Month: September 2010

Lost in Trans-Lation II: This Time It’s Personal…er

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

So begins Episode II of the Lost in Trans-Lation saga. I realise this is, in many ways, a terrible title whose badness is compounded by the fact that it’s yet another bad ‘trans’ pun (and don’t worry, there’s more where that come from) but it’s grown on me and I’m going to keep it around for its humour value. I’m in a new Women and Gender Studies class with the same professor giving the same weekly journal writing assignments, and so I felt that like any badly named movie it needed a sequel. The sequel no one was waiting for. (Rejected titles include Lost in Trans-Lation II: The Two Ivory Towers; Lost in Trans-Lation II: Revenge of the Poststructuralists; Lost in Trans-Lation II: Return of Marilyn Frye. Lost in Trans-Lation II: The Identitarian Menace. Look, do you know how hard it is to make jokes out of words like ‘ethnomethodology’? Give me a break!)

Onto more serious things. In this space I clearly devote an extensive amount of energy to trans issues. In the near future I will write my thoughts on the etiology of transgender and I think that this journal entry I’d written that reviews Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body is a very good place to start that might give my readers some insight into the intellectual underpinnings of the opinions I’ll soon be expressing. Dr. Fausto-Sterling presents a very compelling view of biology, its relation to politics, and the project of sexual dimorphism, with profound implications for how we understand transgender and transsexual people.

It would be difficult to overstate just how vital Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work should be to any discussion of sex and gender, particularly in its ponderous neurological and biological contexts. Her earlier book, Myths of Gender, explored the myriad of problems with simplistic biological explanations for gendered phenomena in society, but Sexing the Body’s implications reach further. She proposes a radically new means of understanding sex and gender. I would not simply say she has proposed a new ‘system’- rather she challenges the need for a system at all, and trading heavily on the examples of intersex people demonstrates the radical implications of it and the need for a vision of sex and gender the centralises the individual rather than privileges the preservation of already-existing groups. In the opening chapter, Duelling Dualisms, she uses illuminating examples that highlight the seemingly arbitrary nature of our present ‘two party system’ as she wryly calls it later in the book, focusing on the topic of Olympic sex testing. While this work was penned in 2000, the very contemporary example of Caster Semenya demonstrates the ongoing, painful relevance of the Olympic examples and the absurdities contained in its assumptions. From a Nazi athlete who disguised himself as a woman in the Olympics for easy gold medals, and then lost to three actual women, to a Spanish runner who found herself under vicious attack after an Olympics sex test identified her as “male” Sterling brings to life a complex issue that we do not often think about. What does it say about our world when we have powerful people sitting in a “femininity control head office”?

Sterling paints a picture of a gender system that is as much enforced as it is naturally occurring, and one that treats exceptions to it not only as curiosities, but even as things to be utterly annihilated, denied, and erased. Such language may seem extreme, but it is hard to look at the surgical alteration of intersex infants in any other way. Her chapter Should There Be Only Two Sexes? demonstrates powerfully why these surgeries appear to be more in the interest of preserving a social ideal than in the welfare of any given child. She demonstrates that while intersex people without surgically altered bodies lead productive lives, including lives that are active sexually, those who undergo the surgery face mixed results and the doctors themselves admit that the goal of such surgeries is merely a cosmetic effect. Virtually no attention is paid to the psychological health of the child or to their future sexuality, which is often irretrievably harmed by the surgery.

I have often said that this failure to treat intersex children properly is best described by one of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s best turns of phrase wherein she says such surgeries constitute “the literal social construction of sex”; contained in those words is the essence of the very problem that intersex people and transgender people are confronted with. Sterling points out that many of our sexual woes are essentially conceptual problems. We find ourselves unable to break out of dualistic thinking on the subject: sex and gender, male and female, nature and nurture. She argues convincingly for a vision that regards the connections between mind and body, as well as body and society, as a Mobius strip where there is a simple but elegant continuity between the two ‘sides.’ This stands in a long line of feminist thinking that has sought to challenge dualism as a destructive idea that necessarily flows from (and thereby reinforces in dialectic fashion) systems of domination and subordination. Starhawk spends much time challenging dualistic thinking in both religious and secular life, arguing that it promotes the idea that one end of the polar split is good and the other evil, a metaphor that plays out on countless aspects of ordinary life with disastrous consequences. Sterling takes this conceptual vision and suggests that we reunite concepts previously held to be opposites, echoing my own long standing injunction “can’t it be both?”

Another problem, as I already alluded to, is that such dualistic cleavages invariably create hierarchies. Quoting Judith Butler, Sterling asks “Why […] has the idea of materiality come to signify that which is irreducible, that which can support construction but cannot be itself constructed?” This echoes my past thoughts about the long shadow Karl Marx’s base/superstructure paradigm has cast on the sciences. Even feminists would come to see it as salvation, allowing them to argue that yes, while biological sex is natural, real, and unchangeable, gender was constructed and malleable, thus social change was possible. It is a compromise argument that has left feminism the poorer and painted it into a corner as it still fights on numerous fronts against biological determinism. Sex is accorded the status of timeless reality, that which simply is, while gender is conceptually granted the possibility of some flexibility but is still seen as an outgrowth of sex’s foundation.

In addition to this, however, she proposes an equally interesting idea that has much merit as well. She holds that homosexuality and heterosexuality are themselves constructed and are predicated on a reinforced binary sex/gender system that only came into full force with the rationalisation of the 19th Century.  She argues that our culture presumes that when a middle aged person comes out as gay that they are revealing something that has been cosmically true all along and invalidates years of prior heterosexual activity. The truth, she says, is more complex and the idea that one is exclusively hetero or exclusively straight (and sometimes bi) is a scientific fabrication enforced by powerful social norms that ensure a general degree of conformity and compliance. Certainly this is true to a great extent. Many gay/queer people who come out later in life feel as if they have been living a lie. It is not to say, however, that heterosexual acts might never have occurred to them in a more tolerant society, only that the stifling burden of compulsory heteronormativity limited their options to a ‘straight’ presentation. That is most certainly living a lie. But does it mean that there is a “gay gene”? Both Fausto-Sterling and I are sceptical.

In Should There Be Only Two Sexes? Sterling makes a brief reference to transsexual and transgender history that is interesting and does ring of some accuracy, but suffers enormously from its brevity. My concern is that readers new to the subject may walk away with a somewhat skewed view of this history. She briefly mentions but does not go into detail about just how powerful medical and psychiatric professionals were in determining the gender presentations of trans people. There can and should be no mistake: trans people, women especially, were a highly vulnerable population that many psychiatrists took advantage of to enforce the most rigid gender norms possible. To the extent many such trans people enacted, and perhaps even internalised, this performance it is assuredly the fault of the psychiatric establishment, not of transgender women, that there was a “reinforcement of a two gender system.” She does also muddy the streams when it comes to the transsexual/transgender distinction, incorrectly making transsexuals seem conservative, and transgender people more inherently liberal or gender fluid. I identify as transsexual but I am certainly no gender conservative, and may even fall into the category of people she says do not surgically alter their bodies but identify as women. She also says something that I agree with, when she says “permanently assuming a transsexual identity that is neither male nor female in the traditional sense.” She is correct, certainly. I identify as a trans woman, maintaining the firm double-thought of that identity and resisting any artificial bifurcation of it. I am not a broken woman in need of correction or fixing. Sterling touches on a debate in the transgender community: some feel comfortable referring to being trans as a “birth defect” or saying “I’m just a woman, not trans-anything” while others like myself consider her transness to be an inextricable part of her identity that cannot be excised and should instead be a matter of pride. I distinctly remember when I first read this book my great disappointment that Sterling did not spend more time on trans people as we are- and I do not think she’d deny this for a second- quite helpful to her general argument. But as I have just pointed out, it is very difficult to summarise the complex politics of identity in the trans community. Perhaps she was avoiding a minefield after all?

Sterling’s photo of a much younger version of herself still makes me smile very broadly. It reminds me quite a bit of myself at her age, endlessly fascinated with test tubes and the other trappings of the great scientist, saving the world through mixing brightly coloured chemicals. I imagine that had I been raised as a cis girl I might’ve been given a similar epitaph “In memory of Katie, who liked space rocks better than boys.” The point she makes about innate inclination versus environment, and how it cannot be resolved or intuited as being convincingly one or the other is a good one. There may well be no way of knowing for sure if she truly was born to be a scientist. After all, the science I decided to pursue after many years of faithfully stealing my mother’s food colouring to better enhance the sciencey look of my fake chemistry sets was, of course, social science. How did she end up a biologist and me an aspiring sociologist? The resolution that she proposes for understanding how these things happen is a sound one, and her flair for apt visual metaphors continues into the final words of the book: a matryoshka doll. For her the famous Russian nesting doll symbolises the various layers of sex and gender, interconnected, each interesting by itself, but only fully intelligible and complete as part of a larger, continuous whole. Each layer- history, society and culture, the mind’s psyche, the physiological organism and so on- shapes gender. How much? That depends on the individual. Individual body, personal history, personal relationship with significant others and society, personal biology. It all adds up to a unique individual. This is the frightening answer that many people do not want to face up to- it fails to offer the silver bullet much desired of those who want an easy and simple gender order.

But it does have the benefit of being correct.

Their Eyes Were Watching Goddess

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

“Three years after graduation, in an apple orchard in Sonoma, a friend of mine (who comes from an Italian working class family) says to me “Cherrie, no wonder you felt like such a nut in school. Most of the people there were white and rich.” It was true. All along I had felt the difference, but not until I had put the words “class” and “colour” to the experience, did my feelings make any sense. For years, I had berated myself for not being as “free” as my classmates. I completely bought that they simply had more guts than I did- to rebel against their parents and run around the country hitchhiking, reading books, and studying “art.” They had enough privilege to be atheists, for chrissake.”

~Cherrie Moraga, from ‘La Guera’

I have often said that transition changes far more than you expect. In my own life I certainly expected to change gender presentation in a very noticeable way, yes, but I never expected my politics to change, my relationship with my mother to change, and my career goals to crystallise so quickly, to name just a few significant things that shifted with the tectonic plate of my gender. But there is one more area of great significance here and I touched on it a bit yesterday. Faith.

When I was younger I was very close to being a radical atheist. I thought Richard Dawkins was the greatest thing to happen to Western intellectual life since Voltaire, I gleefully joined in the intellectually squalid mockery of the religious as “irrational” and otherwise “weak minded” (when I was being nice), and I joined Christopher Hitchens in saying that religion poisons everything. I had, after all, grown up in a Catholic household headed by a traditionalist patriarch who took inspiration from his faith to be misogynist and homophobic, as well as bigoted against various other religions, like Islam and Hinduism. As I grew older I would find myself recoiling against it, and not just because of him. I saw in the news, time after time, the Church shafting women, helping AIDS spread in non-Western countries, bilking the impoverished, spreading hatred of the queer and gender variant among us; indeed when I first tepidly came out, just a few days later the Pope would compare transgender and other variant people to the threat of deforestation around the world. I’ve memorialised my reaction to that in the form of this blog’s very title.

In all of this, how could I not have had a very negative reaction to faith as I got older? But when I transitioned something finally gave way. Even during my heavy flirtation with atheism I did not quite come right out and claim that I was because there was, ironically, a bit of logic gnawing at my mind. Would the world really be uniformly better off without religion when we settle the most petty of secular disputes with equal verve and hatred? Are virtuous people of faith really straw men, or are they people I ought to include in my assessment of religion? Is it right to mock and dismiss the religious out of hand because of their beliefs? On and on those questions worked upon my mind quietly. So what changed when I came out? The woman who helped me find myself was in the midst of another transition: coming out as a woman of faith.

But what made me sit up and take notice was that it was not just any faith, it was a pagan one culled from centuries past. The worship of the Goddess Cybele was often executed by priestesses that we would, today, consider transsexual women. Far from being a stigmatised group, shunned by faith as a threat to the world, they were considered the highest and holiest manifestations of the goddess herself. As my dear friend excitedly explained all of this to me and I did some research of my own I sat back pensively and felt my sociological imagination kick in. If that were possible- trans people being holy instead of utterly sinful- what else could faith do? And I began to realise that even though I knew religion was socially constructed, I had never taken that idea to its logical conclusion: that it could be socially reconstructed, that its meaning was not fixed and that its present form was not its inevitable one. The mythology of her deeply felt faith is profoundly beautiful, and my friend- Jade- found in me a willing counsellor. I couldn’t believe that I had stepped into this role, of interpreting her faith for her and providing her with guidance on how to believe. But it felt so right, and I knew that I was helping her. In her own words Jade describes her faith best: Here she is on sacred sexuality, here on the main myth of Cybelline faith which rendered trans women holy, and here is her beautiful recounting of SRS as a spiritual experience.

To return to my own journey… The hammer fell hardest on my self-flattering delusions about secularism and atheism. I had wanted to believe that those who had no faith would be inherently more tolerant, more reasonable, and more accepting. Yet as I was coming out and looked around I saw any number of things that told me this wasn’t true. Several atheists (YouTube’s infamous AmazingAtheist being a prime example of this) were flagrantly misogynist in the most boorish and typical way possible. Indeed, AA would give my Catholic father a run for his money in the woman-bashing department. In numerous discussions, comment threads, and writings I’ve found I have also discovered that many atheists can be just as callously transphobic as their “theist” counterparts, and oftentimes for the same reasons. It does not matter to me if you tell me that it is God or Allah who holds me as less than human, or if it is your bowdlerised reading of neuroscience and psychology that informs this. It’s all the same bullshit to me. That realisation was actually a liberating one. Christopher Hitchens’ atheism also did not leave him with the wisdom to oppose the war in Iraq or to not heartlessly rationalise neo-imperialism, nor did it leave him with the compassion to avoid Islamophobia, nor the reason to skirt asinine evolutionary-psychological theories about women’s separate sphere.

All of this made me realise that religion was less operative on human sin than I had thought. Atheists were just as capable of bigotry and rank stupidity as the religious were, and people of faith could be possessed of immense kindness and love. All was possible, but religion did not predispose us to one thing or another.

The fault, dear reader, lies not with the stars but with ourselves. What we mould faith into is what matters, but faith itself is merely a tool. The dominant patriarchal faiths of the world have done immeasurable harm, but not expressly because they are religions. We as humans lust after purpose and meaning. Religion furnishes us with this, but it is not the only avenue to those universally sought-after goals. Secular philosophies, political ideologies, and various other beliefs can inspire the same passion, the same fervour, the same devout blindness that religion can. The sacred canopy of faith, that great nomos that binds together the meaning structure of society, is easily replaced with secular strictures that perform the same functions- and will be prone to exactly the same flaws. The problem is neither faith, nor government, nor science, it is us.

When I came out as trans and began to research the history of this group I suddenly found I belonged to I realised that the great antagonists in our lives were not only the patriarchal men of God who pronounced hatred upon us from on high, but also men in white coats who hearkened to the higher power of rationality. Men who would pathologise us as diseased and in need of their shepherding, who would seek to control us. Who would tell trans men that they could not love or marry other men, who would tell trans women that we could not wear trousers, and who would constantly exploit us to enforce their vision of gender and sexuality. The same men who, for a very long time, had pathologised homosexuality. Their descendants, even now, in the forms of J. Michael Bailey and Kenneth Zucker, use rationalism to oppress. They exploit us for no reason other than a desire to increase the volume of their citeable writing and to make names for themselves with esoteric pet theories.

The Catholic Church could hardly have done any worse.

There were other things I came to notice as well as the scales finally fell from my eyes. Atheism’s overwhelming whiteness was one. In their insipid denunciations of the “irrational” among us they completely ignored the different cultural meanings and centralities of faith for people of colour. The Cherrie Moraga quote above epitomises a perspective that, even though I had grown up in a Latino family as well, I had become somewhat blinkered to. I had the privilege of going to the best schools in New York, which pushed me shoulder to shoulder with many who were white, upper class, and rebelling. I gained little to no appreciation for how faith built community in my own neighbourhood and wrote off the role of faith in opposing slavery and segregation.

When Sojourner Truth told a sceptical audience of white suffragettes and men of how only Jesus heard her when she wept a mother’s tears at how slavemasters stole away her children, that meant something. That was not incidental or flavouring. Faith sustained her through her greatest trials, faith helped her to become the powerful presence that stood at that podium to issue an injunction that echoes loudly and proudly to this very hour: Ain’t I a woman?

How could I have ever, ever deigned to spit on that as merely irrational weak mindedness? How drunk on privilege does one have to be in order to make such a judgement?

What Cherrie Moraga said was jarring because I had interpreted my own struggle to free myself from Catholicism as something rather the opposite of privilege. But in truth it was because I inhabited upper class milieux that I even had the breathing room to express myself in that way, where participation in a community of faith was optional. This Color Lines article is rather instructive on the subject from the unique perspective of trans people of colour.

[Monica] Roberts grew up in Houston, Texas, and in the Black church. Her mother is a teacher, and she was surrounded by women who were historians and leaders in the community. She understood the influence of Black women. “You might have a minister up here pontificating on the pulpit on Sunday,” she says, “but the real power behind the throne is the women’s auxiliary that’s meeting on Tuesday.”

Her father, a local radio commentator, tried to groom Roberts for leadership as his eldest child. Yet, it was only after transitioning that Roberts felt able to take on such a leadership role. Perhaps it was due to the toll that living in the “tranny closet” had taken on her self-esteem. But Roberts also noticed a difference in the responses she received from other people to her leadership as a Black woman. She got positive reactions, she says, “because I was basically doing the traditional work of Black women in the community in terms of uplifting the race.”

This is neither small nor incidental, it is something that commands respect and understanding. Not arrogant derision. I learned fast that what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls “the metalanguage of race” bears profoundly on how we have constructed atheist opposition to religion. I had never thought of atheism as a privilege. In some ways, it assuredly isn’t. It opens you up to discrimination and other forms of opprobrium. But on the same level as what people of colour have experienced? Absolutely not. What’s more it is also used as a weapon against people of colour, directly and indirectly, as a tool to castigate them for being insufficiently enlightened or intellectual or modern- how ironic that one form of cultural colonialism is being steadily replaced with another. The truth is, I found more enlightenment in a church nestled in the heart of a working class and immigrant community of colour than I ever saw in many so-called rationalists.

I’ll close with a recollection of that church, one the most wonderful memories I have of early transition. Another figure in my own spiritual transition was my Cybelline friend’s mother, Anne;  a minister in the United Church of Canada and herself a lesbian, married to another woman quite happily. She took me one drizzly Sunday morning to her church to speak to her congregation for a service dedicated to Pride Week. By itself that was amazing. The sight of a rainbow flag on the altar beside the sacred ornaments and instruments of Christian faith felt at once natural and exciting. But I would be asked to speak specifically about being a trans woman.

It was something I never expected to do, and yet somehow it happened, and as I spoke movingly of my joys and my fears, I also had to spare them a thank you. They’d prayed for me. Not to “cure” me or what have you, but prayed that my father would come to love and accept his daughter. When Anne had told me this, it was like a brick through a plate glass window that finally shattered my militant resistance to faith. I thanked the congregation for their thoughts and their prayers and told my story, which was very well received by them all. As I sang with them and moved to the sounds of their gospel I felt something I had never felt before. At home in a church.

I am not a Christian now, no, nor will I ever be. The faith does not speak to my soul the way it does for some others. The difference now, however, is that I respect that for what it is. I learned the seemingly simple and even obvious lesson that faith is what you make of it, and that invidious mockery of it merely serves to reinforce the bigotry that atheism is supposed to be the antidote to. For my own part, I will admit for the first time here publicly that I consider myself a woman of faith, and probably betrayed what that faith was in my prior article. I do not speak much of it in this space simply because faith is private for me, it’s my own little sanctuary against the world in the embrace of Goddess and God. I do not believe in skyhook deities, however; for me faith is a beautiful metaphor that orders my thoughts and grants me peace.

I came to realise that was enough.

A Hex on Both Your Houses

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

I generally do not waste too much time expounding on general American political issues because they’re done to death just about everywhere else. For all of your Red vs. Blue, lib vs. con cockfighting there are quite literally hundreds of sites for your fancies. What I try to do here is to shed light on viewpoints that are not likely to, say, be repeated on HuffPo ad nauseam. Nevertheless occasionally something comes along, down that corroded mainstream pipeline that I find is being analysed in a way that elides its most interesting elements.

Ladies and gentlemen: Christine O’Donnell had sex with a witch. Liberals wish for you to know this and meditate on this.

Ms. O’Donnell and I likely agree on nothing save for, perhaps, the colour of the sky and Goddess knows I hope she’s trounced in the November election, for all the good it will do. But in watching the ascent of the Tea Party’s women I’m noticing a familiar pattern emerging here and one I am not especially fond of. When it comes to women like Sarah Palin, liberal men tend to forget that they’re theoretically committed to the idea of being anti-sexist and tolerant in general. Thus, enter one of the infamous “Mama Grizzlies,” Ms. O’Donnell and some video clips of her 11 years ago on Politically Incorrect.

I’ll waste no more words here. In watching the splashy press coverage of this we are expected to accept as uncritical fact the idea that it is scandalous that Ms. O’Donnell was involved in witchcraft, and that she had sex with a witch on what she describes as a “Satanic altar.” This, to me, is not a scandal. I’m going to leave aside the important issue of the fact that “Satanism” and “witchcraft” are two completely different things, and this erroneous conflation of the two on O’Donnell’s part has gone unchallenged. It’s more important to focus on two things here:

  • Yet again, a woman having had a sex life is automatically a scandal.
  • Witchcraft = Bad according to liberals. Thanks, boys.

Usually when this sort of nonsense comes up I’ll typically hear out a liberal apologist who says this is merely about exposing hypocrisy. It reminds me of a debate I had with one liberal cis woman who thought calling Ann Coulter a “tranny” was just hi-fuckin’-larious, and it was okay! Because it just showed up Ann Coulter as a hypocrite and because *she* was transphobic, then it was just all ironic and shit to imply she was a trans woman. You know. Like it’s a bad thing! But that doesn’t mean liberals are being transphobic. They’re just being “clever.”

So it is with Ms. O’Donnell. They’re not hating on pagans or witches, they’re just showing up Ms. O’Donnell as a hypocrite, is all! Cause she’s all Fundie now. However, note how there is precious little explanation of this complexity, nor any attempt in any of the many salacious news stories about Ms. O’Donnell’s indiscretions to set the record straight about what witchcraft is. In any just world, being a witch would be no more scandalous than being Episcopal. Yet, as usual, when it comes to anyone who isn’t white cis men, liberals play a bit of a shell game. They are ‘merely’ exposing hypocrisy while also ‘cleverly’ trading on the stigmas surrounding witchcraft and female sexuality. It’s all for a good cause, of course. Sundering the evil conservatives.

Who cares if you use exactly the same methods people like Christine O’Donnell uses to discredit her ideological foes? And, hey, who cares if you reinforce nasty stereotypes about religious minorities, eh? We need liberalism to protect the weak, after all.

In watching the usual sexist sophistry of mainstream American liberalism from the sidelines this season I’m left shaking my head and remembering why I’ve increasingly come to distance myself from that philosophical stream. For them, defeating conservatives- while a worthy goal- has become an end in and of itself in a grand game of mounted polo chiefly played by white upper class people who are predominantly male and Christian. Periodically, in the service of these “higher” ideals they espouse, they’ll throw people under the bus in parade: people of colour, gay/queer people, trans people (I haven’t forgotten, Representative Frank), women, and now, hey, let’s give the neo-pagans a turn while we’re at it.

If I sound a tad peeved it’s because this is getting old. In fact it was ‘old’ long before I was born. Thus, in that spirit, I shall show you something tonight you probably never expected: behold, a radical leftist feminist transsexual queer woman goes to bat for Christine O’Donnell. For one thing, I don’t care what she did when she was a teenager. I am concerned about the impact of her political views in the here and now. For all I know, she could’ve been more rad than Angela Davis when she was 18, it does not change the fact that there is something glaringly wrong with her contemporary politics. We all did stupid shit when we were young. Myself included. I guarantee you, who ever you may be, did so as well. Maybe you had hot Satanic sex with two people! (Of course, that’s less stupid and more flaming hot, but… you get the idea). I do not need to know this about Ms. O’Donnell’s past. I kind of figured she’s fucked at some point in her life. I assume that about most people I meet. I even assume they’ve probably done weird shit in the bedroom at some point in their lives. I actually assume this about every politician I’ve ever heard of or laid eyes upon.

I would actually hazard a guess that most people do, regardless of social class or education. No one, not a one, is surprised when some rag runs sex scandal stories. Ever.

People change over time. How would you feel if some bit of youthful nonsense you’d dipped your nose into stalked you for the rest of your life? Christine O’Donnell’s contemporary record speaks for itself without this being thrown onto the pile. So, the rub of this is, irrespective of everything else, the fact that she did this in the past does not change Ms. O’Donnell’s sincerity in her convictions, nor does it make her less serious. That is a fact that those interested in challenging her would actually do well to keep in mind. If she ever was Wiccan (doubtful) she certainly is no longer and represents a legitimate threat to liberty. We would do well to not dismantle it on our end by opposing her with witch-baiting and sexist campaigns, yes?

Secondly and finally, Satanism and witchcraft are not the same things, and both Satanists and Wiccans will tell you this, as will many neo-Pagans. The conflation of the two is a Christian creation designed to facilitate exactly the kind of slandering that Bill Maher and other white liberal men are now using to pursue their own short term political aims. “She’s a witch!!” Really guys? The Fundamentalists called, they want their shtick back.

As far as I’m concerned the mainstream liberals and conservatives can have each other. A metaphorical hex on both their houses.

ETA: Apparently us witchy folks are speaking up rather loudly about this now. Note, however, that the criticism is being levelled chiefly at O’Donnell, as well it should since she herself was defaming Wicca/witchcraft in her initial interview. I maintain, however, that the media’s uncritical use of this soundbyte and screaming headlines of “O’Donnell says she dabbled in witchcraft” were meant to speak to a presumed audience of Americans who would assume witchcraft is bad and scandalous, and thus the thrust of my criticism- directed at liberals who sought to make a tempest in a tea (party) cup- remains trenchant, in my view. The headlines were not “O’Donnell insults Wiccan community,”  they were oriented at shaming her for her association, however tenuous and distant in the past, with something vaguely approximating witchcraft.

The scandal was not her bigotry, it was the insinuated association. The media’s uncritical repetition of this meme is reflective of far larger problems than O’Donnell’s individual rantings and it is this, I feel, that merits the most criticism.

The Soul of History: Breaking the Silence of Biography

Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

This post was originally going to appear on Nuclear Unicorn first, but evolved into something written for Questioning Transphobia very quickly. Still, it has more than earned its place here and is part of the project of confession and catharsis that “The Daughter Also Rises” began, in the hopes of telling a true trans story- my trans story- and illuminating just how complicated this whole thing is. Enjoy!

I was not so happy as I looked in the pictures on my parents’ walls. It was something that resonated with me as I read a beautiful, radical poem by Jo Carillo ‘And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You’ which used as a leitmotif pictures of Latinas working under the sun that might hang in the livingroom of a blanquita radfem. Like so many things in the anthology- This Bridge Called My Back- that poem is immortalised in, it made me think, not just about its own very important subject which is, alas, an all too salient issue even today… but about the pictures that were once on my wall too.

They were windows into a very particular past, a past that is assuredly a minefield on multiple levels. Much has been said, including on the pages of Questioning Transphobia itself, about those pictures. How they can oppress, or how they can liberate. It vexed me because as a budding sociologist I’m easily entranced by questions of meaning, and constantly working upon my mind was a need to decipher the meanings of those pictures in my own life. Not just the meanings of the photographs themselves, but what they represented.

And to begin the, perhaps necessary, use of ten guinea words in this piece; what the past those pictures evoked could say about my subjectivity.

What it means to be trans is one of those existential questions that excites and puzzles as surely as other such questions about the categories of human existence, the lines drawn in flesh that mark us off as one thing or the other. In the more evolved discourses of identity politics and its modern intersectional incarnations, there is an understanding that being trans carries with it a certain experience, a certain perspective on the world that only trans people have.

Certainly the vagaries of this can be disputed but one question that I’ve had and felt very troubled in answering is this one: Is my lived experience as someone who was forced to be male part of my subjectivity?

Let me be clearer still: I was never a man, no, but I lived as a male per the directions and encouragement of every social actor in my life up until the age of 21. In moving through the world in that utterly ill fitting skin, that imposed disguise whose existence tantilised the very edges of my conscious mind, I still ended up seeing things a certain way and being made to undertake certain actions, think certain thoughts. Such for me provides rich perspective, and informs my participation in discourses on misogyny. But can I talk about what that meant for me and what it felt like? What the specific experience was for me as a young trans girl- a woman forced in very deep ways to put on what society deemed a male persona? Can I say that this taught me something about male privilege or provided me with some perspective on what being a young man might be like?

Not without siring a world of trouble, that much is for sure.

I cannot speak about my past and lend a voice to those pictures that were once on my wall. I was not living as I wanted then, I was indeed battered into silence- sometimes quite literally- and I did not yet fully understand the essence of who I was.

But I was a person back then too, goddamnit. I lived. I breathed. I experienced life. I saw things. Felt things. Oh Goddess, the things I felt.

Transition is not going through life as a passive, unreceptive automaton until a switch is flipped and suddenly “YAY I’M A WOMAN/MAN!” and then suddenly all comes to life and now you live a life worth documenting and recounting. I was a person then too, in all those long, interminable years before transition. I was Quinnae-in-waiting, in a sense, but I was also Quinnae-in-progress. Despite this reality, this unshakeable duality, these contradictions held together by the insistent fact of my existence, I still feel immense fear speaking about my past with authority.

It’s a legitimate fear we’ve all felt, of course. We fear the slings and arrows that can come from any direction- from family, from radical feminists, from conservatives, from MRAs, and any number of people anywhere that might be invested in attacking our identities. We fear, with good reason, that the minute we say in a discussion “I used to live as a man/woman” that we remind people of a spectre we had hoped to banish, remind them that we are different- and in a way that often unsettles cis people. We fear we may shatter the selves that we have worked so tirelessly to build, shedding blood to make whole because we place before our potential tormentors the irresistible red meat of discussing a gendered experience as our assigned-gender, rather than who we really are.

We are often silenced because of this, and inhibited on speaking to the immense complexity of transgender experience. We fear that speaking of our pasts will court that tiny but vocal claque of radical feminists who will simply go “Aha! You DID have male privilege! We win! We win!” We fear people’s inevitable confusion and their bigotry. All with good reason.

In a recent article, Lisa spoke of the acceptable narratives of trans-ness, with a focus on the element of the acceptable liberal narrative that holds we are totally and forever happy after transition, the end. What I will focus on here is what comes before that, the hegemonic discourse surrounding pre-transition life. It is, in short, that everything is bad and terrible because you are “trapped in the wrong body” and waiting for deliverance as you sit in a swirling vortex of darkness. To a large extent this is true in its way- who among us does not remember deep depression and self loathing? I had suicidal ideations, virtually no will to live, and by the time I hit 20 my energy to do anything productive or meaningful had at last become the latest casualty to the dysphoria.

But the problem with the dominant narrative is that it tacitly insists that that’s all there is to pre-transition life, and my story was always more complicated. Talking about that isn’t easy because it upsets the prefabricated story that most cis people have about us, even when they want to be supportive, sympathetic, and mean well. The “trapped in the wrong body” cliché sums it up very aptly. The perception is one of a binary switch and also part of the same he/she media trope that bedevils so much ‘journalism’ about us (wherein the wrong pronoun will be used to refer to the trans person in past tense while the correct one is reserved for the present, post-transition person, which speaks volumes about how we are seen).

Perceptions of transition presume that you are exactly like a cis person in every way until one day you wake up and decide you want a sex change and BOOM, now you’re a man or woman. But the fundamental truth, as we all know, that our personal biographies are much more unified and complex than that.

I didn’t play with dolls when I was little, not because I felt like I couldn’t, but because Lego was fucking awesome. On my bookshelf right now, just above my copies of Whipping Girl, Women, Race & Class, and Gender Trouble, is a huge Lego starship I made and have carefully preserved. I was raised on and still adore video games. When I was a wee tyke I’d always get excited at seeing monster truck rallies on TV (my favourite was Bigfoot). To the cis observer, I didn’t fit the stereotype of the insistent five year old demanding the stereotypical trappings of femininity. But it didn’t change the dysphoria I would feel. So I was a bit of a tomboy growing up; doesn’t mean I’m any less of a woman for it.

That’s the other problem with the hegemonic cis narrative- it forces trans men and trans women (and excludes genderqueer folk, naturally) into a highly gender stereotyped fable… and then turns around and blames us for reinforcing their gender binary.

What I would experience as a trans girl was distinct to being me-who-is-trans, if that makes any sense. It’s my story and is not The Transgender Experience, but it is an experience of transness. What happened to me was that many parts of myself began to pull at me mercilessly as though my soul were being drawn and quartered. I fought against my gender socialisation as much as I felt compelled by it. This lead to contradictory postures in high school. I understood and fought against rape-apologism at age 16, earning the admiration of many female classmates, but also ended up employing entitled views about women. I became what I would come to loathe the most, a Nice Guy ™. All of this informs how I see gender politics today because, among other things, I feel I can testify to the fact that I saw certain gendered phenomena from the inside and could say with the kind of confidence that comes with that kind of knowing how remarkably troubling and disturbing it is.

Yet the reason I reject a simple male privilege analysis is because what I experienced as a trans girl is quite simply not really the same as what a cis boy might have. I internalised enough to act out some male socialisation, yes, but that has its own very distinct consequences that imbricate with the issues of potential privilege. It’s that male gender socialisation makes you utterly despise yourself as a woman, loathe who you feel you are deep inside, and worst of all compel you into a kind of ritual debasement that is a special form of torture: objectifying yourself. I strained so hard to accept I could have female role models and want who they were, their strength, their passion, their intelligence, and in some cases, yes, their fashion sense. But relentless pounding from my father, my peers, the media, all made me feel there was only one acceptable avenue for admiring women and femininity: sexual attraction.

I can’t begin to describe how that fucks you up as a woman. There are no sesquipedalian words for this, no academic prettifications I can conjure to lessen the blow of how intense I mean that to sound. It is deep and it is troubling; its enactment profoundly deepened my self-loathing and was part of what ultimately sent me spirialling downward. I owned nothing about myself, my dreams, my sexuality, nothing.

Talking about that is difficult, not just because of the shame I still feel sometimes, but because I fear that it will lead people to armchair psychoanalysis. More than a few right wing types and “men’s rights activists” have claimed trans women are just self hating men who mutilate themselves. That line of bigotry also has a silencing effect, because in talking fully and faithfully about my past I need to be able to say that acting out such and such male socialisation was like inflicting wounds on myself daily. It was deeply ingrained self hate and I need to explain a lot about my pre-transition subjectivity in order to fully explain that. I have to remind you of my past, and entreat you to step into that picture that once hung on my wall.

I also have to navigate the unyielding and craggy shoals of transgender politics. The perpetual fear of “making us look bad” stalks my mind, as I’m sure it dogs many of us here. I fear sometimes that if I say “when I was forced to live as a man, I didn’t get harassed in the street; now my life is completely different and my relationship with the outdoors is fundamentally altered” I will earn the ire of those who demand I stick to The Narrative for the good of the community and not try to give voice to my past self because it will just confuse people and undermine my identity. I don’t fully blame other trans people for doing this; the fears are very real, unfortunately. Part of the appeal of The Narrative is that it’s simple and easy to remember. It could probably fit into a limerick I don’t have the patience to think up right now.

But the fact is that we’re far more complicated- like any human being might be. That’s not good for a bumper sticker, but it is reality. As the comments here demonstrate there are a multiplicity of transgender perspectives and experiences. Being trans is a bodily experience too, and yet even that differs. When I stand up and say that I never felt ‘trapped’ by my body, will someone think I’m making us look bad or confusing people? What might people think if I tell them that for me changing my name was far more important to me than anything about my genitals? That it was less my penis and more things like my name that clawed at me and made me feel empty inside, defined by others but not by myself.

How might I describe that? I might put it in the terms I put it to a cis friend of mine who listened rapt:

“In the past, when I wrote my name or signed it, it felt as perfunctory and connected to me as a serial number. An assigned thing that signified this entity known as “me” but had no connection to my soul otherwise. It was just a thing for a form.”

She is enthralled by this and ‘gets it’ more than many cis people do. Yet I’d fear saying this to a broad audience, I would fear leaving myself to misinterpretation. The fear of that, of doing wrong by the trans people I love, silences me oftentimes. Yet I still try, on my blog and in comments sprinkled here and there, to say ‘this is my experience’- and I have found many people who, much to my surprise and pleasure, seemed to understand and welcome the complications I added to the transgender stories they had heard.

The real power of this, however, is in the person I will never forget, who read a blog post I wrote where I spoke of the tomboyish aspects of my youth and how I didn’t fit the stifling “classic transsexual” narrative that is so often repeated in news outlets right around the world. She came out after reading it because she at last felt she wasn’t alone in having that unique childhood. She didn’t play with mum’s dresses and high heels either, but she is no less a trans woman. It makes you wonder how many more of us suffer in silence and are having their pain prolonged by that ciscentric, cis-friendly narrative of transition that leaves them feeling “not trans enough” to save their lives.

I know in some way, we have to start breaking this vow of silence. How, I don’t know. But I feel like the answers lie in those pictures. I wasn’t as happy as I looked in them, no.

But nevertheless that was a woman and a human being.

On.

My.

Wall.

Author’s Note: Some of the flourishes at the beginning and especially the end of this piece owe themselves to Jo Carillo’s beautiful poetry, which I sorely wish I could have linked in this article. As I came to accept myself as Latina I wanted to elevate these voices and add their textures to my contributions to trans discourse, but I want there to be no mistake about who they belong to.