Still Black, a view of black transmen

Check out the trailer. Visit the site. Consider donating.

I’m really looking forward to the finished product.

Curse you, WordPress, for fighting my attempt to post this every step of the way. :(

Three Blog Carnivals: Allies, Disability, Sexual Freedom and Autonomy

Cripchick’s hosting the 37th edition of the Disability Blog Carnival:

Disability Identity: What Do You Think??

The Disability Activist Collective, a group of disability activists working to create change within the disability community by shifting focus towards culture and identity, is currently collecting pieces (poetry, art, essays, videos, blog posts) on disability culture, community and identity in hopes of creating a website or hub on disability culture. This carnival is your chance to participate in the building of it!

This edition will focus on disability identity and culture in all its forms (i.e. radical disability pride, understanding disability through various frameworks, disability intersecting [coming together] with other identities, dealing with pain, etc.).

The deadline to submit something is officially May 4th though I will keep adding people in through a rolling basis. The blog carnival will go on air May 8th. You can submit things by leaving a link in a comment to this post, emailing me it at consciouslycrip [at] gmail [dot] com, or using the blogcarnival.com tech.

The Angry Black Woman is hosting a blog carnival for allies:

I’ve been thinking about many things since the whole “Thank You, White People” post debacle and subsequent influx of white supremacists who seemed to come here with the intent of saying, “You thought you dealt with racists on a daily basis? HA! We’ll show you what REAL racism is!” And they did. One of my reactions was to say that for every white ally who acknowledged racism and worked to fight against it, there were 20 others wishing to drag us back to Jim Crow and worse. Then smart commenter Jackie said:

Thing is, I don’t believe there’re 20 of them for every one of us (black or white or other) who wants to make things right; I think there’s actually somewhat fewer of them. But for each white supremacist (and for each person of any color who wants to make things right) there are 20 nice, well-meaning, but privileged and entitled white people who thing “racism is bad” but have no idea whatsoever that real racism exists, or what it’s like to be a target of it. Or how much they have benefited from their European coloring, and from not having centuries of slavery and legally enforced poverty limiting every aspects of the parents’ and grandparents’ and great-great-great-grandparents’ lives.

This got me thinking about those white folks who exist in that liminal space where they are against racism but don’t understand how it works and get defensive, hurt, and freaked out when folks point out how they benefit from it without trying. We saw a lot of that on the Thank You thread before the others showed up. I am wondering how you turn that kind of person into an ally. I’m wondering if maybe I cannot simply because, when they read my words, they are so filled with defensiveness and perhaps guilt, nothing I say can get through. If they can’t listen to me, can they maybe listen to other White people?

And that got me wondering if this was true for any kind of ally. Is it easier to understand oppression, to move past guilt and on to useful dialogue, etc., if the person explaining these things to you in-depth is a person like yourself? White or male or straight or Christian or whatever? I don’t know. But as this is the Internet, it should be easy to figure out.

The deadline is May 5th, and I apologize for my own atrocious lateness in posting about it.

And finally, the Second Feminist Carnival for Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is up at Labyrinth Walk.

 

I am in love with Renegade Evolution

Ren wrote this post in response to the discussion on Bastante Already about radical feminism.

[W]e all get told how much our activism of any sort does not matter. If you happen to not be against, or are even ambivalent towards, or maybe involved in sex work (and not the perfect poster girl victim), what you do doesn’t mean shit. It’s nothing, not good enough; after all, you haven’t seen what they’ve seen, and you are enabling it, even personally making it happen! It doesn’t matter if you bust your ass every day trying to find a woman on the run from an abusive ex a place she can afford to live. It doesn’t matter if you spend hours working with lesbians who have been kicked repeatedly by society trying to help them feel comfortable in their own skins. It doesn’t matter if you’ve scrubbed the blood and grey matter of a woman shot by her boyfriend off your floors or stood over the casket of a co-worker killed by her boyfriend in a jealous rage. It does not matter if you’re a transwoman who has been beaten or raped. It doesn’t matter if you’ve fucking lived aspects of any of these lives on your own in order to put food on the table and come through it realizing that every persons situation is different and that there is no universal experience when it comes to all women. It does not matter. You’re not good enough. Right enough. Pure enough. What you do means nothing, no matter how much of that nothing you do or how much of that nothing you’ve lived or how much of that nothing has helped other people.

Yeah, that.

The radical feminists I talk about in this blog, who write the most transphobic things are the same radical feminists who say the above - who dismiss the work Ren does because Ren does sex work - because she’s a stripper. Their bigotry is not limited to just one or two things, but a spectrum of experiences and lives that they vehemently disapprove of - BDSM, pornography, women of color who actually speak for themselves, women with disabilities. Anyone who raises uncomfortable questions about the definition of oppression in radical feminist terms - that the root of all oppressions is gender, that women are invariably oppressed, and that all these things represent oppression. BDSM reifies heteronormative patriarchal sex roles. Transsexualism reifies the patriarchal gender binary. Pornography makes women nothing more than sex objects. All women have a common experience of oppression as women, and so the pain that a black woman suffers when the violation she suffers is defined as “not really rape” and “a theft of services” is the same pain that a black woman from Mali suffers when she is refused political asylum to protect her daughters from FGM. It’s the same pain that a Russian woman who’s been trafficked into sex slavery suffers. It is the same pain that a latina woman suffers when she is separated from her daughter before deportation. These are all the same pain that a white middle-class woman feels when she reads about these stories. Or so some radical feminists might say.

This denies that all women have our own diverse experiences, that we experience life differently, that we’re oppressed in many ways because of race, disability, class, and sexual orientation. That my experience as a white woman is not the same as a black woman’s, or that black woman’s experiences are not the same as mine because she is cissexual and I am transsexual. That we have intersections that stack and multiply the social complications we face, and that it is impossible to separate “race” from “gender” for women of color, or “disability” from “gender” for women with disabilities.

Instead of looking for a common thread that binds all women together, we’re better served trying to address the real experiences that real women live. A form of feminism that runs women who don’t share that common thread out on a rail isn’t really a feminism I can get behind. Especially not one whose proponents try to silence voices like these.

Some Links

Queen Emily describes what being transgender means to her. I need to post my own, soon.

Drakyn posts his description here.

Nexy responds to Emily’s post here.

Shiva describes the natural alliance of disability and transgender activism. I intend to cover this myself, but I didn’t get this done by today as I’d planned.

Monica Roberts continues her Transgender Day of Remembrance posts with Remembering Our Dead.

Gorgon Queen expresses some common frustration about the transphobia coming from certain prominent gay men.

Cara on Feministe posts about the transgender politician sued for fraud. I covered this somewhat, but didn’t comment much. Cara has a lot to say that I happen to agree with.

Brownfemipower, BlackAmazon, Donna, and Sylvia respond to Hugo Schwyzer resurrecting the Full Frontal Feminism controversy. The discussion about how women of color are marginalized in feminism is very to the point.

Miss Crip Chick wrote a poem everyone should read.

Kim at Bastante Already explains why she turned away from online radical feminism.

Dw3t-Hthr of Letters from Gehenna posts regarding mental health, sexual assault, and the personal being political.

Renegade Evolution discusses pornspeak, how some women react to it, and some women try to use it as a weapon.

Lesbianism. It’s serious business.

The Conflation of Gender and Racial Impersonation

I had a hard time picking one today. I’d grabbed all the low-hanging “Questioning Transgender” fruit in previous sweeps, leaving only a few articles that touch on anything I haven’t covered before. Trans-Race is one of the few I haven’t touched that attacks transgender people directly, and is a topic I’ve skirted a few times - the comparison of transitioning into the other sex to “blackface.”

This is actually a fairly common comparison, made as if it were completely reasonable and acknowledges all possible realities surrounding race and gender, but it’s really just an offensive form of appropriation. I’ve linked to Queen Emily’s Race and Transness article before, which covers the topic fairly thoroughly (and is why I’ve held off on this for the past two weeks).

Angelita Manzano’s article immediately begins with an imposed fallacy, a false argument she applies to trans people:

The claim is often made that claiming there is a category called “woman” is a way of reinscribing sexist categories, and we should be trying to get rid of sexist categories, so let’s just deny “woman” exists. I’m saying that claiming that there is no difference between someone born with a vagina and raised as a girl, and someone born with a penis and raised as a boy (that the latter may simply choose to belong to the category of woman) is analogous to saying that there is no difference between someone born and raised Black and someone born and raised white–that the latter may simply choose to belong to the category of Black.

She implies right off the bat that trans women claim there is no difference between a trans woman and a cis women, and immediately makes a racial comparison. The problems with this paragraph are:

• Saying that claiming a trans woman can really be a woman is like claiming that a white person can “simply choose” to become a black person. She’s implying, as so many radical feminists like to do when discussing trans people, that the decision to transition is a matter of “simply choosing.”
• That there’s no difference between using hormones and surgery to change sex and living full time in the social role of “woman” and the simple act of asserting that one is now a black person.
• That manhood and womanhood derive from the penis and the vagina, respectively, and have nothing to do with how you’re socialized, how you’re treated, how you’re expected to act, and so on.

Accepting any of these require denying the lived realities trans people experience as well as what it takes to change sex. It also conveniently ignores the realities of gender and race by conflating them into basically the same thing, and tries to make the idea of changing sex sound like a frivolous decision.

It’s necessary for her to establish the idea that race and gender can be conflated like this so she can write the following paragraph without immediately losing her (presumably unfavorable-toward-trans people) audience. The entire second paragraph is about how it’s not possible to destroy racism by simply switching to a different race - for her, as a woman of color, to make herself more white. Now, this is not not unreasonable: You don’t destroy racism by acting more like the people with the racial privilege. Condoleeza Rice and Michelle Malkin make that much clear. Of course, this has nothing to do with why trans people choose to transition, but as we can see, Angelita believes it does, having absorbed the transphobic radical feminist teachings rather well:

Similarly, we can say there’s no such thing as gender, and in a certain sense, that is true–gender is not a biological fact. However, if we deny that there is such a thing as “woman” (that we can just choose to live whatever gender we want) that means that there is no such thing as “man”–i.e., there is no class of people (men) that have unequal power and privilege over another group of people (women). In other words, by denying the reality of women and men, you deny the reality of patriarchy. So if I chose to live my life as a man that would do nothing to destroy the system of male supremacy. And destroying male supremacy is what I think feminism is about: we must get rid of patriarchy in order to get rid of gender roles.

Now she brings it around, equating trans people’s approach to gender with white people who claim to be color-blind with regards to race. This paragraph is ridiculous. The existence of men and women as discrete categories is a reality that trans people have to negotiate constantly. We can’t deny the existence of men and women because this is central to what we have to live with. Transitioning isn’t about denying anything, about supporting or ignoring the patriarchy. It is not a political act - it is an act of survival.

She also criticizes transition because it won’t destroy the patriarchy. But, really, who seriously claims it would? Does open heart surgery threaten the patriarchy? How about insulin injections? Maybe taking antibiotics to cure strep throat? Hormones and surgery are medical treatments for trans people. Transitioning has nothing to do with politics by itself. It may inform trans people’s politics (and it really should - transition moves one down the social ladder several steps just for being trans), but it is not defined by or as politics.

This is emblematic of the peculiar radical feminist view that “the personal is political” means that everything personal must be interpreted as a political act, whether you engage in BDSM, are a sex worker, choose to marry a man instead of pretending to be a politically caricatured lesbian. This makes it remarkably easy to identify “enemies” and ostracize and slander them. When you’re reducing a person’s most fundamental decisions and perceptions of herself to whether her identity is congruent with your politics, you’ve ceased to see her as a valid human being, and instead look upon her as a token for your own goals.

In a lot of ways, radical feminism (as seen online) is defined more by what radical feminists hate than what radical feminists support.

Anyway, back to the male privilege argument:

When I say that there is such a thing as “Black,” I’m not reinscribing categories but simply admitting the truth about the world we live in today. When I say that there is such a thing as “woman,” I’m not “reinscribing” categories–I am simply admitting the truth about the world we live in today. And as much as I would like to someday live in a world where someone with a penis would not have power over me, that’s not the world that I live in today. Denying this truth, denying that someone born with penis and raised a boy has greater access to power and privilege than I do, does nothing to get rid of male dominance.

The overall tone of the article is meant to imply, “Once a ______, always a _______.” So, if you’re born white, raised white, and try to claim you’re black, you’ll still received white privilege from society, even if you personally do your best to not exert that white privilege. Everyone still sees you as white, they treat you as white. You have an easier time getting good jobs, getting into good schools, and so on. She wants this to be extended to trans women: Once a man, always a man. Even if you look like a woman, smell like a woman, dress like a woman, act like a woman, sound like a woman, have an F on your driver’s license and a surgically constructed vagina, you’re still receiving male privilege. The superficial change of claiming an identity on a whim is just like the profound change of altering your body. That if you ever received male privilege, it taints your life forever after. That it is in fact a personal failing that earns you condemnation, and forever bars you from acceptance.

It also serves as the source of many offensive stereotypes about trans women - that we “take up too much social space,” for example, and that we only want into women’s spaces because “women aren’t allowed to say no to men.” In short, the original sin of male privilege serves as a convenient lever to discredit everything about trans woman identities.

I’ve also found it difficult to ever have dialogue with transphobic feminists about male privilege. Any actual discussion will put chinks in the idea that trans women benefit from uncomplicated male privilege, either during the period of our lives when we were seen as male, or during our entire lives because we are allegedly unable to relinquish it. Actually talking to a trans woman and finding out that, “Yes, men treat me like I’m ignorant and talk over me all the time too” makes it difficult to hold the line on this particular point. As with every other stereotype perpetuated by transphobic radical feminists, this must be asserted over and over again to maintain the illusion of trans women as ultra-feminine, socially domineering, men in dresses without any ability to connect or relate to womanhood. We’re too loud, too male, to be accepted. This is, of course, a caricature, a cartoon figure intended to serve as a bogeywoman to keep us out of woman-only spaces.

Comparing gender to race in this context is simply another way to establish that caricature, to link the idea of “trans woman” to “caricature,” in this case, to the idea of white people claiming to be people of color. Many radical feminists go all the way and directly compare transitioning to blackface.

Keep Your Gender Struggles Out of My Race Struggles

Monica Roberts has posted a rebuttal to an anti-transgender blog post by Bob Parks. The rebuttal is also in the comments for that post.

Bob Parks’ complaint is that “Transgenders are not like blacks,” or rather, that we’re appropriating black civil rights struggles to explain our own plight and justify why we need civil rights. Now, it is true that people inappropriately appeal to what black people have suffered as comparable to what they’re suffering, and this is not really a good way to make your point. It also ignores the intersections that trans people of color have to deal with both because of their gender and their race.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with drawing parallels, or learning from history. Bigoted speech about just about any minority parallels the speech about just about any other minority. The same tactics, the same silencing. Hate crimes happen the same way (even if for different motivations). The results of oppression are sometimes similar - lack of access to employment, housing, some protections. It’s possible to draw similarities between particular instances - such as same-sex marriage vs. anti-miscegenation laws - without claiming they’re identical.

What really disappoints me about Bob’s post is not that he is angry about racial struggles being appropriated for other causes. It’s how he goes on an extended tirade about how transgendered people are too weird to be acceptable, how trans women all dress like sluts, and how we don’t look right. In other words, he uses the language of bigotry to justify why he doesn’t want us to have our civil rights, and why he does not want us to even mention the black civil rights struggle in comparison to our own. He judges trans women by what he assumes we look and act like, and says this is a reason we don’t deserve civil rights.

Personally, I do not think it is cool to spread offensive stereotypes about a group of people and judge them as lacking based on those stereotypes. It does not matter whether those stereotypes are applied because you changed sex, because of who you love, because of the color of your skin, or because your body doesn’t fit into society’s norms.