understand why you continue to get a free pass on this board, but I have nothing for you, and have no wish to interact with you any further.)

It's entirely possible that ILX needs a space for expressing outrage and sadness at atrocities affecting trans people! Maybe someone should create *that* space instead of using this one all the time!

Something OWS said above really got me thinking, about how 9 times out of 10, when you see a trans woman in the news, it's something *bad*. It's something awful, it's a story about murder or suicide or something *terrible*. And there's a need for a space to express "this stuff is awful".

But there is a *greater* need, I feel, for a space where trans* people can be just normal people, living our normal lives, discussing our stuff, with the same amount of respect and understanding and tolerance as people discussing other difficult, personal stuff which is hard to express (especially on the internet, with people shouting "fuck you" at you for no reason while you are making polite requests). Respect us, and respect our space.

I have asked before, on this thread, for people not to link-dump. If you have something to share, say why you're sharing it. ("This is one more reminder to get a will" would have been a salient thing to say.) If you are unable to stop yourself, link-dumping, try to balance "50th trans woman murdered horribly this year" stories with "Laverne Cox wins 17th award for awesomeness" and "local trans boy elected homecoming king" stories. Maybe. I dunno.

K I have a good story, my student is going by his preferred name and pronoun for his byline for our school newspaper, he is so rad.

(this is the same trans* student I've discussed here before.)

That's great news about your student, m bison! Belatedly, I want to respond to a few points from your posts, Branwell, though I feel like doing so would be easier in the context of a conversation than in an asynchronous medium like ILX. (The questions you raise about the purpose of this thread and whether we need a separate trans politics/lamentation thread are also valid, but I'll leave them aside for now.)

...what I also want, is for Trans Women and femme of centre MAAB to interrogate the common or garden misogyny that they so often bring to the table! Our society is soaking in misogyny and sexism! That shit gets *everywhere*. Trans women are not exempt from internalising misogyny any more than cis women are! Trans women do *not* get some special 'get out of misogyny free' card if they add 'cis' before 'woman' when complaining about 'shit girls do' (that boys also do, but boys are never criticised for). And I do acknowledge that there are deep problems within feminism regarding trans women. That is a legitimate complaint! But! But, but, but!
But I am fucking *tired* of "Feminism" being held to standards that Cis Men are never held to! I am not even a Cis Woman, but I am still tired of criticisms of 'Cis Women' that are never, ever applied to 'Cis Men'.

I know you were speaking generally rather than in direct response to my posts or those TDoR articles, but I guess the notion of trans women being broadly hostile toward feminism is fairly alien to my experience (although, yeah, everybody living under patriarchy needs to struggle to recognize and undo their internalized misogyny). Most of the criticisms of TERF arguments I've seen distinguish between those fringe positions and feminism more generally. I generally tend to think that it's better not to engage TERFs when it's not necessary, but there are historical reasons (i.e. the 70s through the early 90s, when trans women were being purged from many lesbian communities and women's spaces with the approval of figures like Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, and Janice Raymond) why their claims, while no longer very relevant to feminism today, can't entirely be safely ignored, and TERF arguments are on a continuum with institutional violence against trans women even if they aren't at this point significant drivers of that violence. (Also, just speaking from my own experience: the trans women I know are way more likely to express frustration with men, or with cis people in general, than with cis women or with feminists. Most of the trans women I know consider themselves feminists, and my own situation would be considerably more difficult to deal without feminist critiques of misogyny and gender normativity, even if there was a time in my life when I was internalizing TERF discourses out of sheer self-loathing, and using TERF discourse to convince myself that transitioning would just be appropriating women's experience.)

Femme is devalued by everyone, because of the privileging of Masculinity. However, there is a difference between 'femme is devalued because: privileging of masculinity' and 'a masculine of centre FAAB person viewing 'femme' as a pink prison with which they have imprisoned against their will from birth and are actively rejecting in pursuit of an authentic life'. They are not the same thing at all, even if they may *appear* similar to trans women and femme of centre MAAB people looking from outside.

I think there are a lot of ways in which trans women and trans men or transmasculine people can speak past one another; part of that is the working of transmisogyny concurrent with the transphobia experienced by trans men and masculine FAAB people, and part of that has to do with the different ways masculinity and femininity signify and are visible under patriarchy. I'm aware my relationship to femme expression would be different if it had been forced on me growing up rather than presented as something debased or off-limits (there are obviously all sorts of ways in which normative gender socialization is painful and oppressive); I just bristle against cases in which masculinity is treated as generally "natural" or "desirable" in a way that's continuous with the systematic devaluing of women and femininity. I've read complaints about how this has played out in some queer circles--for example, Imogen Binnie, Julia Serano, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore have all written about transmisogyny among Bay Area queer spaces in the 2000s. (In Binnie's essay here, for example: http://www.keepyourbridgesburning.com/2013/09/we-see-through-you-18/.) As I've said, though, I haven't experienced that in my own town so far, and I want to avoid generalizing about queer spaces I haven't been part of. I'm also aware that masculine-of-center FAAB people are expressing themselves in the way most authentic to them, even if in my own experience there is nothing I see worth salvaging in masculinity. There's another irony here: my own presentation at this point tends to read as soft butch if I'm even perceived as a woman at all, and one of the hardest--and ongoing--parts of transition for me has been trying to work out what aspects of myself are, for lack of a better word, authentic, and which were learned on the basis of fear but have come to seem natural.

Anyway, this is all obviously endlessly complicated and often painful to talk about, but I felt like your posts deserved some response. (I want to come back to your point about how dysphoria is situated in relation to questions of social privilege at some point.)

That is cool, m bison, and he sounds awesome. :)

OWS, I think we got some wires crossed here. (Which is, admittedly, pretty easy when I'm on a tear.) It was never my intention to state anything like "trans women are hostile to feminism." Because the majority of trans women I've known or read are pretty pro-feminism; and they have had valid (and constructive) criticisms of feminism. It's just weird to read articles about TDoR which talk about trans women being murdered, followed by "feminism needs to change" rather than "men need to stop murdering women."

I've read that Imogen Binnie thing about 3 times and I'm sorry but I think it's a confused mess. But hey, LiveJournal is for being a confused mess.

She seems to feel kinda angry and disappointed that she moved to San Fran and the lesbian scene there was kinda... uh... butch? That the trans man scene was full of transmasculinity? If it's not for you, it's not for you, honey, but you don't seem to understand that trans men have had to fight for the same space to shout "I am trans and I AM a man!" from their jockstraps? That trans men might not be acting that way because masculinity is more ~natural~ or ~desirable~ but because expressing their masculinity is as important to them as femininity to a trans woman! (and also often denied to them, in oppressive and sometimes violent ways!)

I typed out more but I deleted it because I don't really feel like there's any point to hammering this stuff. There have been many, many (male-coded) Gay Spaces that have felt awful and exclusionary and humiliating for me to inhabit. But the difference is, I never felt like I had any right to feel entitled enough to ask that they be centred around *my* needs. I just read them as "not for me" and didn't stick around.

I need to not think about this for a while. It's starting to just feel like shitty in-fighting.

I think the point of Binnie's essay was pretty straightforward (that the queer spaces she was in in the bay seemed to marginalize her and other trans women while claiming to be OK with trans people), and I don't think she was asking for them to be centered around her needs so much as explaining why she found them alienating, but I won't belabor that. I'll be away from the internet for the next few days, so to continue this thread on a more conciliatory note, here are a couple of links on Feinberg and Stone Butch Blues, one on sex work and the other, more light-hearted, on casting a hypothetical adaptation:
http://titsandsass.com/remembering-stone-butch-blues-pledge-to-sex-workers/
http://the-toast.net/2014/07/30/casting-stone-butch-blues/

(I was also kinda gunnysacking in that post, when I was making that snipe about 'trans women need to address their own internalised misogyny' - like, that was in response to something unrelated, which wasn't posted on this thread, but had made me angry. I know from experience, should not post to ILX when I'm worked up. (I mean, really, I should know better than to post to ILX at all.) Because inside, I am reacting emotionally to a really angry-making thing, while trying to more calmly discuss a more ambivalent thing requiring more equanimity. I am sorry for doing that.)

And, no, I don't think that the point of Binnie's essay was that straightforward, but I am not going to argue it any more.

love this photo gallery
http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/02/24/photos-transgender-elders-show-us-meaning-survival

the former Bruce Jenner is a privileged attention whore/idiot who does not need to be 'supported'.

responding to ghost posters

I don't think I need to tell you where the flag post is.

No interest in her personal story or w/e but it's kind of a watershed moment for trans people + a huge step in making the USA in particular a safer place for transpeople, no?

don't be an asshole, bill.

always

i dig that jenner's celebrity / wealth / glamour makes her seem more untouchable and inexplicable than her gender ever could, but fgti basically otm.

I was talking to my 90 year old mom a few days ago and one way or another Orlando by Woolf came up in the conversation. As the subject meandered on from there I discovered that she was unaware of the name Christine Jorgensen, or the fact of sex reassignment surgery. So, she may be in a small minority, but the availability of such surgery is not universal knowledge and some publicity about it is not useless to those who may never have heard of it before.

for someone who already had a long career as a public figure to make this transition is a pretty huge cultural moment, imho. that said i wish that there was less attention & importance placed on the surgical aspect of her transition in terms of the media / the public accepting & recognizing her gender.

an actual trans athletc hero:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards

but hey, every era gets the symbol it desrves i guess.

They look a lot alike! is my stupid contribution.

Fwiw I mostly agree with dr. Morbs re "privelaged attention whore" status. I mean, she certainly is that but something more interesting and progressive may result.

Or may not.

In other words that was a non post. But attention whoring has many levels and degrees.

can we be grown ups and stop using 'attention whore' it is the pits