Questioning Transphobia

Specifically, the way that many cissexual sex worker rights activists talk about “men, women, and transgendered” as separate categories of sex workers.

This kind of thing has bothered me in the past, but I had trouble addressing it directly for a variety of reasons. However, it did make it hard for me to read some sex worker activist blogs (like Bound not Gagged) because I would frequently trip over statements like this that would imply that trans men and trans women were not really men and women, but “other.”

Anyway, the post:

Posted on Behalf of Robin from SWOP-NYC

To my fellow cis sex workers rights activists:

Men, women, and transgendered people.  Male, female, and trans.  I’m sure most of you recognize these phrases as they are used widely across the sex workers rights movement.  I was at the December 17th march in D.C., and I heard them used there.  I’ve also seen them in press releases and blogs, and even dear friends of mine have used them.  This is a call for it to stop, or at least an attempt at such a call.  Many people call this sort of thing “third-gendering”; it implies that trans women and trans men are not “real” women and men, but are instead a third gender.  People who identify as genderqueer or outside the gender binary certainly do exist, and those identifications should be respected too, but there are also many, many trans men and trans women who identify as men and women, full stop.  To symbolically shunt all of them off to a third gender can come across as marginalizing, and tokenizing, and really faux-inclusive at best.  I understand that many people in this movement do want to be truly respectful in their language and their work of everyone within our community, and so I am writing this to encourage people to move more fully in that direction.

What should you say if you wish to explicitly include trans people in your statements?  It is true that in our society, many people will assume that the phrase “men and women” means “cis men and cis women” unless trans people are explicitly included.  That is unfortunate, but there are ways to work around it without third-gendering people who do not identify as a third gender.  Let’s say you are talking about women, and want to be absolutely clear that you are including trans women in your statement.  You can say, “women, cis and trans.” Or “cis women and trans women.”  Or, “women, including trans women.”  Or even “female-identified people.”  What you should not say, is “women and trans” or “women and trans women,” as though trans women are never included in the category “women.”  Because “women” should always include women who happen to be trans.

Language is fundamental to giving trans people the same respect that cis people take for granted.  It signals how the speaker sees trans people, and can shape the views of both speaker and audience.  The sex workers rights movement needs to respect people’s gender identities–whether cis or trans–and this means that everyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, and everyone who identifies as a man is a man.

I write as a trans ally whose long-term trans partner is bothered by this language, and as someone with trans loved ones and friends for whom I care very much.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this message.

So Renee at Womanist Musings and Monica at Transgriot have started a new talk radio show.  Amazing.  The latest episode features guests bfp and frau sally benz talking about the feminist blogosphere and how women of color are silenced, more in a meta sense than about any specific fracas (Professer whatevs)..  There’s a lot of interesting points raised, like the co-opting of women of color’s work, ally work and commenting and blogging practices.  My favourite line, though, about people blogging was “sometimes people need to keep their five cents.”

Also worth checking:  Sally’s series on Legendary Latinas is quite awesome.

Every year, on November 20, many people – cis people as well as trans people – observe the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Trans people are 16 times more likely to be murdered than the general population, and 1-2 trans people are murdered every month. So far, the TDOR website lists 18 names:

Kellie Telesford, Brian McGlothlin, Gabriela Alejandra Albornoz, Patrick Murphy, Adolphus Simmons, Phaedra, Ashley Sweeney, Sanesha Stewart, Lawrence King, Simmie Williams Jr., Luna, Lloyd Nixon, Felicia Melton-Smyth, Silvana Berisha, Ebony Whitaker, Rosa Pazos, Angie Zapata, and Jaylynn L. Namauu.

Names not yet added to the list include Ruby Molina and Nikki Williams.

For 10 years, our community has gathered to remember our dead on November 20th.

So, enter GLSEN, or the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, proposing TransAction!,

TransAction! – November 21, 2008

GLSEN is proud to be sponsoring a new national day of action: TransAction! This is a day for action, a day for education, celebration, and a day for people who do not identify as transgender to become an ally and stand up for the rights of individuals who have been the victims of harassment, bullying and name-calling because of their gender identity and/or gender expression.

Now, I think suggesting a day like this is by itself not a bad thing, but doing it the day after the Day of Remembrance is in incredibly poor taste, and smacks of allies speaking for trans people. I could be wrong, and trans people might be involved in planning/proposing this day… but even so, November 21st is the wrong day. Further, on Washington State’s GLSEN page,

*November*

11/21/2008, TransAction (Formerly Trans Day of Remembrance)

People who want to become an ally and stand up for the rights of trans people who have been the victims of harassment, bullying, and name-calling because of their gender identity and/or expression shouldn’t be doing this. Trans people have been doing the Day of Remembrance for 10 years. Don’t claim to replace the TDOR. Don’t put your day of celebration on the day after DOR. This isn’t solidarity, it’s appropriation. It’s walking all over what trans people are already doing.

Contact info: glsen@glsen.org or 212-727-0135

h/t Dale62676

Susie Bright’s hosted the carnival here this time. Unfortunately, as with a recent 59th Carnival of Feminists, one of the included links indulges in some trans bashing:

Formerly Pat Califia, he (then she) has had an enormous impact on my life and writing. Califia was writing about sex at a time when that wasn’t, er, uh, the thing to do, and, during the reading, he made frequent and somewhat bitter references the “the feminists” that had stood in his way. Odd that, because it was a lesbian feminist publisher, Naiad Press, that bravely published his first book, Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, in 1980. In it, Califia wrote, “Knowing I was a lesbian transformed the way I saw, heard, perceived the whole world […] We share a rebellious passion for the disinherited one, woman.”

“he (then she)”? Was that even necessary? Is there some kind of assumption that Patrick was really a woman underlying that statement? That when Patrick’s body changed, so did his sense of self? That this is the case for all trans people? That we were essentially members of our birth sex in all ways prior to transition?

Or did you intend to communicate that? And if you didn’t, why did you say it in the first place?

The thing is, Califia wasn’t the only one writing so courageously and honestly. Feminists of all stripes were taking on a culture’s erotophobia and writing words or producing images that rocked the worlds of readers and audiences in the 70’s and 80’s, straight and queer alike. In Canada, there were video artists and filmmakers like myself, as well as Corrie Weingarden, the Kiss ‘n Tell Collective, Lynn Fernie, and writers and theorists like Mariana Valverde, Dionne Brand, Carolyn Gammon, Betsy Warland, Nicole Brossard. The American list of sex-positive feminists writers and theorists reads like an elegy: Annie Sprinkle; Audre Lorde: Joan Nestle; Sarah Schulman; Cheryl Clarke. The holy names of all these artists span my bookshelves; their words have marked my life. They made survival, and better yet, growth and expansion, possible for generations of queer feminists.

Which is true – Patrick wasn’t the only one writing so courageously and honestly. Was he saying that he was? Is anyone placing Patrick in a singular place in this regard?

Why then, does Califia (much like other transmen that I’ve heard or read) define himself so singularly, and so in opposition to feminism? It’s certainly true that identity is relational, and that we often define ourselves by what we’re not – Canadian because we’re not American, queer because not straight, and so on. Sometimes that kind of identity formation can be the sign, as in Canadian identity, of a problem: a crack in the facade of national identity.

Because so many feminists have made it clear over the past 30-40 years that they hate trans people. Pat Califia talks about his early time as a feminist, when Beth Elliott was ejected from the Daughters of Bilitis just for being trans:

As I tried to locate myself in San Francisco’s much larger and more sophisticated lesbian community, I heard the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) had recently purged a male-to-female transsexual who had been an officer in their organization. This event was still a hot topic, and one of the ways I made friends with other dykes was to express my approval of the purge. It made me really angry and unhappy to encounter opposition from a women I respected, a former bar dyke and diesel butch who liked what she heard about the women’s movement and became a feminist. She had actually been present at the stormy meeting where this women was ousted, unlike most of the rest of us who were talking about it, and she had not liked what she saw.

“This doesn’t feel okay to me,” she said. “She worked harder than anybody else in DOB. She gave a lot to that organization. There was no good reason to kick her out. She hadn’t done anything wrong except be a transsexual. You wouldn’t believe some of the vile and vicious things other women said to her. And she just sat and listened to all of it, kept her dignity, and answered them back without losing her temper or calling anybody names.”

I didn’t know what to think about that. Who cared what happened to some man? Who cared if we hurt his feelings? Men had hurt my feelings and much worse than that hundreds of times. By kicking out this impostor, I felt we were simply giving the patriarchy back a little of its own shit. But here was a women I respected, a dyke with good political credentials, older and wiser than me, who was telling me that this was wrong. She called it a witch hunt. She was brave enought to disagree with me. It didn’t change my mind, but I carried this uncomfortable confrontation away with me and thought about it over the course of the next year. I stopped running my mouth about this debate and just llistened.

What I heard made me uneasy. I didn’t have a lot of leftist political education but I knew about McCarthyism. I knew that during the fifities this country had been througuh massive witch-hunts to ferret out queers and Communists. That infamous question, “Have you now or have you ever been …” rang in my ears. And what I saw happening began to feel like a witch-hunt. It reminded me of all the creeps in school banding together on the playground to beat up a new kid who had not yet acquired allies or protectors.

A year later, Robin Morgan called to have Beth ejected from a women’s festival in the middle of Beth’s performance. She wrote about this in her book, Going Too Far, in which she boasted about and demanded the physical, violent ejection of trans women from feminist spaces:

[Are] we, out of the compassion in which we have been positively forced to drown as women, are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist, yes obscenity, of male transvestitism? How many of us will try to explain away–or permit into our organization even–men
who deliberately  reemphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering as “Camp”? Maybe it seems that we, in our “liberated” combat boots and jeans, aren’t being mocked?  No? Then is it “merely” our mothers, and their mothers, who had no other choice, who wore hobbling dresses and torture stiletto heels to survive, to keep jobs, or to keep husbands because they themselves could get no jobs?  No, I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface, the same thing is at work when men wear drag.

How about Janice Raymond?

transsexuality must be morally mandated out of existence.

How about Germaine Greer?

The transsexual is identified as such solely on his/her own script, which can be as learned as any sex-typed behaviour and as editorialized as autobiographies usually are. The lack of insight that MTF transsexuals usually show about the extent of their acceptance as females should be an indication that their behaviour is less rational than it seems. There is a witness to the transsexual’s script, a witness who is never consulted. She is the person who built the transsexual’s body of her own flesh and brought it up as her son or daughter, the transsexual’s worst enemy, his/her mother. Whatever else it is gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. When a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving at a stroke that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more honourable than any female impersonator’s; his achievement is to gag all those who would call his bluff. When he forces his way into the few private spaces women may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with threats and hate mail, he does as rapists have always done.”

How about the arguments aimed directly at trans men? (BTW: Shame on Vancouver Rape Relief for hosting transphobic and trans misogynist articles to justify their discrimination against Kimberly Nixon years ago):

To my eyes and ears, young butch dykes walking the FTM path look and despite vocal alteration, sound , quite like the young butch Dykes many of us have been and known for decades. However, these days we hear mostly their echoes and see only their backs as the flee womanhood. But they are our line, and by rejecting their female bodies along with our shared history, they break our hearts.

Gays and lesbians have struggled for decades to be able to name ourselves and to BE ourselves.  But now, in our own community we are expected to applaud Dykes rejecting womanhood and embrace men taking it over.  In our smart, brave and compassionate community, being “different” is the unifying thread holding us together in a diverse crazy quilt of which queers are justifiably proud.

But while we’re at it, let’s also honour our identity and history.  And our women.  Then maybe our girls won’t be so eager to run.  So lets put away the knives.  Can we talk?

How about the way people involved with Off Our Backs maintained a website dedicated to attacking trans people?

How can a trans person – man or woman – avoid seeing ourselves in opposition to a significant swath of feminism – or more accurately, how can we avoid seeing that a significant swath of feminism is held in opposition to us. Why is this opposition something that Patrick must be held accountable for in the face of nearly four decades of anti-trans hate coming from feminism? Why aren’t you – as the author of this piece – holding feminism accountable for the multitude of attacks upon trans people that have originated from feminists?

Identity itself is so fragmented, so multi-faceted. Defining yourself as just one thing – say, in my case, Ukrainian – would, of necessity require denying queerness, and probably feminism too.

This is a radically impossible conclusion to draw from Patrick’s life and writings. He identifies as many things, as can easily be determined by just looking him up on the internet.

Could it be that transgender politics is in an early kind of postcolonial nationalist stage? Something akin to the ‘lesbian nation’ of the 1970’s?

Could it be that you’re reifying the cis privileged perspective of ignoring the breadth and depth of a person’s existence so as to define that existence by the one trait most visible to you, and then holding the person you’re talking about accountable for your perception?

Still, I expect more from folks like Califia, who are old enough to remember the pain and pitfalls of essentialist identity politics. A fellow writer and ally, I don’t want to be lectured and stereotyped as I sit in the audience. I love Califia’s sex writing, admire his craft, appreciate his charm. I think he needs a good editor. Or maybe as audiences and readers, we need to be more outspoken.

Your pain from being lectured and stereotyped as you sit in the audience is no doubt more profound and meaningful than Patrick’s pain (or my pain, or any other trans person’s pain) from being lectured and stereotyped in every conceivable social context, in writing, on television, in movies, when we’re murdered, when we’re assaulted, when we’re in the news for any reason at all. Your pain as you sat in that audience was more meaningful than the pain that trans people in the United States experienced when Barney Frank insisted that we hadn’t done the education necessary to earn our place at the civil rights table during last year’s ENDA debacle. Your pain is at least equal to the pain that any of us feels when we read – for the first time – the Questioning Transgender website, The Transsexual Empire, Pantomime Dames. Your pain as you sat in an audience and heard Patrick criticize feminism for its transphobic history, was more meaningful than trans people’s pain for being the target of that feminist transphobia, the same as our pain as we were ejected from feminist organizations, feminist collectives, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, from domestic violence shelters.

If the best you can do is reduce that to essentialist identity politics, you’re no ally.

And Susie Bright:  Why did you host this in the carnival? Why is it okay to tear into trans people like this? Does blaming trans people for the oppression we’ve experienced really fall under the category of “sexual freedom and autonomy?”

Bint Alshamsa had some very good news the other day.

I just want to celebrate it a bit.

Renegade Evolution has posted her perspective about all this stuff I’ve been posting about lately.

For those radical feminists who keep asking stuff like, “How can you call yourself a woman when women are telling you that you aren’t?” Aside from it not being a vote, other women acknowledge and respect my womanhood. If I have to pick someone to acknowledge or deny my identity, you’ll lose every time. Plus, I don’t have to.

And now, a few thoughts on this whole transgender thing that blew up while I was chillin’ in the sun…

I don’t get a lot of it. I don’t get a lot of folks objection to the term “cis”. I don’t get how folk who are so all about being women, yet warriors against gender-which yep, is largely constructed by society- but still, love their woman/female-ness and all, love, love, love it, get so riled up when some woman who might have been born with different parts, but felt that woman/female-ness all along just wants to be seen as who and what she is, and accepted as such. Then there are the lists of things that “real women/women born women” (puke) can do that those other women can’t…like have babies. Produce breast milk. Have periods. Except, you know, a lot of cis-women can’t do those things…they can’t have babies, or produce breast milk, and sooner or later they all stop having periods.

Does that make them “not women”? No one seems to want to answer that, but sometimes I feel like the answer out of some might be yes…

I also don’t get how some people who claim so much not to care about appearances get so angry at the appearances transwomen take on, be they gender ambigious or plain or “passing” or down-right girlie.

I don’t get how people who are so against gender turn around and attempt to enforce it themselves.

Read the whole thing!