Chloe Sagal.

By now word has spread like a nauseating shockwave through the various channels and tributaries of the Internet: independent game developer Chloe Sagal “defrauded” online contributors to her IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign for what she’d called a “lifesaving surgery;” in the wake of the internet-mob-justice bacchanal that followed, Chloe made an apparent suicide attempt on a Twitch.tv stream. She is, as of this writing and to the best of my knowledge, recovering in a hospital.

The outpouring of internet vigilantism that followed was an indistinctly undulating sea of noise, hate, and entitled egoistic rage. But there was one Tweet that bubbled to the surface and got everyone’s attention.

Allistair Pinsof, a journalist at Destructoid, ponderously shuffled up to his Twitter podium to unburden himself and reveal that he knew and spoke to Sagal, and knew “the truth”: Chloe was a trans woman who’d actually intended to use the proceeds from her IndieGogo campaign to fund sexual reassignment surgery (SRS).

He writes that he was freed to do this because Sagal had attempted the very thing that had kept his mouth shut—he alleges that Sagal had told him not to reveal the truth or she would kill herself; since she tried to do so anyway, he used the eminently appropriate opportunity of her hospital stay to tweet to the world Chloe Sagal’s most personal business and position himself as an objective interpreter of her feelings, struggles, and situation. As she lay recovering from the brink of death and eternal night, he knowingly adds incalculable weight to her woes.

He has written at length about the affair here, and has done so in a way that is measured in tone and avoids rank transphobia, but remains profoundly paternalistic and patronising. The more base transphobia is something he saved for Twitter (all conveniently listed here):

“If you are seriously angry at me for calling her a ‘HE’ you can screw off. He is a he in real life. I supported her. Telling the truth now.”

This alone should speak volumes about the actual amount of respect he had for Sagal and should, at the very least, invite scepticism about his motives here, as well as his claims in his essay. I would especially draw the reader’s attention to the following from Pinsof’s essay:

“She just didn’t trust that people would support her for who she is. I told her I do and I still do.”

With undue respect, Mr. Pinsof, I think your Twitter performance rather validates her anxieties. What matters here is the incredulity Pinsof expresses—he seems to ask how could Sagal not believe she would be accepted. Trans people know the marrow-deep answer to that question; it’s written in Pinsof’s own words and deformed judgements of this entire tragic situation.

Let us address one significant moral matter before I dive into the rest of this: a woman has nearly died—she has been, and doubtless will continue to be, suffering from severe depression and dysphoria. In the throes of that depression she made an ill-advised choice: misrepresenting herself on IndieGogo to secure funding for SRS. In the grand scheme of things, this was a certain kind of fraud; but the crimes perpetrated against her were far greater and, without any doubt, validate her strenuous efforts to keep her true intentions secret. For many trans people, SRS is the definition of a lifesaving surgery; we have the misfortune of living in a society where this is not only poorly understood, but actively vilified, pathologised, and morally panicked about. Throughout Pinsof’s writing on the subject there is a very subtle underccurent of judgement and contempt—he writes on Twitter that “[the surgery] was non-vital, in the sense that her body would go on even if her mind couldn’t let it. But I understand you.” The last line was written to a woman criticising the fact that he diminished Sagal’s vital need; I’d gently posit that he does not actually understand.

One of Chloe Sagal’s games, Homesick.

Not Enough For Heaven

“Faith, here’s an equivocator… who committed enough treason for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,” drawls the comic porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, lamenting the equivocating Jesuits who lied enough to keep their faith against oppression yet were condemned to the fires of Hell nevertheless for their subtle lie. It puts me in the mind of Chloe Sagal, for she too equivocated; she petitioned for a lifesaving surgery—and in this she was quite correct—she simply mislead the public as to which she needed. We can debate merrily ‘til the heat death of the universe about whether this was right, whether Sagal’s use of deceptive speech for the greater good of her survival is defensible or not (as far as I am concerned, it is).

But it does not justify Pinsof’s actions, especially in a public forum where Sagal is not capable of defending herself; Pinsof violated her trust in a way likely to cause hatred against other transgender people. I cannot overemphasise this point: he has contributed to a welter of stereotypes about trans women and publicly invalidated Sagal’s experience by comparing her to “good” trans women who, he feels, have handled their transitions better. In the process he is shaming every trans person who may see their story in Sagal’s, and who’ve known her desperation.

While he might argue that the ultimate cause of all of this was Sagal’s decision to start her campaign, I’d say the ultimate cause was her pain and the society in which we live. Pinsof’s moral and ethical duty to her, and to everyone like her, was to avoid enflaming this situation and providing grist for those who would condemn us. Even as he professes compassion, he paints her as a hopeless “lost cause” who refused all attempts to help and not only had the audacity to commit suicide, but do so publicly.

He says of her, in his essay, “Even after the awful things she has done — scamming good people and broadcasting her suicide — I have a place in my heart to help her,” as if her suicide itself were a sin that should count against her; the broadcasting of it is, so far as I am concerned, irrelevant to ethical consideration. Perhaps she did not wish to feel as if she were dying alone, perhaps it was a cry for help; in either case, Pinsof’s condemnation is ill timed and deeply unfair to Sagal. There may be a time for her to better understand the meaning she makes of this tragedy. It is not now. If indeed Mr. Pinsof “has a place” in his heart to help her, he would have been better off doing so privately instead of publicly humiliating her and then attempting to appear magnanimous, inviting many others to follow along with him in this display of sanctimony.

And sanctimony it is, for what else can I call this:

“If everyone so hellbent on harming me today could put as much effort in giving Chloe a support circle, she could really have a chance at having a happy life where she is honest about who she is to herself and everyone around her. It’s unfortunate that so much harm, to herself and others, had to occur first, but the optimist in me likes to think it won’t be in vein [sic]…

“But I can’t understand people who will put so much anger out at me before putting an equal amount of support for Chloe and others like her. I don’t expect you to understand my unique predicament but I hope you can put some effort into understanding her’s [sic]”

Let me explain two things to you, Mr. Pinsof:

1)      You do not get to decide for a trans person when they should come out. Period. There is no way for me to garland this with pretty words. You simply do not do this. You do not get to decide where, when, and how coming out is “for their own good.” Especially not when she is in the hospital and completely unable to have input on the decision.

I cannot, however, better the woman’s own words, posted not long before her last suicide attempt:

“I also have to say that all this talk about what people feel my gender expression consists of is extremely foolish, and it breaks my heart. Not only is it no one’s business, but you seem to have failed to realize that there have been a good deal of the lgbt who have been killed, or have killed themselves over being outed. Unless someone gives you their permission to talk about it, you never, ever talk about it with anyone but that person directly. It has never been okay to act like that, and you should be ashamed, though that statement won’t be as effective coming from myself. Outing someone who does not want to be outed not only invites physical danger on to that person, but a host of emotional problems when others feel the need to insult them over it. And if anyone is going to make the argument that if they don’t do it, someone else will, don’t bother. You are better than this.”

Indeed, you should have been better than this, Mr. Pinsof.

2)      The trans community online and in the trans gaming community is—as you yourself observe—able to provide a home for her. We would welcome her. I would proudly call her my sister. But my first act of supporting her in public is to stand here and set the record straight on who we are, and why what you did to Chloe Sagal was morally wrong. We will be there for her as a community when, heaven willing, she is able to leave the hospital on her own and rejoin online communities. Do not think to lecture us, however, because we hold you accountable and responsible for your words.

For Want of Understanding

Further, I do understand her predicament. All too well. More, in fact, than you know, Mr. Pinsof. I have wanted to commit suicide more times than I care to count—before I transitioned, I remember standing quietly in my dorm room at the University of Connecticut, inexplicably furious, alone, shaking, quietly sobbing and fantasising about putting a shotgun in my mouth and pulling the trigger. Moments like that pockmarked my adolescence and the first few years of adulthood. The bottomlessness of that despair was incalculable. I pray and hope you never have to know what that feels like; in the meantime I ask you not to judge too harshly what those in such a headspace might say or do. In hindsight, I regret certain things I said and did in those heady, pretransition days of ignorance; but I did what I had to in order to survive one day further.

Pinsof himself says that Sagal lives in an unsupportive “small town.” I had the good fortune of starting my transition in a major city; two, to be exact. I ended up coming out and making my “debut” so to speak in Toronto, with a supportive girlfriend and her dauntless mother at my side, smiling and cheering me on. I would not be here today without them—without the fortune I had in meeting them. When I broke down in tears and felt that my life would end, my girlfriend’s mother dropped everything she was doing and raced through the streets of a busy city to be at my side.

In time, my own mother and father would stand with me as well. But for a febrile few months, I was on a rickety bridge over an abyss, my legs knocking and wobbling; I needed people there to hold me up and prevent me from tumbling into that void, vertiginously beckoning me.

Sagal needed that too. And Pinsof seems to say that, for a time, he tried to be that for her. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that, perhaps with good intentions, he tried. But whatever spirit may have driven him, its anima was clearly sapped after a while. He talked her down from one suicide attempt and then, he writes,

“I decided to distance myself from Chloe who sent me emails thanking me for saving her. She also referred to me in postings online. This made me worried as things were growing more personal, so I ignored in fear of where things could lead if I continued communications. I wanted to help her tell her story, not become a part of it, especially after the concerning state of health she announced to me.”

The fact that Pinsof withdrew at that point suggests to me that he misunderstood what was happening, and in his withering condemnation of Sagal he seems to ignore the fact that he pulled back when she was reaching out. When we as trans people are still in the closet and at the cusp of transition, we may—perhaps naively—get attached to anyone who seems even remotely supportive. Could you really blame us? Now Pinsof might be able to understand how betrayed Sagal might feel. She thought he was an ally, a friend—and then he does this.

Destructoid, the site which employs Allistair Pinsof and, as of this writing, continues to support him.

The most charitable thing I can say for Mr. Pinsof is that he, at some point, meant well and tried to do the right thing; what overrode him at the end was the fact that he did not, and could not, take a trans woman at her word and accept her experience from her perspective—he at last submitted to an angle of vision more readily supported by the non-trans majority.

Nothing about this is easy; I have been in dark places myself and consoled many sisters who have been in even darker places. It is profoundly challenging and sometimes very draining; sometimes I simply can’t do it. But what I never do is take her pain and scatter it to the four winds in the misguided hope that I could crowdsource the responsibility. Even if Pinsof argues that Sagal had made this inevitable by holding a public funding campaign that does not suddenly absolve him of all ethical responsibility to her (and, indeed, to us all). He made a choice only he is responsible for, and his choice may actually hinder Sagal’s recovery.

I will conclude by saying this. For all the chest-beating on Twitter about how Sagal lied or committed a crime or defrauded others, I do not feel lied to. I see in her a sister who was doing what she had to do. Perhaps she could have done it better or in a less risky or misleading fashion, but you will forgive me if I am disinclined to count angels on the head of a pin at this moment.

To those who defend Pinsof and the various social media mobs, all I ask is this: Does your sense of supposed injustice demand a woman’s life as payment?

The Trans100 list is a project that I didn’t even know about until a week ago. But it grew up from We Happy Trans*, This is HOW, and other projects dedicated to the proposition of trans visibility, and the idea that the lives we live—even in the midst of a stricken world like ours—are worth celebrating. That’s an idea I can get behind, to say the least, and coincidentally I wrote something this past week that gets at why I think we need things like the Trans100. I was expressing my discomfort with the often Manichean tone of the same-sex marriage debate on my Facebook feed. Oh no no, not between liberals and conservatives, but between radicals and liberals. I was very uneasy with the simple, dyadic terms of a discussion where marriage was posited either as a capitalist-cum-patriarchal evil, or a completely unproblematic institution that merited no critical analysis. Adding to the complexity was the fact that the HRC, with its awful history, was squatting on the whole discussion like a dreadfully white elephant.

In many cases, trans people and POC were political footballs: “same-sex marriage is a nonissue because trans POC have totally different issues!” – partially true, of course, but it also misses some complexities. In particular, I grew weary of how we were being talked about mostly in absentia and mostly in terms of tragedy. What follows began as a lengthy Facebook post and has now been edited and remixed for you, Nuclear Unicorners (I’ve officially named you, revel in my originality). Enjoy.

***

I’ve noticed a trend amongst certain people in the queer community where white/male/masculine/cis people/who-don’t-live-in-my-hood are telling me what my issues are, and that does make me more than a little uncomfortable. The majority of people I know who’ve recently been married thanks to same sex marriage law changes are folks of colour and trans people, for one. It did matter to them, and that needs to be factored into our consideration here—that we may be standing in a more complex place than reductive ‘lived politics’ may permit.

But it’s more than just that. Allow me to explain.

What defines recent media coverage and liberal discussions of presumptively-cis gays and lesbians? Normativity? ‘They’re just like us!’-ism? Yes, in no small measure; but go deeper than that. What is that pointing to? In what substantial ways, beyond the white picket fence, beyond 2.3 kids and a dog, are they just like (some) cis heteros?

They’re shown to be having lives. Increasingly, cis gays and lesbians are at last being recognised as people who are everything from activists to artists, journalists to teachers, scientists to non-profit organisers, parents and family; people with dreams and aspirations. In particular, it is once the latter are accorded an equal place in the firmament of human yearning that we come one step closer to substantive justice.

This is not just about normativity, it’s a question of living and thriving. Of humanising. Many of the same radical queers may critique that, but they want to live those same lives– as activists, artists, academics, poets, writers, community organisers, queer polyfamily members, and so on.

That’s a life. A real life-as-lived that can be a source of inspiring pride.

Yet every time I see a Facebook post from someone about us, usually an ally of trans women who’s either a cis man/woman, or a queer trans man or trans masculine person, do you know what I hear?

About how dead we are.

Stab wounds, immolation, genital mutilation. We’re heels pointed up out of a dumpster, we’re arrest and incarceration statistics, and we’re “bodies” (oh how I loathe how that term has replaced “person” in so much discourse). We’re dead, voiceless names and brief stories read at TDOR. And when our issues are talked about and screamed about from the top of a cis man’s lungs, that’s mainly what we are. Dead and dying. Unable to speak for ourselves as trans women of colour.

It’s why I cheered when I saw Janet Mock on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show because holy mother of Goddess, when’s the last time the mainstream media heard from someone with her life and perspective? I finally saw a living, thriving sister talking about the need for justice, not a cis person speaking for us as so many bodies, but a real trans woman of colour. My sister.

My living sister.

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project—the non-profit where I’m a proud collective member—takes on the hard jobs, the cases no one else will. We do the hard work of responding as a collective and a community to the hell imposed on us by the state, by the police, by uncaring institutions and the violence of a society that hates us, but especially hates trans women. We do that, and we do it gladly. But you know who “we” are? Trans folk and people of colour. We’re not just victims, we’re doing. We’re lawyers, social scientists, activists, artists, and beautiful living, thriving people who are doing great work and striving to make our own issues and lives visible.

Our Prisoner Advisory Committee is comprised of incarcerated trans folk who are now fighting for meaningful lives– both during and after incarceration. They’re trying to thrive and do work; budding jailhouse lawyers who refuse to be “bodies.” (I encourage you to check out PAC’s newsletter, In Solidarity, where PAC members submit editorials, art, and poetry to be shared with the wider community– in and outside of prison.)

The people we serve aren’t just “clients”– they’re neighbours, friends and loved ones with vibrant communities too often ignored by both the gazes of mainstream media lenses and trendy radical indie film lenses. Instead we’re “bodies”– victims and statistics.

That half-truth is how we are seen by all. Even by our ‘allies.’ Through it all we hear next to nothing of these women’s lives and loves. We learn not of how trans women live, only how we may die.

Now we return to the beginning: this is why I get uncomfortable when white masculine queers angrily talk about how dead we are. We’re not all dead, and those of us who live have real, lived lives just as valid, beautiful, and dreamy as those of my queer sisters and brothers who get to have the house with the white picket fence. Even as we struggle—and every day it feels like I hear another story about how someone was shitty to a sister, abused or harassed her—and even as I still fight dysphoria, there are beautiful lives and stories and dreams there.

Talk about them.

I’m not dead yet, my queer family.

***

Karen Kohler (l) and K.T. Sullivan, courtesy of Ms. Kohler’s website. (http://www.karenkohler.com)

An intimate theatre arrayed much like a speakeasy, a crowd of chatter, wooden colonnades framing a petite proscenium—all washed down with aromatic whiskey; it was the carefree spirit of Weimar as it was. If I had to summarise what I enjoyed most about K.T. Sullivan and Karen Kohler’s Vienna to Weimar cabaret, it was that both women rhapsodised about the human spirit in a way that both spoke to the distinctions of a bygone age, while resonating deeply thousands of miles and scores of years away.

The performance granted a coruscating voice to reality that puts the lie to any notion of traditionalist “good ol’ days.” These were songs about women in full crimson bloom, songs about women in three dimensions: lesbian women, women with their fists thrust athwart chauvinism, women traipsing across lines of class, gender, and sexuality—the songs tell alternating tales of politically sexual confidence with an elegantly militant posture that still wears glamorously in 2012. They capture the currents of a time in Germany where all was in furious chaos and anything seemed possible. Kohler, with a stunning voice, tremendous range, and commanding style in her tuxedo and top hat, seemed herself to be an embodiment of the times, evoking Marlene Dietrich. K.T. Sullivan’s operatic range was equally magnificent—taking us from Viennese waltzes that teased class boundaries and evoked old fairy tales, to brassy and sensual cabaret at its highest peak.

The performance was a beautiful handkerchief flung in the face of stereotypes. Even as the dark clouds of fascism gathered over central Europe, here were feminists and lesbians daring to draw the temper of their foes, daring to sing against patriarchy with the jaunty chorus of “raus mit der Männer aus dem Reichstag!” It is well worth remembering that some of these songs are courageous even today. Their boldness and the triumph of the lived womanhood that sired them become all the more impressive in that reckoning. With that in mind, the weight of a secret but potent history was expertly borne by Sullivan and Kohler, and they more than did it justice.

The show was a symphonic concatenation of a very crimson Germany. On stage Sullivan and Kohler beautifully fanned the flames of gendered rebellion and brought striking images of lesbian love forth through English and German lyrics. The artists themselves provided beautiful, and often funny context in between their sets, granting provenance to the artefacts of their lyrics, reminding us of the origins of such powerful songs as Lila Leid—“Purple Song”, an anthem to the repressed queer folk of Germany. They had the air of glamorous historians in those moments, and their brief but informative interludes curated the production beautifully.

The metaphor of curation is an apt one, for these two women were indeed charged with the expert handling and display of timeless relics. Everything in the performance evoked its period. The subtle surprise of each performer entering from behind the audience, rather than from behind the curtain, the siren-like crooning as they walked among the audience members, drawing them into the music—it all amounted to a brilliantly immersive performance, and allowed me to breath the air of those delectably seedy halls of social rebellion where women would throw off thousands of years worth of chains for one blissful night.

The artefacts themselves were songs that, as previously mentioned, revealed a truth about that age. A hidden truth that tells the stories of those often left out of history textbooks which recount only wheelbarrows full of valueless Marks, the Shakespearian collapse of President Hindenburg, and the storm clouds of the Nazism to come—as if the Weimar Republic were merely the bankrupt semicolon between the Great War and Adolf Hitler. Sullivan and Kohler’s beautiful elegy for the real Weimar, as real women saw it, was inspired—a gay revue both funny and sad, often all at once, that eagerly seized on the bright sparks of freedom that Weimar seemed to anemically offer.

That freedom is best embodied by a song that still strikes a beautifully radical note today, about a masculine and feminine woman constantly changing and upending their ‘roles’—emerging from the happy chaos is a “hermaphrodite” baby that seems to contain the hope of a brighter future where sex/gender distinction is no longer so grimly tenacious and all-consuming. The flying sparks here illuminate not only the lesbian possibilities of the era, but even transgender and intersex ones. The play, here, truly contains impressive multitudes.

But of course, from these Olympian heights of queer-utopian dreams we must descend from the Roaring Twenties into the era of the Depression. It is a testament to Weimar cabaret that it makes you laugh even when it is at its saddest. One song dreamt a fairy tale of fair and apolitical courts that presided over a fair and just republic, amongst other lovely dreams that pined for the Weimar that could have been. One woman sung her dreams, the other sing-songingly rejoined her as a liar; it was a beautiful back-and-forth teetering between funny, inspiring, and sorrowful. As Kohler and Sullivan stood hand in hand, ramrod straight and solemnly singing that “All conflict will cease and we shall all live in peace” I nearly wept; their acting was as pitch perfect as their voices, their faces captured the spirit of the Weimar Republic’s twilight. They stared somewhere far beyond the audience; one could easily envision these two singers as courageous German women living in the underground of the 20s, seeing the gathering terror in the distance and facing it unerringly.

The metaphors about ‘bottling lightning’ come to mind here. What Kohler and Sullivan managed was to somehow, in a brief and economical space, encapsulate an era and its diversity. At once didactic and intoxicating, it was a performance that allowed one to forget where she sat for a brief moment. Each quivering of my note-taking pen made me worry I was missing something on stage, each sip of Bourbon perfectly complimented the smoky and sensual gala unfolding on (and off) stage.

***

There is much more that one could say, for like the art of Hannah Höch this revue seemed to explode in every direction. On final reflection, however, the most interesting direction for me was the exploration of womanhood. Opera reviewers often imbue singers’ voices with the character of the circumnavigator and say that their voices survey uncharted lands. In that vein, Kohler and Sullivan’s sojourn explored the different fiefdoms of womanhood—both through their eyes and men’s eyes, taking the words of male songwriters and bathing them in a new interpretation at once searchingly sensual and political.

Whatever the intentions of the original songwriters, Kohler and Sullivan gave each piece a feminist resonance. When Sullivan sung “ich bin ein Vamp!” you wanted to leap up and join her. When their much remarked upon performance of “Atilla the Hun” was sung, you felt a swelling of sisterly pride for their proud, confident, demanding sexuality (and did not dwell on mourning the lost virility of that “cute little brute”). And finally, Hollaender’s “Chuck All the Men,” brought me to the home that this queer trans woman’s heart never left—I felt as if I could conquer the world in that moment. This very song was a mantra that armoured me with a measure of Kohler and Sullivan’s confidence after a man harassed me in Central Park not long after the show.

Those songs were a bridge between 1920s Germany and my Bronx-born queerness; something I did not quite expect going into the show, and I’m tremendously glad I walked away with it.

I think I will take this waltz.

I purchased it to keep up with the debate and because Lean In had potentially huge implications for my field; I’ve been studying and researching in the area of gender in the workplace for almost two years now. I went at it with a sociological eye, my mental red pen raised high and ready. This would be a safari in reverse; the Latina trans woman from the Bronx would don her pith helmet and survey this strange and wonderful world of white, bourgeois heteronormative privilege, return with her field notes and write a blistering polemic to join all the others.

What I found stunned me. My mental red pen became a very literal purple one that began underlining all the lines I found quotable or that had my head bobbing as if to a phantasmal soundtrack. As I read, I owned up to the fact that I purchased the book because it had called to me; that very day I was having a discussion with my advising professor about when and whether I should, perhaps, maybe, tentatively, own my work and claim the title of “sociologist.” We’d been talking about the book and I joked this was my “Lean In moment.” When the laughter subsided, however, I realised there was something to that offhanded remark. I went to Barnes & Noble after that very meeting.

A Pom-Pom Woman for Sociology

Suffice it to say, I feel the book has been misrepresented, even by certain other feminists. But the most important way it has been misrepresented is as a book that is solely about individual women, ignorant in its uniquely privileged way about social structure and constraint. In reality, the book is cited better than some texts assigned in sociology classes; Sandberg jokes that she is now a “pom pom girl for feminism,” but in her own terms she is a pom-pom woman for social science as well. I was stunned at how much of the very research I was prepared to throw in her face was actually being cited back to me in the book—including some studies I’d not yet had the pleasure of reading.

In 172 brief pages she gives us less a self-help manual than a guidebook for women (and men) to see (and hack) social structure. The impressive cites are aimed at proving to the reader that sexism is not simply contained in consciously prejudicial individuals, but is in fact a social force that operates at the level of groups and institutions, and at the individual level it is often expressed subconsciously. Again and again she makes the case that stereotypes structure perception in a way that works to the detriment of women.

For instance, one of my pre-read criticisms of Lean In was that if women ‘lean in,’ we are called strident, shrill, bitches, aggressive, unlikeable, ice queens, and worse. We simply aren’t rewarded for assertiveness the same way that men are. And yet the very research I’d use to prove that point was being summarised and cited right there in Lean In itself. Far from ignoring this structural reality, Sandberg was teaching her readers about it:

“If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent… this creates a huge stumbling block for women. Acting in stereotypically feminine ways makes it difficult to reach for the same opportunities as men, but defying expectations and reaching for those opportunities leads to being judged as undeserving and selfish.”

With simple language like this, she introduces basic feminist insights to a mainstream audience that may not have been exposed to them before. At bottom, feminist epistemology exposes gender as a social structure and not simply what individuals do. Sexism is a social practise, reinforced through commonsense ideas, norms, and subconscious biases given to us by that taken-for-granted perspective on the world. It’s a point Sandberg makes with less lugubrious language. She should be applauded for this.

In the text, findings are explained digestibly and make their point well; in the notes, Sandberg and her writing assistant Nell Scovell acquit themselves with aplomb by expanding on those summaries with the same acumen I expect of actual social researchers—and it’s all there in black and white in a mass-market book.

Time and again “social scientists” are quoted as authorities on important issues; the hard work of many a feminist social scientist is put up in lights and their precious findings are reaching a far larger audience than JSTOR could ever hope to summon. This is a vital public moment for gender sociologists; so many of us fret about promoting our discipline and broadening the audience for our findings. Sheryl Sandberg, much to my pleasant surprise, has done us a tremendous favour in this regard.

A Woman is Not a List

At the beginning of this article I gave a list of characteristics I often use to define myself (or my ‘social location,’ if you prefer)—trans, Latina, working class, queer, and measured these against Sandberg’s—white, rich, cis, het. While I talk a good game about sisterhood, I thought this gap was too broad a chasm to bridge.

I was happy to be proven wrong—and reminded of my other thoughts on “woman” as an identity category. We are our diversity. It is the patriarchal myth that we are all slight variations on the pedestalised alabaster angel, or else complete failures (in the case of women of colour, trans women, poor women, etc.). In reality, we as women are complex and difficult to pin down; to the extent feminism organises around the concept, it is increasingly with this vision of womanhood in mind that we organise “for women.” Not an ideal, but a complexity. A contradiction, even.

Thus it was that I saw myself in Sandberg’s words, not as an aspirational exercise in ‘identifying with the oppressor’ but as a woman who’d experienced a great deal at school and in various workplaces. There was no hope of her even mentioning trans people, but I am still a woman.

We are not lists; or, rather, we are not lists that can be weighted against each other like balance sheets. That isn’t actually how privilege and power work.

Her lengthy discussion of the “impostor syndrome” spoke to me very deeply:

“[W]omen feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can’t seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found for who they really are—impostors with limited skills or abilities. … Every time I was called on in class, I was sure that I was about to embarrass myself. Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself—or even excelled—I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up.”

This was the moment, 28 pages in, that I took off the pith helmet and said ‘right on, sister.’ And much to my surprise, there was a bridge where once had been only a chasm.

Sisterhood is a rather shocking thing. It’s how I can find myself in both This Bridge Called My Back and Lean In. Women’s experiences-as-epistemology written from opposite ends of power structures, one very critically radical, one very liberal; both about women’s authentic worlds. That is how I could see myself in the pages of both books. “Womanhood” describes a lived reality that can and does transcend oppression’s manifold divisions and antimonies.

***

Last week I submitted my first book proposal, at the eleventh hour as any good writer should. But there had been a moment of profound doubt mixed with the languid draw of lethargy; I was 90% done, but was it really worth finishing? This book, outspoken and radical—transfeminism, gasp!—was surely not what anyone was looking to publish, so why bother? The proposal was a rookie effort anyway, not good enough. I’m not like real writers, not like actual, good, intelligent academic feminists. This is just me “me too-ing” and that’s that.

Two close friends nudged—okay, forcefully and lovingly shoved—me over the finish line. And as I hammered away feverishly at the keyboard, determined to not let this opportunity pass me by, I heard Sandberg’s voice from the pages of Lean In. “Writing this book is not just me encouraging others to lean in. This is me leaning in. Writing this book is what I would do if I weren’t afraid.”

If I weren’t afraid, I’d pitch a book about transfeminism and video gaming. So I did.

This article is also what I would write if I weren’t afraid—weren’t afraid of call out culture, accusations of “selling out” or identifying with oppression, or capitalist collaboration, or ignoring umpteen thousand critiques, or failing to get it exactly right, or failing to cite this, that, and the other, or ignoring this writer or this scholar, or this blogger. If I wasn’t afraid of that, even for just a brief, foolish moment, this is what I’d write. So I am.

Now about all of that…

Sides of the Street: The Division of Feminist Labour

Sandberg’s book was—notably, before it even hit shelves—roundly criticised and condemned, becoming a byword for privilege and ‘by your bootstraps’ boosterism that was feminism-lite at best and actively harmful to working women at worst. I can categorically say it is neither. Everything my research has taught me about the specific issues she raises tells me that she is conveying that sort of knowledge well and commendably. What she’s offering to share with her readers is, in many ways, the exact opposite of hyper-individualism; it’s about identifying the social rules so you can hack and break them, then get together and organise on your own time to change them.

But the vision of Sandberg “blaming the victim” and leveraging her privilege remains irresistible. Much as I felt annoyed that third wave feminists had degraded and undersold the writing of Catharine MacKinnon to me, I felt irked that so many feminists had undersold Lean In. This is not a critical theory reader, nor is it a radical feminist text that gives it to the reader with both barrels; it’s a gentle introduction to a larger world. It should be understood in that light, and that work should be valued rather than dismissed.

Writing a 101 level introduction to feminism is a sure-fire way to make you unpopular with other feminists, it seems—this is understandable to a certain extent. The stakes are very high. If a woman expresses sexism in her work, it can be used to credibly licence misogyny directed at all women (“How can it be sexist? A woman said it!”). And surely, Sandberg is easily misread as arguing “in order for there to be equality, all women need to do is work harder and be more assertive like the menfolk; they’re merely holding themselves back.” This is a toxic argument for feminists with good reason, especially when it has the imprimatur of a powerful woman. Thankfully it’s not what Sandberg actually believes.

The third chapter begins, “Okay, so all a woman has to do is ignore society’s expectations, be ambitious, sit at the table, work hard, and then it’s smooth sailing all the way. What could possibly go wrong?” She then details all the things that can and do go wrong because of patriarchal social structure. Hers is not an anti-feminist argument. Rather, Sandberg says, she wishes to focus on what women can do to circumvent and short-circuit those social norms while fighting back against your socialised self-doubt, and how men can do their part by challenging their biases and assumptions while changing their behaviour. She’s working a particular “side of the street:” the symbolic-interactionist side.

Her interest is in finding ways to alter social structure at the level of small groups and offices, hoping that in aggregate, with many women and men pushing back against socialised norms all at once, structural change can begin. She hopes that by changing how we relate– with a special focus on the symbolic terms of that relation– we can change society.

This is both a debatable and testable proposition, but it’s often not the one challenged by Sandberg’s critics who hone in more on the caricature of “victim blamer.”

Sandberg, far from attacking those of us who devote ourselves to identifying and trying to change structure, applauds us—particularly feminist social scientists—and gratefully uses our work to support her own argument. Meanwhile, she seems to say, you work your side of the street while I work mine. This is not disagreeable. She neither ignores nor derides the work of structurally oriented feminists, she simply asserts that she can find a somewhat different and useful way to help. That is not something I want to be in the business of shooting down and discouraging.

I’ll be there to study whether or not the “Lean In Circles” she is creating actually work, but I want her to be encouraged by us rather than simply nay-said.

All That is Left Unsaid

There’s a lot she does not introduce her readers to. For instance, she rightly antagonises workplace culture as being built around a male ‘ideal worker’ archetype, and driven increasingly towards ruthless demands on time. She is not, however, apt to implicate capitalist culture as such—which is surely no less responsible for some of these problems. What she does do quite usefully is demonstrate the limits of “flat hierarchies”—unlike many people, she understands that power is at its most insidious when it is unnamed and informal. I’m willing to trade a critique of capitalism for a critique of reductive pseudo-anarchism.

There are two larger omissions that merit discussion, however. One is the relentless heteronormativity of the book; it would’ve been nice to see Sandberg at least acknowledge that there are lesbians and queer women for whom a lengthy discussion of male partners was less relevant. One of the things we have to ‘lean in’ against is homophobia (and in my case, transphobia as well). The same can be said for her take on race—to her enormous credit she acknowledges that life is often harder for women of colour, that our wage gap figures are even more startling, and that there is commensurability between racism and sexism in terms of their insidious workplace effects. She points out in a few places that people of colour have remarked to her that they too have experienced silencing, double standards, and double binds that are difficult to speak up about or challenge. All to the good.

What Lean In might have benefited from were the words or stories of women of colour. She tells a lot of peoples’ stories in this book to personally illustrate her points and her advice. Surely there were a few women of colour who could have also talked about the way race and gender are a ball of wax, so far as our experiences are concerned, and that one often socially impacts the other. I think that sort of knowledge can be made 101-ready, and Sandberg has great skill at distilling complex concepts. Dealing with the intersection of race and gender more explicitly could have drawn in some of her readers that much more deeply.

Conclusions

And yet, it is not impossible for me to see myself in this book—surely no small achievement. I had a profoundly emotional response to this book, exceeded only by volumes that were written with lightning (like the aforementioned This Bridge Called my Back, or Whipping Girl). Sandberg is much more measured and is not a visceral writer, yet she teased memories and feelings from me all the same. She reflected back at me my own self doubt, self loathing, fears, and awful memories. She may never know gender dysphoria or racism, but in my case it still added up to many of the same feelings she experienced.

Perhaps the great strength of Lean In is that Sandberg’s tenor is not “I worked hard, now I’m successful and happy, and you can be too! Stop whining!” She is open and honest about her humanity. Moments of weakness, moments of fragility, moments of tears and lice and green t-shirts and toilet-bound email checking; they are the moments when we fall short of our goals and are all too human, sometimes all too silly. It’s good that she shares hers with such admirable candour. Rather than exhorting us to deny our humanity, she asks us to embrace it. Weakness and all, doubt and all, imperfection and all. I almost hate to say something so simple and trite but… it was comforting to hear.

Yet this book does not, by and large, speak to the humanity of all women by any stretch (nor does Sandberg claim it does)– the human experience of my working class mother might well be elided, for instance. Her lifelong work—with only the briefest interruptions—has been to raise her family. But she is happy that this little book meant something profound to her daughter. To the extent the book does speak for me it is because I’ve been able to have comparable experiences in university and in a white-collar, professional working environment where everyone has a degree. This constitutes a privilege, without doubt. But a trans woman of colour is there in that space all the same, and if she had a “lean in moment,” how many others might? I say time and again I want to see more people like myself, my closest sisters, in these rarefied academic halls producing knowledge. Is Lean In part of a much larger puzzle that shows how to do that? Even with my reservations, I think so.

Oh, and as to that meeting with my professor just before I bought the book? We settled on calling me a sociologist.

The frontspiece for the comic featuring our heroine, Catherine Abigail Daniels. (This cover, above, is the work of Sarah Zaidan; all subsequent artwork featured in this article is by Susan Shore)

My So Called Secret Identity, the product of writer Will Brooker and artists Sarah Zaidan and Susan Shore, is a comic that seems to blossom out of the implied fissures left by the mainstream comic genre. While its protagonist, Catherine Abigail Daniels, is remarkable for being a non-sexualised star who presents an image of womanhood rarely seen in comic books, she is no less interesting for the fact that she is one of the “little people” in her superheroic city. The big superheroes and villains of Gloria City would be the focus of any other comic; here they are relegated to the background, flying far above the very richly detailed urban world that Cat lives in. “Gloria City is a theater where these big figures fight, posture, pose and self-promote. And if you’re not in a costume and a mask, you’re just little people,” as the promotional summary says.

The story is set to tell the tale of Cat’s intervention into that theatrical landscape, and how she becomes a costumed heroine in her own right. The perspective shift here is dramatically enticing; I can hardly wait to see how this story develops.

Cat is a character I truly empathised with, and not just because we’re both pursuing PhDs or share (roughly) the same name. The way she moves through Gloria City is an interesting sight in and of itself; it reminds me of my marrow-deep relationship with New York in its manifold rhythms and beats, its light shows, its high and low art, and the scattered constellation of shops, parks, cafes, and corners that are my homes away from home. With an economy of words and a wealth of images, the observational Cat gave me quite a lot to see myself in. Her loving descriptions of bookstore stacks remind me very much of my own literary rhapsodising.

Those powers of observation are part of what Cat’s superpower is meant to be. As one of the creators, Will Brooker, said in an interview with Nerd Span, “It’s the way she can find the links between things, recognise the dynamic and the relationships between the people and places in her world, and realise how they relate to history, theory, politics, institutions and power. Just remembering stuff is impressive, but that isn’t really Cat’s skill. She links things up. She makes connections nobody else has seen, and interprets what those connections mean.” In other words, Cat’s superpower is that she has a sociological imagination. Please excuse me while I swoon.

Her struggles include militating with the oppressive supervillainy that hangs over Gloria City, yes—the first comic literally opens with a bang—but also with quotidian sexism brilliantly and economically sketched on a single comic page that could usefully serve as a definition of ‘microagression.’ She is told she ought to be less academically forthright and confident, constantly made to feel little and ‘modest,’ and thus it feels like quite a stirring victory when she confidently confesses what her superpower is: “To put it simply… I’m really, really goddamn smart.”

Having read through the first issue, posted for free on their website, I must say that this comic—Cat’s life, aspirations, and story—really speak to me. Her struggles at university, for instance, put me in the mind of a recent debacle involving a male professor of mine. Relatable characters are hard enough to come by, but one that actually reflects the textures of a real woman’s life as lived, and then proceeds to spin that tale into fantasy escapism, is truly priceless.

The groundwork is laid in this first issue for the action to come; you get a sense of Cat, Gloria City, and the terrorism that wracks it. It’s not hard to see where this comic is potentially going, and what is hinted at is quite enticing indeed. Can Cat subvert the ‘theatre’ of Gloria City’s superheroes and villains, and perhaps become a true heroine for the “little people”? I’d really, really like to find out.

The comic’s funding scheme, which solicits PayPal donations from the readership, is no less interesting:

Here’s where the money will go:

$700 pays Suze for an entire episode (22 pages) of beautiful black and white line art

$400 pays Sarah for the painted covers, the painted interior colour, and the mind-blowing montage sequences

$100 pays Lindsay to update the website with new costume designs and character sketches in Cat’s Lookbook, each issue

That’s $1,200 per issue. We’re rounding it up to $1,300 because we want to make a donation from each issue to a relevant women’s charity.

For issue 2, we are giving to A Way Out, which reaches out to and supports vulnerable women and their families. Rather than offer a single lump sum, MSCSI will make a regular monthly donation as a partner. How much we can give, and how many charities we can work with, depends on the success of this project. The author, Will Brooker, takes no money at all from your donation, and writes this comic free of charge.

Combining social justice with fantasy superheroic justice; how can I say no? This project is in its infancy, but one hopes that this is the beginning of a beautiful saga. It isn’t often that I see a woman character I can really relate to in comics, least of all one who is the focus of the comic itself. Mainstream comics have had a few decent women characters here and there, but it’s rare that they take centre stage. One gets the sense that once Cat gets her superheroine druthers on no one will be able to steal the spotlight from her.

My So-Called Secret Identity, or MSCSI as the cool kids call it, seems to be the latest example of insurrectionist art that is pushing back against popular lies in mainstream cultural industries. Indie game designers are pushing boundaries without budgets, bending genres and showing us that, yes Virginia, feminine women can be badass video game stars. Increasingly, comic and webcomic artists are showing the way forward by doing much the same with their medium.

One of my favourite books, incidentally.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil…, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

~Merlin, from The Once and Future King by T.H. White

I am often asked why I study sociology, and invariably the question is often freighted with the ponderous addition of “how are you going to make money?” I have employment in my field, and I intend to remain employed here: nothing is going to change my will to keep doing sociology and the deeper in I go, the longer and thicker my roots in social science’s soil become. Will I ever make a fortune? No, but that is not the gold that I got into this profession to find. The real mother-lode is the answer to the question of “why?”

In the midst of yet another right wing politician attacking the liberal arts model of education, it’s worth reflecting on the question, why it glitters; and why we, in Merlin’s word, wag.

North Carolina’s governor Pat McCrory said Tuesday, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” The prevalence of such noxious opinions alone recommends the courage of anyone taking a cultural studies course, minor, or major; it is not enough, it seems, to confront all the quotidian challenges of college life, one must also deal with the slings and arrows of people who think your intellectual pursuits worthless.

Yet beyond this it also misunderstands the raison d’etre for liberal education. It provides you with lenses of perspective that enhance whatever one sets her mind to: to have a grasp of gender studies is to understand the dynamics of your workplace and be more productive in it. A better co-worker, a better human resources manager, a better supervisor, union leader (uh oh), and so on. This happens because liberal education is about expanding your horizons beyond the realm of your individual capabilities and recognising what it means to live in a society—a place where you are not alone, where you share rights, responsibilities, and a fate, with countless others whom you’ve never met, and do not know. That is intimidating, but learning history, philosophy, social science, and the arts, gives you handles on that vast world, and it gives you a place to begin. Somewhere to situate yourself, in other words, and a way of engaging with your fellow citizens as citizens; when you speak the common language of music, have a grasp of structures of discrimination, know the history of another culture, know a foreign language, or connect on an intimate level with an intellectual sub-universe you’d never known had existed before, that cosmopolitan ethic allows you to be and do more in whatever job you happen to choose.

Learning about mythology helps you make some of your own– and yes, you can get paid for that.

In the world of video games, this is starkly evident. Ree Soesbee, with a Master’s in English, and a PhD in mythological studies, is one of the most talented people in game design. On top of everything else, she is a classically trained musician and speaks three languages. She’s also a brilliant writer and helped design the much lauded Sylvari race in Guild Wars 2, which many including myself have praised as a brilliantly original addition to the canon of high fantasy. Perhaps governor McCrory does not think this valuable work, but it is work, it does pay, and it has made countless people happy. Academic perspective, at its best, is a magnificently refractive prism that turns the light of learning into a rainbow that we can all admire. Great art, great writing, great research, add to the magnificent polychromatic tapestry that any culture might produce, and they give us the tools to both enjoy and understand our world. The Sylvari, for instance, are not only a fun addition to a video game, but in their uniquely written biology and culture, are also an interesting mirror in which to meditate about our received notions concerning gender and sexuality: something whose urgency in our very real world should be more than apparent.

Democratic citizenship requires that sort of meditation because it insists we participate in the governance of our society. It is why we cannot simply be together alone, islands adrift aimlessly in a sea of mass democracy, but active and thoughtful people who know whereof they speak and know a bit about the wagging of this world. Liberal education provides the tools and context to make sense of this world’s variegated meanings, to know why the world is the way it is, what its history is, what its anthropology is, what our psychologies are, what the theologies of its constituent religions may be, what the sociology of your street corner is; those scraps of knowledge are lenses that give every citizen a spyglass that extends the boundaries of the world and makes them smarter voters and smarter people.

There is a hunger for that knowledge, too. I’ve long refused to believe that these are the peas and carrots of our lifelong intellectual repast. Throughout my years learning and doing sociology I’ve met strangers on buses, trains, in airport bars, and parties who, upon hearing I’m a sociologist, immediately lean in conspiratorially and ask bashfully if I can explain why humans do x.  Sometimes it’s simple: why do people lie? Other times it’s more complicated: why are the Israelis and Palestinians fighting? Sometimes it’s middling: why are people religious? But the point is, the questions bother them, and they want to know the answers. Time and again, in social science and gender studies classrooms I see students get swept up in the discussion as their taken-for-granted worlds are scattered to the four winds of intellectual inquiry. They are not always comfortable, but they do not shrink either. They’re interested, they want to know; they know there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in McCrory’s non-philosophy and they want to hear all about it.

The danger of McCrory’s vision, of the world he imagines, is that it is more plastic and static than a Lego town (which at least has the imaginative dreaming McCrory denies the importance of). Not only does he, as a matter of pure economics, get the order of operations wrong (technical training or no, the jobs simply aren’t there, and the cause has much more to do with the failings of capitalism than the number of students taking African American History or Kantian Philosophy), but he also seems to think that the social world we have, with its history, politics, and economics, simply fell out of the sky. His vision of America is equally static, and that myopia emerges in his lambasting of learning Swahili; he seems to forget, or simply not know, that we have large communities of Swahili speakers in the United States.

For McCrory, it seems, we are the way we are because that’s the way we are, the end. It’s as frightening a view as saying that we should not try to understand the majesty of the night sky or the deeps of the ocean—that we should accept that they exist and move on to more important things (whatever those are). Yet our world, our social world, the universe we as humans created with our imaginations—for good and ill—has a history, has a sociology, has a psychology; it’s a story worth knowing, worth debating, and worth living with as a citizen. As a human being. We cannot let it lie because, if we’re going to talk about jobs, there is a ton of work to be done here.

If McCrory wants to create jobs, perhaps he could find a way of paying the armies of students in his state who are working to end poverty, volunteering at domestic violence shelters, churches, family planning clinics, trade unions, or who are teaching and tutoring for free, or who are working to end homelessness, give dignity to jobless and wounded veterans, protect and enrich the lives of the LGBT community, getting people registered to vote and driving them to the polling stations, supporting the incarcerated; this is all labour of the hardest sort. I am surrounded by people who practically give of their flesh to labour at doing the right thing in this country—who organise communities into actively participating citizens who can police their own streets, help their kin, support their children, build their homes; it’s the hard work of using the law to help people, not hurt people; the hard work of creating a “citizenship” that is about democratic participation, not your immigration status.

All of this is work, and every iota of it has benefited from engagement with this world’s great ideas, great literature, great art, and great science. An understanding of sociology not only benefits me at my day job, it follows me into my volunteer work. It helps me do both to the best of my ability. Understanding at least the first elements of how and why the world works as it does helps me to be a part of this democracy in a way that, I hope, benefits more people than just myself, and makes “We the People” a reality, not merely a slogan.

Forgive me if it’s elitist to think we might all benefit from knowing why this world wags.

The idea so often lacking from non-debates about free speech.

If transgender people have a “superpower” it is our remarkable ability to stand for anything:  living, breathing “floating signifiers.” Our meaning d’jour is, for some on Fleet Street, “a professionally offended, Left wing lobby group” that is now the latest “post-Leveson” threat to free speech and a free press. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of things—fleeting as these meanings are, such that we can even speak of stable oppositions—Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill had accused trans people of dividing and distracting the Left from its “important” goals and its “true” cause.

If this seems exasperating and contradictory, you ain’t seen nothing yet, as they say.

But for now, it is enough to deal with these two absurdities one at a time and bring a bit of light to a decidedly un-illuminating heat.

Free Speech: From Posturing to Substance

Toby Young and all the other vacuous, fly-by-night defenders of “free speech” filch lovely rhetoric that whistle stops past all manner of liberal democratic tropes while failing to specify the connection between, say, hate speech and liberty. They use language meant to bypass both the intellect and one’s reason, while subtly refusing any attempt at being substantive. To do so would be to pull back the curtain at Oz and reveal the great democratic wizard to be nothing more than a petty would-be tyrant in disguise. In his entire blog post, Young does not mention the content of Burchill’s article once, instead gesturing to the void indirectly by casting trans people as some monolithic left lobby opposed to free speech.

He has archived Burchill’s piece for the world to see, so readers can judge for themselves, but it is a curious choice—to say the very least—to use an article that was almost entirely vapid schoolyard bullying and name-calling as some kind of heroic exemplar of courageous speech. He takes this to a laughable pinnacle by comparing Burchill’s screed to The Observer’s opposition to Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal, now widely regarded by historians as the last gasp of the British Empire. Clearly these were equal acts of great courage.

Yet, if one refuses Young’s attempts to cut their intellectual brake lines, it’s plain to see that Burchill’s article was no Watergate, no “Pentagon Papers.” To compare Burchill’s privileged tantrum to great acts of journalism is offensive to the profession (and if one wants to read incisive feminist journalism, I cannot recommend Ms. Magazine more strongly—their investigations into the plague of rape in the US Military, and the anti-abortion lobby’s links to terrorism are, alone, reminders of what truly courageous pens might write).

Instead of asking substantive questions about Burchill’s writing, Young thoughtlessly defends it without any regard for its content, nor any attempt to engage with it meaningfully. This is profoundly anti-democratic. We do not, in a truly free society, throw our hands up in childlike awe and say “Oooh, there are so many ideas out there, that’s nice!”—ideally, we engage with them, we debate, and we argue; we consider them on their merits, weigh them, and are fully allowed to find them woefully wanting.

According to Toby Young, the Observer’s willingness to oppose this historical event is the moral equivalent to publishing Julie Burchill’s piece. As you can see, they’re exactly the same thing.

That is precisely what trans women, our loved ones, and allies did with Julie Burchill’s codswollop. And it is here that we come to what else is so utterly pernicious about Young’s unthinking editorialising: he has completely misrepresented and lied about the motivations of Burchill’s critics. Many of us, myself included, did not want the Observer article taken down. What we wanted was to be heard, and to counter the spreading of hate. Some of us wanted Burchill to apologise, and some wanted the piece taken down, yes, but I’d not say the latter was a widespread, agreed-upon, much promoted goal. It is certainly fair to say that few of us are mourning the piece’s loss. It is no Vindication of the Rights of Woman (quite the opposite, in fact), nor is it Candide. It was gutter trash of the lowest order, and even if you don’t give a toss about transphobia, one would have to concede it was tenth-rate writing. Its deletion from the Observer’s website is no loss to anyone.

And yet, while Mr. Young may think himself a dutiful democrat for preserving and republishing the piece, he might be surprised that he was beaten to the punch by many of the same trans activists he was attacking. Most of us had a problem with the article being used as “link bait” for the Observer, driving up their ad costs with every click. This shock and awe tactic is, tragically, a commonplace in online news websites. Many of us, who wanted to preserve the public record of Burchill’s hate, have reposted the piece elsewhere—both to ensure that it was not flushed down the memory hole, and to ensure that people could read and judge for themselves, while denying The Observer profit-from-hate. If Mr. Young had bothered to talk to any of those faceless and nameless activists he decries, he might have seen that our motivation was not to punish “political incorrectness” but to add to the discourse, with the urgency that hate speech always demands.

That is democracy.

Speech Acts

It is also worth remembering that if one wishes to defend free speech, one must know what they are defending and why. More of those nattering specifics that tend to deflate gassy rhetoric, yes.

Speech does something. That is why it’s so powerful, cherished, and defended as a fundamental right. But like any right, it can be abused, used to the detriment of others, and cause great harm. Citizenship, by contrast, is the craft of using rights and liberties to further the cause of freedom. Burchill’s piece, on the other hand, was both puerile and dangerous in the most vulgar way. Words like hers are hurled along with glass bottles at trans women fleeing for their lives from angry, hateful cisgender men. Ideas like hers fuel housing discrimination, see trans people excommunicated from their families, usher us with sibilant urgings to suicide, and are deployed by people who need to justify violence against trans people.

Burchill’s words and ideas, to the extent they have any substance at all, are simply the anima of hatred; hatred that revokes trans women’s rights. It sees our free speech muzzled, lest we be attacked for naming our experience and concerns. It sees our right to life snuffed out and declared conditional—less important than a privileged journalist’s right to lose her intellectual lunch in a national newspaper. It sees our right to free movement drastically curtailed, our right to healthcare passively but firmly denied.

None of this has a whit to do with “being offended.” It has everything to do with survival.

Our speaking up—as feminists, LGBTQ activists, and concerned citizens—was an attempt to ensure that Burchill’s article, which ended with an unambiguous threat and was essentially one long piece telling us to “shut up” (where was Mr. Young then?), did not have its intended silencing effect. If Mr. Young seeks enemies of free speech, instead of rudely stereotyping trans women he might well simply look in the mirror.

Solidarity and the “Real Issues”

Only a briefer note is necessary to deal with the odious counterpart to Young’s Left-baiting, and that is Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill’s snide suggestion that we are a single issue group devoted to a myopic cause at the expense of wider solidarity. Never mind that this exact argument has been used against feminists since the 19^th Century and is a common silencing tactic.

I am proud to work for an organisation that is devoted to precisely the kind of solidarity that Burchill so disingenuously “defended.” The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is concerned with those wider economic issues that structurally oppress so many in our society—the austerity and cuts crusades now being trumpeted from Whitehall to Washington. We’ve been on the front lines trying to fight the manifestations of that malignancy as they particularly affect low income trans people of colour, and do so in solidarity with organisations and nonprofits serving different communities. Our goal is to not only provide our clients with basic legal needs and representation, but also to help them join activist communities of their fellows, educating them about often opaque and esoteric rights they may have (in the social services system, for instance), and enjoining them to take part in discourse, education, protests, and the fight for justice.

This is not done through an artificial focus on trans issues, as if they can they be neatly and discretely parcelled away from all others, but through recognising that whatever “trans issues” are, they are made up of class politics, immigration politics, racial inequality, social-structural sexism, a culture of policing and incarceration, and so on. These are inseparable from each other, and necessarily inform our response to the issues of our time.

It was one of many reasons that I found Moore and Burchill’s claims to be both divisive and fatuous. So many trans people learn the true meaning of solidarity the hard way, and many of us who are feminists and rights activists are part of organisations that—far from being ‘single issue distractions’—are deeply embedded in broader struggles against austerity, sexism, racism, and the ever widening wealth gap in the West; others fight with a tighter focus on neo-colonialism and foreign policy. But we are all immensely concerned with the battle for wider, meaningful liberty, and it is nothing more than a hateful lie to suggest that we are not, simply because we have the audacity to defend ourselves when attacked so viciously by name.

Grauniad Offices; photo by Bryantbob.

It is altogether fitting that on a day when my own father yelled at me for being a feminist, and got angry at me for introducing my brother to novels by women, about women, that I should come across Julie Burchill raging against “shemales” in the Guardian. It was very much in the spirit of an evening where I was told to my face that I’d do more good for feminism if I’d “been a man” and not a woman; it was a day where I had to listen to a man witheringly declaim literature about “women’s stuff,” and a day where I was attacked for my anger and verve in defending our right to write and speak as women.

So in that spirit, I shall continue to write, and to speak.

I shall continue to write in spite of having been threatened with rape, in spite of having been told that I’m a “shemale feminazi with too much sand in her fake vagina,” in spite of having been called every misogynist, transmisogynist, and transphobic slur in the book many times over, and in spite of having been accused of “man-hating, race-baiting, white-hating,” and the utterly unreal crime of “misandry.” In spite of being called too loud, too shrill, too whiny, too sexist (against men, of course), and “heterophobic.” In spite of being told I should avoid graduate school unless I had a “rich boyfriend.” In spite of all that, I speak.

The path I’ve walked is littered with those fell arrows, spread behind me like a sinister field of bent and blackened straw. So when I see something like this:

“Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – don’t threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we’ve experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You really won’t like us when we’re angry.”

I can only shake my head. Not so much at the transmisogyny that runs through Burchill’s article like streaks of blood, but at the failure of empathy and sisterhood such a paragraph entails. After everything I’ve put up with hearing in my life, after all the sexual harassment and moments where I’ve feared for my life and safety—moments any woman, trans or cis[1], would know all too well—after everything I’ve listed above, Burchill still sees trans women as so inscrutably and ineluctably ‘other’ that we are incapable of even being on the same side of the great political divide. It seems impossible, in Burchill’s world, that I exist—as a woman and a radical feminist—because I can only ever be a “shim” in a “bad wig” and a dress. More than anything else, I think, what saddens me are the profound and abiding consequences of failing to see trans women as women, and as sisters in struggle.

Our Old Friend “Authenticity”

Throughout the piece, she excoriates trans activists (most of whom are likely feminists, and many of whom may also be cisgender) for essentially being overeducated toffs who do not know the meaning of suffering, depravation, and struggle. “To be fair, after having one’s nuts taken off (see what I did there?) by endless decades in academia, it’s all most of them are fit to do. Educated beyond all common sense and honesty, it was a hoot to see the screaming mimis accuse Suze of white feminist privilege.”

I’m not British. But I am a Puerto Rican American who both grew up in and still lives in “the ghetto” and my struggle with class in this country is as much a part of my life, my experience, and my activism as gender and its manifold vicissitudes. Further, it is still a matter of routine for feminists in general to be slapped by accusations of overeducation and ivory tower moralising: jeremiads against “the sanctimonious women’s studies set” are a staple of populist editorialising these days and have been for a generation now. I have not the slightest quarrel with Burchill’s working class background– to hate her for that would be to hate myself. I’m merely baffled at the fact that she antagonises women like me for speaking by suggesting that our attempts to get an education are a bad thing.

It never fails to surprise me to see women like Burchill and Bindel resort to the tics of patriarchs when defending their own bigotries, just as it surprises me to hear her extol her working class roots while mocking “wretched inner city kids” in another breath, rolling a horrifically complex social problem and the people who live it into a neatly poor analogy that insults with stunning economy but does nothing useful.

Indeed, going beyond the misogyny, classism, and transmisogyny that is this article’s raison d’etre[2] I would say that what is most disturbing about it is how stunningly and embarrassingly petty it is. It is more or less in the same category as a bullish op-ed by a cis male misogynist that was 50% “bitch, cunt, whore, slapper, slag, cow” and 50% bad clam jokes. Genitals and transphobic insults are the vast bulk of this article. The rest is comprised of invidious distinctions, such as the disgusting attempt to assert that trans feminists are opposed to Julie Bindel’s properly feminist work, and not just her transphobia, or to claim that trans women think their issues are the most important at all times.

The final dollop of a column centimetre that remains is, perhaps, her sole argument: that her friend, Suzanne Moore, should not have been called out for transphobia because she was doing something much more important with her article—the noble work of criticising the Coalition government’s oppressive and often misogynist social policies. But this is a weak argument, no more acceptable than a male socialist seeking forbearance for a rape joke used in an editorial about saving the NHS. Important work does not justify prejudice, even as a “joking” aside. Least of all prejudicial articles where women are objectified and find their appearances to be the subject of uncouth navel-gazing (see: all the remarks about wigs, dresses, cocks, etc.).

An Ironically Missed Opportunity

What is especially irritating about all of this is that feminists have the tools to understand why all of this is problematic: why “it’s just a joke” is not an excuse, why slurs are hate speech, why and how language constructs prejudicial realities (just as “mankind” biases us to thinking of men as more human than women, calling trans women “men” biases us to discriminating against them), and so on. Feminists, more than most people, have the tools to understand all of this.

But what troubles me even more is the attempt to put feminists on one side and trans women on the other. As if trans women cannot be feminists, or as if cis feminists could not be deeply troubled by the implications of Burchill’s piece. This is what is most potentially destructive here: the neat, artificial distinction that keeps trans women away from that great sisterhood of feminism, and from the healing and empowerment it can engender. And for what? For the sake of a cheap thrill in the Guardian?

Oddly enough, the innocuous subtitle of her article is “It’s never a good idea for those who feel oppressed to start bullying others in turn,” a point I fully agree with. We do have a problem with “call-out culture” in our feminist and queer communities, we do have a problem with unchecked egos and with activist-cum-academic aesthetics becoming more important than material results. There is a real, meaningful discussion to be had about whether the Tumblr-isation of activism has been a wholly good thing, or whether it breeds reflexive semantic policing at the expense of necessary work.

But Burchill forewent that entirely, instead launching into an article where she failed to take her own advice and did so with an ineloquent flamboyance that betrayed little besides prejudice and lack of self-awareness. Instead of possibly seeing trans women as sisters and allies in both forming a more perfect activist culture and in fighting patriarchy, she—who by her own admission knows nothing of the trans community save through Julie Bindel and this recent episode with Ms. Moore—simply writes an article groaning under the weight of its slurs and insults.

That saddens me more than anything else. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Sisterhood Unbroken

The other sad thing is, I completely get why she’s doing this. From her perspective, trans women are not women. We’re overeducated fops who are whinging about getting our feelings hurt and throwing male privilege around, so far as she is concerned. She could not be more violently wrong, but that fundamental belief animates everything else she says. I would like to think that if she actually, sincerely knew us—that if she were the godmother of some of our daughters as well—she might think very differently, and that she might be confronted with the mountains of empirical evidence that we’re really not so different from her.

She might see that, in the spirited words of Eowyn, I am no man. That her words have profoundly deleterious effects for very real (not imagined) women.

But what also troubles me is that she suggests that women should prove that they can be hurt by patriarchy by showing how they have. Why? Why must I strip off and reveal my scars to prove myself? Why must I revisit traumas to satisfy her and earn my place? Why must I always return to those places and times where I felt death gather around me in order to prove that I “know the meaning of suffering”?

My feminism is defined by what I do—by what I write, by what I orate, by what organisations I work for, by the research I do, by how I confront a patriarchal world and try to change it. It is not defined by my many wounds. Neither, for that matter, is my womanhood.

To be honest, I do not want Burchill to apologise. I do not dream of apologies. Rather, I wish Burchill could see what I see. That she could see the indefatigable sisterhood of women, trans and cis, working side by side to shatter each other’s chains, that she could see my friends and loved ones who I keep in mind every working day. I wish she could see, through their eyes, why words like hers can feel so profoundly dehumanising.

I wish that she could see the evil that trans women have had to face—the same violent deaths that befall too many women in our world—the same objectification, rape culture, risk, and quotidian hatreds, and see how it can shatter us in our fragile moments of being all too human, while also seeing how we manage to rise above it at our very best. I wish she could see us as the very human women that feminism has always striven to empower and render visible in a sightlessly woman-hating world.

I wish she could see me.

In that moment, I’d like to think, we could be sisters.

It would seem impossible to regard Lady Macbeth as anything other than an out and out villain; she seems at best incompetent in her malevolence, and at worst an almost demonic manifestation among humans who spreads her sickness to a far more powerful husband. Yet, on close reading of the text we see that Lady Macbeth has an urgent and bright moral centre, one that ultimately refuses to let her live; she shows regret and repeatedly evinces a morality that her husband is increasingly bereft of. As Macbeth’s better angels flee his increasingly sickened spirit, they seem to spread their wings ever more around Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth might be better understood as a tragic hero, in the mould of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, whose fatal flaw is her vaulting ambition; like Caesar she flew too close to the sun and paid the ultimate price. But unique amongst such Shakespearean figures is that Lady Macbeth is undone by patriarchy as well; it was misogyny that had so cribbed her in that using a male surrogate to gain power became an ineluctable necessity, creating a monster that would run out of control.

Yet from the start we are given a number of textual glimpses of Lady Macbeth’s empathy and restraint; “compunctious visitings of nature” would not shake her “fell purpose,” but in the end her own morality did. Such a view stands athwart not only popular notions of Lady Macbeth as an unalloyed villain, but also against some feminist interpretations that regard her simply as a failure, or as little more than a shadowed reflection of unadulterated sexism (Klein 169). It is certainly possible that Shakespeare’s intentions with Lady Macbeth were less than egalitarian in spirit and that he meant for her to be seen as a villain; these things are irrelevant to textual  analysis, however (Wimsatt and Beardsley 469). What is in the play itself matters most, and they point to an interpretation of Lady Macbeth’s character that is a good deal more favourable to her.

Hardly Infirm of Purpose

First it will be necessary to dispense with the idea that Lady Macbeth is simply a “help mate” or other purely misogynist diminution. Joan Larsen Klein argues that Lady Macbeth’s “particularly feminine” anguish represents a kind of punishment for her abjuration of women’s purportedly proper role (169). Lady Macbeth is “enfeebled” by this punishment, the “awareness of her sin” (a particularly passive kind of awareness) driving her to madness (171). Klein even attributes Lady Macbeth’s feint of a faint in Act II to “weakness” (174-175). She portrays Lady Macbeth as not only doomed from the start, but utterly benighted from her first line, a bumbling infirm who serves as little more than a misogynist object lesson. This is to give Lady Macbeth far too little credit for both the depth and truth of her struggles, and to neglect the fact that she actually does not act “particularly feminine” in any way that is actually sincere. Sociologist Raewyn Connell calls compliant, male-oriented femininity (that most enfeebling and degrading kind) ‘emphasised femininity,’ arguing that it is “organised as an adaptation to men’s power… emphasising compliance, nurturance, and empathy as womanly virtues” and that it is “performed, and performed especially to men” (Connell 186-188). Crucially, however, this is a femininity that seeks the marginalisation of its rivals. It is the impetus to be a “good girl” in relation to men, and suppress any women who interpret femininity differently. If this sounds nothing like Lady Macbeth, there is very good reason for that.

To whatever extent Lady Macbeth “performs for men,” as she does in Act 2, Scene 3 when she faints, it is a decidedly expected, high feminine behaviour, except that it can be strongly argued that Lady Macbeth—fully seized of and aware of what she has done, and hardly in a position to be given the vapours by the mere mention of blood she had already dipped her hands in—deliberately faked her faint so as to distract attention from her husband’s flailing excuses. This “performance for men” manipulates them and uses their sexism against them.  When Macduff says to her “O gentle lady, ‘Tis not for you to hear what I can speak: the repetition, in a woman’s ear, would murder as it fell” (2.3.85), there is no small amount of deliberate dramatic irony at work here which makes the scene incredibly effective in its brevity. We know Lady Macbeth would hardly be ‘murdered’ by the naming of the deed that she, no “gentle lady,” had just taken part in. She is, in this scene, trying to control events with the meagre tools available to her, a theme of her character from her first scene.

Her husband was one of those meagre tools, the implement that she prayed for the strength to use; these are not the actions of a woman wallowing in the performance of emphasised femininity, but rather one who is trying to manipulate it to her advantage in a particularly cunning way. There is no doubt that she is confined by sexism here and belittled by Macduff’s words. But those societal circumstances are best understood as the tragedy that the world of the story has set up for Lady Macbeth. They are part of her individual journey down the road to tragic heroism.

The Unimportance of “Unsexing”

It is here that we work backwards, to Lady Macbeth’s infamous opening speech which appears to at a stroke foreclose any consideration of her as a “hero,” tragic or otherwise. It is here that Klein finds her central idiom for discussing Lady Macbeth’s failures; the analysis turns on whether or not Lady Macbeth could be “unsexed,” as she so energetically demanded of the heavens. Klein concludes she was not, and that she remained fatally connected to womankind in ways that would be her undoing (169). “As long as she lives, Lady Macbeth is never unsexed in the only way she wanted to be unsexed—able to act with the cruelty she ignorantly and perversely identified with male strength” (179). But Lady Macbeth’s prayer to be unsexed matters less in its literal success or failure than its poetic plea to transcend the limits of her gender, of which she was all too conscious. It was an elegant gesture to her worldly circumstances, haunting poetry that says—more than anything else— that she recognises the patriarchy that surrounds her. That awareness in and of itself, so often forbidden to women in older literature, is striking, and speaks profoundly to Lady Macbeth’s agency. It is the evil that she struggles against (albeit in perverse ways).

But Klein portrays the arc of the story as being one simply of failed transcendence; Lady Macbeth could not ascend to the heights of being “unsexed” and tragically fell to earth, into the muck of emphasised femininity and in the end is nothing more than an object of pity. I would not be so quick to use such a stark, zero sum dichotomy here, however. In a very large sense, Lady Macbeth did transcend the limits of her gender; she died not because of ‘womanly weakness’, but because of a morality that is shared among all people, regardless of gender. Klein suggests that Lady Macbeth perished because Shakespeare wished to show us that a woman could not help but have these enfeebling pangs of empathy and remorse. This point is irrelevant. What matters is that, in the world of the story, men also have these feelings of empathy and moral outrage, suggesting there is more to the “milk of human kindness” than femininity. The men that appear heroic, like Macduff, are shown as ‘feeling’ men who have access to the very virtues that Macbeth has, with a chilling lack of error, shorn from himself. When Macduff learns of his family’s murder, he avers that he must not only dispute the crime as a man, but “feel it as a man” (4.3.220).

We come, then, to an interesting symmetry between Macduff and Lady Macbeth. She too mourns Macduff’s loss: “The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” she says during her painful sleepwalking confession (5.1.45). She shares Macduff’s pain, but from the guilt-riven perspective of the one who fears that she made the killing possible, that she created the monster who robbed the Thane of Fife of his “pretty ones.” This connection, which reveals to us men and women sharing the same deeply empathetic mourning, does suggest that Lady Macbeth’s moral malaise is about something more than mere emphasised femininity. Lady Macbeth dies and Macduff lives, but Lady Macbeth’s necessary guilt is responsible for that—and it is, again, a very human guilt.

The Second Sexing of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth did indeed escape some of the limitations of womanhood—by demonstrating a keen awareness of her social condition and then acting in ways that would allow her to deal with the deck stacked against her, she showed that despite her ultimate failure, it was not a collapse into typical Renaissance womanhood that sundered her. Rather, we should give her the dignity of saying that she fell on the sword of her own designs—a fact we would surely admit if she were a male character from the outset, all other things being equal. But another question must now be addressed: even if all of this can be granted, surely this just makes her a more complex villain than Klein and others credit, and in no sense a tragic heroine? Lady Macbeth’s struggle against the gender roles of her time, and her ability to make the best of the difficult hand she has been dealt, both speak positively of her; in the end and in the full context of the play, her sinister prayer to have her milk taken for gall appears less as a statement of true character than as a desperately beautiful moment of fleeting pique and poetic exposition. At almost every other point in the play, pinpricks of Lady Macbeth’s virtues are revealed. When she has a moment of empathy upon regarding the sleeping Duncan, we see that side of her (2.2.13).  Lady Macbeth, further, demonstrates great self awareness upon recognising her lack of contentment and the reasons for it (3.2.5); all in a scene that markedly contrasts Lady Macbeth to her husband, whose “mind is full of scorpions” because he seeks to become yet more bloody in his rule. It can even be surmised that Macbeth realises that his wife is a far better creature than he when he refuses to tell her of his plans to kill Banquo. The tension in this scene, where Lady Macbeth tries to get her husband to cease worrying about Banquo and his issue, arises from the fact that she has a dawning awareness of the monster awakening in her royal husband. Still to come is the famous, even cathartically bone-chilling hand-washing scene, which should leave us in no doubt about the torment of Lady Macbeth by her better angels.

Lady Macbeth, upon reading the missive that would change everything for her.

Lady Macbeth’s two, intimately interwoven, fatal flaws are her sweeping ambition and her cynical view of politics; for the latter she can hardly be blamed, however. The Scotland of the time was a bloody game of swords—she could be forgiven for thinking that politics red in tooth and claw was the only way to achieve one’s ambitions. And it was Lady Macbeth’s own ambitions that drove her to urge her husband to make good the Weird Sisters’ prophecy; the scale and sweep of those ambitions, their impatience, and—most importantly—their uncritical endorsement of hegemonic masculinity, were her undoing. As the play grinds forward, Lady Macbeth reveals her bright moral centre all the more, and the towering tragedy was that she had snuffed it out for but a brief space in time that would end her life—remember that the hatching and execution of the regicide took place over the course of less than twenty four hours. But for this one fit, this one moment of profound and fatal moral weakness (not femininity-as-weakness), she would live, and with a clean conscience. It is worth noting that it is not her femininity that undoes her in this reading, but rather that moment of darkness with only the gold of the crown glinting in Lady Macbeth’s eyes where she gives into a profoundly masculine temperament—a hegemonically masculine one premised on emotionless, bloodless, heartless and savage strength. That is the weakness that undoes her.

The point has been made by gender scholars that Lady Macbeth and other strong women in fiction are very easily dismissed as villains and attacked due to their gender; we view them in the particular as “women” rather than as “women who are political actors” or “women with moral paroxysms” engaged in a deeply human struggle. Cristina León Alfar has called for a broader view to be taken of Shakespearian “villainesses” that would restore to them a context of fuller humanity, rather than simply presuming an utterly confined and inhuman feminine archetype for them before exegesis ever occurs:

Because the gender prescriptions [Shakespearian women] ostensibly fracture have never been adequately explored in relation to the dynamics of gender and power that inform their tragedies, they are read within their designated domestic roles as daughters and wives. Consequently, the political context of their actions is ignored in favour of a reinscription of obedience, mercy, and compassion as natural and appropriate feminine behaviours (Alfar 26).

In her analysis of Macbeth she says she will “reread them as political tragedies that put pressure on orthodox notions of gender and power.” This is precisely the vein in which I have been reading Macbeth here: as a play where patriarchy clearly exists, but where the drama unfolds nearest the hairline fractures in its edifice. The indictment of hegemonic masculinity, Lady Macbeth exploring the outer and inner limits of herself without regard for the delimiters of wifehood, Macduff’s epiphany about “feeling as a man,” the Weird Sisters beards, all give testament to that emergent gender anxiety just beneath the play’s surface. It is in that world that Lady Macbeth’s tragic flaw—the very human flaw of ambition—takes flight. But I argue that this is difficult for us to see because we become too caught up on the fact that Lady Macbeth is a woman.

Sexism, like a saboteur in the night, silently cuts our moral and critical brake lines, leaving us vulnerable to antagonising women for flaws that we would deeply qualify, excuse, or complicate, if we were beholding a man in similar circumstances. We may simply think that our moral indignation is the objectively mechanistic result of a character’s genuine moral failings—we dislike Lady Macbeth because she is “bad”—but we fail to recognise the higher standard to which we hold her because she is a woman. She is less likely to be allowed to exist as a morally complex, tormented, even heroic figure; she must either be an angel or a demon; Madonna or whore. Yet her tragedy here lays primarily in an epic mistake occasioned by the unfortunate confluence of social and personal forces at the wrong moment in Lady Macbeth’s life.

Conclusion

The play clearly gender stereotypes on one level, associating certain virtues with masculinity and others with femininity. But it is hegemonic masculinity that comes across as a clear villain, due to its merciless demands for dominance and the self-abnegation that results from it (Connell 184). Lady Macbeth drinks briefly but deeply from that intoxicating elixir, and almost immediately realises that she has committed a grave sin as a result. But she does not end, as Klein suggests, in an enfeebled state of emphasised femininity. She is a complex character who achieves instead a deeper understanding of her own humanity, but at the tragic cost of her own life; it was the only penance she could offer in the depraved, bloody world built on fear and daggers that her husband, whose hegemonically masculine monster she helped to unleash, had created.

Yet her heroic qualities are demonstrated, first and foremost, by the world the story creates, partially through the easily discerned web of gender stereotypes that threads through the play, but also through Lady Macbeth’s awareness of patriarchy and the condescension shown to her by many of the men around her. She has to struggle against this to do anything, including advance her career. She retains a number of virtuous qualities, such as her capacity for remorse and empathy, and the great tragedy of the play is observed largely through her. We see through Lady Macbeth’s eyes not only the utter collapse of her plans but also the shocking moral inventory she performs throughout the play, accepting her culpability in the terror around her and watching with horror as her husband spiralled out of control, seeing the wages of her enjoining him to “manliness” writ starkly in blood before her.

So if we can find in Caesar a tragic hero, whose hamartia was ambition, then we can surely find the same in Lady Macbeth who also fell on the sword of her hubris. It is not punishment for her being a woman, per se, but rather a story of sin and atonement that is as human as any other, where Lady Macbeth’s “fell purpose” is ultimately shaken by her heroic qualities—her humanistic virtues. The fact that Lady Macbeth is a woman in a patriarchal society does, indisputably, change things somewhat. But only to the extent that it adds to the complexity of the story’s political context and gives Lady Macbeth additional confinements that add to the depth of the tragedy; for this is decidedly a tragedy of gender, of the fatal flaw that is hegemonic masculinity, and the mistake that Lady Macbeth makes in using it, however briefly, to overcome the societal sexism to which she is so justly opposed.

Works Cited

Alfar, Cristina León. Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Print.

Connell, Raewyn. Gender and Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Print.

Klein, Joan Larsen. “Lady Macbeth: Infirm of Purpose.” Shakespeare: Macbeth. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet, 1998. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. New York: Signet, 1998. Print.

Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468-488. Print.

This dinosaur might be transgender. I can’t tell, however, because she looks too normative.

If I were to give a measured reaction to Riki Wilchins now infamous “Transgender Dinosaurs” editorial in The Advocate, it would amount to this: it is yet another example of hierarchal inversion where we assign a moral-political value to genders and then exile the ones we disapprove of. The kind of visibility Wilchins writes about is based on a trendy ethic that suggests if you aren’t visibly out of the mainstream, then you’re The Man, and part of The Problem. This, however, neglects the fact that ‘standing out’ in that way carried unacceptable risks for most trans women, historically. It also ignores, from a moral perspective, that if we attach moral value only to accoutrement—or suggest that the latter is indispensable to moral behaviour—then we are creating an exclusionary, even bankrupt political ethic that is based simply on what is fashionable, not what is politically necessary.

We begin with this quote which, in a way, neatly sums up everything that is wrong with Wilchins’ ideas:

“Never having passed as female as I’d grown older I’d finally given up trying. Besides, it seemed somehow counter-revolutionary…”

A revolution is about a substantive change in material relations of power and ruling; it is about making the world less violent, less oppressive, more equitable and just. It is not about whatever Wilchins is suggesting is revolutionary here, which seems to be little more than “women should dress and look the way I want them to look” and “trans people should express their gender in the way I want them to.” Do I even have to say something to the effect of “As a feminist, I think that’s sickening”?

But Wilchins’ transmisogyny goes beyond that. The entire story, an efficient distillation of radical transphobia, pivots around a woman with no voice, a girl that Wilchins renders a mute doll in order to make her trendsetting point that trans girls and women are now insufficiently transgressive, beginning immediately with the kind of objectification that characterises most mainstream media coverage of those same women.

The article’s opening words say it all:

“She was a lovely 13-year-old girl, with long blond hair, bright hazel eyes and the budding bosom and hips of the woman she would soon be.”

And throughout the article she remains “this blond.” Her hair colour, a “budding bosom” and a dress are who she is for Wilchins’ purposes. One wonders how this nameless young woman would react to having been used in such a way. What did she have to say about transition? About her life and the meaning of her gender? We don’t know, because she is merely a mirror in which Wilchins sees her own existential insecurities grimacing back at her.

She suggests throughout the article that we somehow stop being trans people if we gain any kind of conditional cisgender privilege, if we cease being ‘visibly trans,’ however that is assessed in our deeply fluctuating society. “But the question of blockers — if you could take a pill that would stop you from being transgender, would you take it?” she asks, constantly equating a “pill that would make [gays and lesbians] heterosexual” with hormone blockers and passing-as-cis. For Wilchins, there is no “residue” when a trans person “passes,” nothing that marks us as special or non-normative.

Outwardly, this may be so. But as Wilchins herself ought to know, being trans is a rather depressingly holistic experience. Phenomenologically, being trans is an all-over, inside-out life;  the ‘inside’ never goes away, no matter what you do. We can manage it psychologically, we can mend the worst side effects of that double consciousness, and stitch its frayed edges, but it is hard to make it go away completely. Why? A trip to the rather ugly comments on Wilchins’ piece should suffice (Trigger Warning):

“Yeah. Sure. Males all start out as female in utero — except for the XY chromosomes in every cell of their bodies. … Letting the “T” infest the LGB was the worst idea since Troy decided to pull that attractive wooden horse inside the gates of the city.

THIS is what we get for it: Heterosexual males who make it their life’s obsession to force everyone else to pretend that normal human reproductive biology doesn’t exist — and denying the rest of us our inalienable right to use the correct pronouns of our mother-tongue per biological sex of the person about whom we are speaking.”

I quoted this sickening screed at length to remind any readers disposed to Wilchins’ views just where the heart of transphobia lies: biological essentialism. We are marked from birth, and always will be in the eyes of cissexists. They hate us because of what was marked on our birth certificate, in essence. No matter how we look, how normative, how ‘attractive’ (and indeed, sometimes the more normative we are, the more viciously we’re attacked, particularly by left wing transphobes like the one quoted here), we will be pilloried if our trans status is known. We will always be subject to the most vicious, vituperative hate from those who are outraged at our mere existence, no matter about our hair or “budding bosoms” or wide hips or pretty dresses or what the hell ever is making Wilchins upset. In other words, there is no “leaving” transgender.

When she says of the nameless 13 year old girl that “She didn’t cross gender lines or even rub up against them” Wilchins is simply lying. The girl transitioned. She charged through the Great Wall of Gender. How on earth is that not “crossing gender lines”?

Living with that knowledge, that coming out is always a dangerous and disturbing exercise that threatens the very foundations of your life in an uncaring world… that stays with you. Knowing that your history is inalterable, that you had a history where you needed to come out, transition, expose yourself, take enormous risks, and endure deep dysphoria to claim a gender that cis people take for granted… that stays with you. These psychological realities are also part of being trans, and while having passing privilege takes some of the sting out, it does not make you “not trans.” That is, to be blunt, a petulant and self-serving thing to suggest, and represents the kind of exclusionary radical politics that drives trans women away from most queer circles.

Martha Nussbaum, in her devastating criticism of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, summarised the queer-feminist Zeitgeist perfectly,

“Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. … All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech.”

Substitute “words/speech” for “gendered performance” and you get the gist of this ethic. Now, consider Wilchins’ purportedly hopeful conclusion to her article: “More youth are queering their hormoneless, surgery-free identities, doing versions of non-male and non-female and all sorts of gender drag in between that both mock binary genders and threaten to turn them inside out.”

The echoes of Butler’s empty buzzwords ring through the sentence.

I am in no way suggesting that what Wilchins describes is a bad thing; what I am specifically doing is critiquing, just as Nussbaum has, the idea that we should attach a privileged moral value to symbolic transgression. The troublesome move here is that Wilchins and others seem to believe that this sartorial and physical rhetoric is the path to the promised land, while those of us who use our hard won autonomy to eschew such “mockery”[i] are simply “counter-revolutionary”—never mind what we actually believe and do. I use makeup, wear my hair long, and I tend to favour skirts; according to Wilchins’ activist balance sheet this must outweigh my work for a radical transgender led nonprofit, work and leadership in a women’s rights club, and my writing.

I have tried to devote myself to using the few talents I have to minimising the suffering of those I can help. The reason I am even writing this article is in the hopes of comforting sisters afflicted by dangerously misguided ideas like Wilchins’. The narcissism that inheres to focusing on presentation and performance is anathema to real political change, which demands empathy and labour on behalf of others, irrespective of their bodies and appearances. Our bodies, our choices; is this not what was meant to be our guiding light? For many of us, our resistance takes us down different paths towards the dream of building better institutions for us all.

Performative rhetorics have their place and can, yes, jolt observers into an uncomfortable place that then engenders new understandings, and a slightly better world. The mistake is in overemphasising such performance as the essence of resistance; this is invariably going to come at someone’s expense and the power dynamics it engenders do not go away with a wish, however much Wilchins and her fellow travellers may wish to ignore them. Oftentimes white, masculine queer folks who run various political events, parties, shindigs, and rallies often wonder why more trans women—especially trans women of colour—don’t show up.

Wilchins’ article is the reason why.

Wilchins, like Butler, “delights in her violative practice while turning her theoretical eye resolutely away from the material suffering of women who are hungry, illiterate, violated, beaten. There is no victim. There is only an insufficiency of signs,” to quote Nussbaum once more. There are very real, material reasons underlying trans women’s “performative” choices—some radiate from the bright sun of our self-esteem, others are painfully emblematic of oppression’s cribbing—all are personal, few are talked about and understood, and none are so much as hinted at by Wilchins’ self-reflection. We need only more subversive gestures that stick a rude finger at the gender binary; we need not consider what trans women’s lived lives are actually like and what multitudes may be contained in our diversity.

If that absence were the only problem, this would be sin enough. Yet Wilchins and others fill the void instead with inflammatory rhetoric that antagonises and demeans the very women that others like her fret about including. It is a conviction that transgression positively correlates with radicalism and morality; to the rest the hindmost. In the process I’ve become the very transsexual menace Wilchins once celebrated.

Forgive me if I refuse to play along.