Cissexism

Fatal Error

Katherine Alejandra Cross7 Comments
What human beings see when they behold something like this has remarkable consequences for the other humans in their lives.

It is, by now, a cliché to suggest that transgender people of most any stripe are somehow acting contrarily to nature. This has numerous ideological expressions. On the political right we hear this from conservative Christians and “men’s rights activists,” from science we hear this from any number of would-be psychiatric colonists of our experiences, and from the left we hear this from any number of groups including a certain clique of radical feminists.

What I have found interesting is that these types of feminists– the Julie Bindel set, essentially– come from a school of feminist thought that placed a good deal of primacy on the sacred, natural body; hence their obsession with SRS and the like. I am always reminded of my father (Goddess knows he was no feminist in the slightest) angrily asking me if I was saying that God had made a mistake. Clearly I was challenging Him by saying I was “born wrong” (or something like that). The whole theoretical construct relies on a welter of cis projections and is not based on anything I’ve said, naturally[1]. But the framing of this clique of feminists is much the same: substitute Nature for God. This simple gesture is at the heart of much leftist and science-based oppression, the generative nucleus of all that is right and good is simply shifted from an all powerful white male divine to an all powerful Natural Order/Balanced Ecosystem that we cannot challenge.

It is exactly the same ideological manoeuvre that feminists rightly opposed in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. A move that allowed the scientists to pooh pooh the religious by telling them there was no God who ordained everything… while preserving the Ur textual explanation for the inexorability of white cis male supremacy in a new form, this time ‘scientific.’ For eco-feminists, there was less emphasis on science as they understood what was going on with the then-ascendant sociobiological explanation for gender. But they simply reinvested a kind of mysticism into Nature. And thus people like Sheila Jeffreys would ask me “So are you saying Nature was wrong?”

What is tacitly ignored in all of this is the fact that humans, by default, act contrarily to nature. Virtually nothing we have done as a species, as a civilisation, has been purely natural. It never fails to make me smirk when I hear arguments about the virtues of naturalism from someone wearing glasses. Such arguments almost invariably are arguments for the preservation, in part or in whole, of the status quo. The “balance of nature” or the “will of God” always just so happens to demand that our present arrangements of power and hegemony, on one particular subject or on all subjects, are pre-ordained and foolish to fight. The set of conservative transphobes on the political right require a vision of a male/female caste system that is ineluctable, easily maintained, and lifelong that can ground itself in the perfectly constructed male/female body. The transphobes of the left, many with roots in various ecological movements, assert that nature has created a perfect body that any changes to (changes that are not sanctioned by dominant ideology, at any rate) are unnatural, aberrant, deviant, and ‘mutilation.’

What is lurking behind all of this is the anthropomorphising of the generative nucleus in each system: God or Nature. The intelligent design movement of the Christian Right in the West provides us with the clearest expression of this notion: God is a designer, a divine watchmaker, whose intelligence is used to carry out His intent in the world and thus all of nature has a sentience-ordained purpose; acting contrarily to that purpose is objectively ‘wrong.’ Since God can be conceptualised as a person, this is easier to swallow if you give yourself over entirely to the religious fervour that enables belief in a literal divine figure, lounging on a cloud somewhere in the heavens. With Nature it is much more clearly a metaphor that has spun wildly out of control. Nature, many transphobic scientists and radical feminists say, has intent as well. We can discern this intent scientifically and politically, and then measure deviance from that standard as an objective metric of ‘wrongness.’ To act contrary to the intent of nature is thus empirically, scientifically, wrong. Politics is removed from the equation, and this analysis is presented to the masses as a neutral, ineluctable truth. One which just so happens to say that the current order of white cis male power is natural and inevitable.

It is interesting to think about why certain cis radical feminists have participated in this discourse, one constructed on a theoretical paradigm that has suggested that women are intrinsically inferior to men.

This is the discourse that radical feminist transphobes are accessing when they deny trans people any semblance of personhood based on how we supposedly challenge the natural order. It uses exactly the same logic, relies on the same Archimedean Point of an all powerful, unchanging divine nature that does not err, and can be easily manipulated to come to conclusions about women that are antithetical to feminism. The ‘perfect body’ of womanhood suggested by some cis radical feminists bears a strange resemblance to the alabaster angel who bears children for the fatherland. To define women solely on the basis of our fertility is not only a losing game, but one that reinforces a central ideological pillar of patriarchy: that we really can be bound by our supposedly universal ability and desire to give birth. Since this is “natural” there can be nothing wrong with it. It is objective, neutral, ahistorical, and apolitical.

Feminists, perhaps better than anyone else, know why that is bullshit and what that imports into our highly political culture. It is precisely my own radical feminism, very specifically, that has given me the strength to confront and push back against these oppressive ideas. It is my feminism which helps me feel, in good conscience, that I am right to oppose any notion that subsumes our shared humanity beneath the weight of an abstract ideal.

The reality that human beings must confront is simple: Nature has no intent. It is not conscious, it is not intelligent or otherwise self-aware. It does not think, it does not plan, it does not design. Nature, as such, is a constantly evolving, changing, messy, illogical riot of constant evolution and adaptation that has no discernable “intent” in the sense humans understand that word. As a woman, my inability to bear children does not define me; to phrase this differently, my inability to bear children has not spared me the ravages of patriarchy. Cis men treat me as a woman, with all the negativity that implies. My lack of a uterus does not insulate me from that. The meaning of “woman” in our society is not synonymous with the meaning of “womb.”

We’re making a very tragic mistake if we think so.

To talk of nature is to talk of something that changes, that evolves. We all know this on some level: not a single one of us looks or is shaped much like we were when we were born. Nature is not a static thing held in perpetual equilibrium. Like the human beings that arose from it, nature changes constantly. Nature is change. To say that what we were born with is intrinsically good, and any alterations thereto are intrinsically bad has nothing to do with nature. It is an ideology. It is, in a word, politics. The world is one that evolves and that blossoms: human life at its best, at its freest, is a life of blossoming, a life constantly in motion whose ultimate course is one of many winding roads and hairpin turns.

To whatever extent it can be determined that evolution has a ‘plan’ or some preconceived order (metaphorically speaking, of course) we as humans, by our very nature (real nature, in this case), are under no obligation or compulsion to follow that plan. One of the things that defines us as a species is our ability to discern evolution and think about it; that awareness is part of how we then step outside of evolution, at least in part, and decide with our own self-awareness what directions we may take.

Women are not ‘intended’ for anything, and certainly not by dint of birth. In my own case, as a woman, as a trans person, as a human being, did God make a mistake? Yes, absolutely. The God conjured by humans, by men in particular, did indeed make a mistake. Because the God is not in the sky, He is invested in every doctor, every clergyman, every teacher and parent, who ever tried to force me to be someone I did not wish to be. It would be more accurate to say that they failed.

But to put it another way, if one believes in Deity of some kind, or a Creator, the best way of imagining it is this (and this applies very much to the Naturalists as well). No, God/Nature did not make any sort of mistake; but we ever fallible human beings have a lot of mistaken assumptions about what we have been given to work with.[2]

[1] I’ve never claimed to be “born wrong” and have long since abandoned any notion of being “born in the wrong body.” The very idea that being trans is the correcting of a mistake is made necessary by a society that imposes definitions on us that are inherently limiting, binding, and always against our will. In a just society, my evolution as a gendered being would have been unremarkable and like any other.

[2] I can’t take credit for this. A discussion with the ever brilliant little light yielded this idea from her and I thought it a brilliant, spiritual and social resolution to what I have always considered a deeply flawed question.

The Master’s Tools

Katherine Alejandra Cross17 Comments

Super Italicised Editor’s Notes: I’ve been quite busy with schoolwork and reading of late so, to all three of you, I apologise. It’s been fulfilling but draining and I scarcely have the energy to write things for this journal. Updates will continue to be sporadic but I have some ideas knocking about.

More Editor’s Notes: Andrea James has graciously responded to this piece at length and I encourage everyone to consider what she has to say.

In the past I have mentioned trans rights activist Andrea James, a highly successful trans woman who writes for and maintains the invaluable resource of TSRoadmap.com, which for its relatively small flaws remains a compendium on trans feminine transition without compare. I still link it at the side of this website for those neophyte trans people who may be poking around the net for information that may stumble on this blog. Ms. James keeps up with it, updating it periodically, and keeping up with its news feed which is one of my sources on trans community news these days.

But I have to say I was disturbed to discover her latest venture, which appears to be an outright attack on two, admittedly dangerous and self-hating, trans people. Linked in the news section, I read this with both interest and concern. Andrea James could well be a scholar if she put her mind to it and much of her website contains comprehensive deconstructions of transphobic ideology, pseudoscientific and otherwise. This is no exception, save for the venom she injects into certain elements, which I will discuss momentarily. The two people she is attacking here are people she, with good reason, lumps together with a group I derisively call the “HBS crowd”, a group of conservative transsexual women who claim to have an intersex condition, “Harry Benjamin Syndrome,” and claim dominion over who is and is not a true transsexual. Much of their online presence is dedicated to outright assaults on the trans community, using extremely bigoted language that would not be out of place in a bar (“men in dresses” “eunuchs” etc.) and they appear to use little else besides political orientation to make these determinations.

They are the Uncle Toms of the transgender community and I do not use this term flippantly or lightly. I do not say this because they don’t think as I do; I say this because they actively reify cissexual oppression and buttress it, claiming standing as a trans person in one breath to legitimise their hatred, while in the next disowning it and appropriating an intersex identity as part of their perpetual self-loathing. I’ve seen HBSers cheer on transphobic feminists, support anti-trans legislation, and reject attempts at equality such as the promotion of the word ‘cis.’ They claim to know who is a real woman and who isn’t, using ‘standards’ that are incredibly demeaning to trans people and women as a whole. Indeed, there is precious little difference between their beliefs and the ideals of your run of the mill ignorant cissexist.

Their betrayal of other trans people is impossible for me to forgive. I do not begrudge those who wish to live in stealth and otherwise separate themselves from the political community. That’s their right, we transition to make our individual lives better and I cannot blame a trans person one jot if they elect to do so. My problem is that they then actively work against the rest of their fellows. They have so internalised cissexist hate that they then project that self-loathing onto the rest of us. They feel illegitimate because they have been so bogged down by a society and a medical establishment that told them this was so, that they’d always be second-best also rans as women. From this perspective, their condition is a sad, lamentable one. HBSers are victims of cissexism as much as the rest of us, and regrettably they turn around to assault the rest of the community in thrashing attempts at legitimising their own identities. They create hierarchies of womanhood with themselves at or near the top and the rest of the trans community towards the bottom. They absolutely must feel more legitimate than other trans people in order to feel legitimate period.

The brilliant author of the webcomic Trans Girl Diaries has some excellent satires of their mentality in these particular pieces.

After this very lengthy and deserved thrashing you may wonder, then, what my problem with Andrea James is in this instance. HBSers attack the community by creating websites and sockpuppets designed to promote  their unique flavour of transphobia, Ms. James comes in with her +10 Hammer o’ Justice and all is well, yes? Well, much as I love Ms. James for doing what so many of us can’t, there is a thorny ethical question here that ties into other such information campaigns she has run in the past.

HBSers, regardless of their self-loathing politics which are externalised onto the rest of us at every opportunity, are still trans women. They are still vulnerable to transphobic and transmisogynist violence and discrimination. The men who have sought to rape, murder and utterly destroy us don’t give a whit about what they would see as semantic political differences. HBSer, TG, WBT, TS, trans women, we’re all just trannies to them, and thus subhuman. For Ms. James to decide, by fiat, who is worthy of protection and who isn’t, I am afraid she’s simply playing into the hands of transphobes. I consider the two women she’s just outed to be odious and detrimental to our community, but I cannot countenance putting them in harm’s way, regardless of the hate they are spreading.

You do not out a trans person, nor splash their photos, full names, and place of residence (if not exact address) on the Internet, end of story.

In digging up all of this personal information, including their personal histories and the like, I feel as if she is going too far to make her point. Can a trans woman activist like Ms. James, however well intentioned, wield the cudgel of cis violence against her (and indeed, our) enemies? Is this ethical? My answer is a resounding no. I understand she is trying to name and shame as well as hold these people accountable for their words and actions, piercing the façade of their innumerable alts and sockpuppets to prove they’re fewer in number than they appear and so forth.

But from Ms. James’ own description, Candice Elliott is apparently confused and possibly going through a midlife crisis. In attaching herself so forcefully to an identity and taxonomy used by trans-hating psychiatrists she is, in my mind, attempting to find and legitimise some identity for herself in a world deeply inimical to trans people. We all have our weak moments, and yes we should be judged by how we handle that weakness, but no you should not be put at risk of violence by other trans people for it.

When she speaks extensively about public figures in the cis scientific community like Ken Zucker and Ray Blanchard she’s mostly going over things that are on the public record. But by outing people like Ms. Holder and Ms. Elliott she’s entering far more dangerous and far more sinister territory. There is, however, other radioactive water that she is carrying:

“As shown in the photo below, Holder is passing for black about as well as passing for female.”

I’m not going to comment on Holder’s skin alterations. I put it in the same category as I do furries; fine by me, I have better things to do with my time than prove you ‘wrong’ in some cosmic sense. However the tone here taken by Ms. James clearly indicates mocking and derision. It is, in my mind, amoral for a trans woman to mock another based on one’s ability to “pass” by their standards (which are invariably influenced by the media imagery of a misogynist culture) and it simply reifies cissexism as much as any HBSer rant does (indeed, many of them do the same, as the pyramid I linked on TGD above shows). How can Andrea James indulge this for even one moment? Would Holder’s wrongdoing be any less problematic if she looked like a supermodel? Of course not. This merely feels like kicking sand at her out of spite (deserved spite, mayhaps, but spite all the same) and echoes the ugly statements made by Lynn Conway about the appearances of some trans people she disapproved of.

The objectifying before/after photos echo an ugly media trope that is often used against trans women, and although the ‘before’ pictures don’t show them in guy mode, it still has an ugly vibe to it that makes me rather uncomfortable.

You cannot fight cissexism and then turn around and indulge in it when it is convenient for you to do so. I don’t claim any right to do so just because I’m a trans woman.

I applaud Ms. James’ valiant efforts on behalf of the rest of us, but I also implore her to be careful when outing people who are otherwise private citizens. It’s a tremendous dilemma because one wants to push back against their misinformation and hate, but they are trans people all the same (whether they claim otherwise or not) and as such are vulnerable to transphobic violence and discrimination. Opening them up to that is unconscionable, unethical, and should be unthinkable for any trans activist.

It might make things harder, yes, but I learned long ago that nothing worth doing is easy, especially that which is virtuous. We must fight our enemies with dignity and without reducing ourselves to their tactics.

Blunted Spearhead: The Cis Man’s Burden

Katherine Alejandra Cross5 Comments

(Trigger Warning: If you find yourself triggered by blatant transphobia, transmisogyny and un/misgendering it’s best to leave this post, for today.)

Generally speaking whenever one comes across flagrant transphobia, particularly of the hopelessly cliched variety, it’s best to not waste your time deconstructing it. It’s just another way we, and other people who constantly have to bat away a barrage of clichéd bullshit, are oppressed and held back- compelled to waste our time justifying ourselves and giving 101 lessons to people who probably won’t care to come within a hundred miles of “Getting It”™. But occasionally it serves a useful purpose, and this is one of those times. Our post comes to us from the mystical world of Men’s Rights Activism, a sort of bizarro world where men are oppressed and live under a Matriarchy where women have all the privileges. It’s kind of like the Underdark. That’s the short, brutally unfair summary.

As you will see, however, the bizarro world nature of it all takes stranger turns that surprised even me.

Generally speaking, men face gendered problems in society and some iniquities. The Men’s Rights movement, however, has faithfully copied the feminism it so loathes by ensuring that it’s chiefly the Straight White Cis Able Men’s Rights Movement, thus conveniently ignoring a broad swathe of male social problems. It began as a movement of white, middle to upper class men (ostensibly representing men who had been punted into the lower classes due to onerous alimony payments) and largely remains so. Unlike feminism which, despite its routine and ceaselessly maddening failures, at least is now in the process of trying to fix that, MR remains blissfully oblivious.

One of their more important sites, Spearhead, is a reminder of why this is. Unlike feminism which has adopted many core left wing values, Men’s Rights activism comes largely from the right, complete with its disdain for respect and any notion of dignity (often expressed through very overdone whining about political correctness, as you will see here). Spearhead’s manifesto contains this little gem, in case you missed the point that this site wasn’t for sissy nanny boo boo lefties:

“But “movement” might be the wrong term, because in our contrived and artificial society the meaning of that word has come to be associated with dilettante radicals with bullhorns and giant puppets making appeals on behalf of sea turtles or some other exotic cause. … Rather than engaging in status displays of conspicuous righteousness, we are raising our voices in defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men, which is a far more ennobling thing to do than raiding weasel farms or getting involved in intertribal disputes halfway around the world.”

Catch both the dig at PETA (fine) and the casual racism? Okay, okay; I don’t need to break this down too much. This merely sets the stage for the grand opus of fail that is to follow. It is to failure what La Boheme is to opera. And thus, the curtain rises on this article written by one Jack Donovan…

“On November 29, 2009 Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner died of an apparent suicide. In 2007 he announced that he was a transsexual and began writing as Christine Daniels. In October 2008 he returned to work dressed in male clothing and began writing as Mike Penner again.”

We see where this is going, isn’t it? We’re in the car and suddenly you see Failtown looming in the distance, through the parted fog, like an even more menacing Racoon City. But no, this is going to far more magical places than just Failtown, my friends.

“The point of this essay is not to speak ill of the dead.”

No, the point of this essay is to utterly trash the dead and savage the living.

“It is to draw attention to yet another way that feminism and cultural Marxism are doing harm to men.”

Do you see the mystical and magical place we’re going yet? I’ll give you a hint, remember that Men’s Rights is Bizarro World radical feminism.

“The incident seemed particularly timely to me because this past weekend I helped some young men move out of a crazy transsexual’s home where they were renting rooms. This former construction worker was open about the fact that he was taking black market hormones, and his behavior was extremely erratic.”

While one could argue that it’s entirely possible he’s talking about a trans man, the tone he takes here and elsewhere in the article makes it patently clear that he’s wilfully misgendering here. So, let’s be clear. Cis man starts going on about a “crazy transsexual” who’s on “black market hormones” and… what else?

“He had a history of suicide attempts. He owned several guns, and had made a plea to someone in the house to hold his ammunition—because “he couldn’t trust himself.” “

I see, that sounds like a terrible situation, Mister Donovan, assuming you’re being entirely faithful in your recounting of the story. But surely, as you are quick to say about the cis white men you care so deeply for, one individual does not define an entire people yes?

“This was no surprise to me. I associated with a wide range of pre and post-op transsexuals when I worked in New York City and San Francisco nightclubs in the 1990s. As with all things there were exceptions, but generally drag queens, trannies and transsexuals in all stages of transition were not well. They were often addicted to drugs, had been diagnosed with mental disorders or chemical imbalances, and many had at one point routinely engaged in prostitution. The erratic, emotionally unstable, borderline schizophrenic behavior my friends described to me was almost exactly what I had experienced myself in the past.”

Oh.

Well I guess we are going there. So, let’s pick this apart. In this paragraph he’s basically admitting that he’s stereotyping, that he took a biased sample of trans people by looking only in nightclubs, he actually called them trannies in an article that is supposed to be professional, and engages in a bit of ableism by stigmatising people who are not neurotypical and further implying that transsexualism is such a mental disorder or evidence of others.

I was going to do this thing with the article where I had a running tally of fail but I knew that if I kept up with it I’d just have to put in a .gif of a counter spinning wildly out of control at the end of the piece.

Like many cis people who regard the trans people that work in such places they assume that their “crazy” desire to “change sex” is what’s causing all of their ‘problems’ when in reality the locus of all of these issues lies in the oppression that society imposes on all trans people. Many trans people end up doing sex work precisely because no one else will hire them, and their families have disowned them. This is tragically, depressingly common.

Do I even have to point out how such could very easily lead to depression and quite a few other unpleasant things?

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. You had something else you wanted to add, Mr. Donovan?

“A guy I knew a year ago was dating a pageant-winning local drag queen who had to be committed.”

Oh, see? It’s okay. He knows a guy. A guy who, like, totally dated a drag queen. Because drag queens=transsexuals=all trans people=transgender=genderqueer=whatever the fuck his cis privilege needs the term to mean. Inasmuch as he can’t even tell the difference between any of those groups, and that he fell for the utterly basic fallacy of assuming that drag queens are representative of the entire trans community and are all transsexual women, it just shows he has no place writing anything like this.

“Even in liberal communities where transsexuality is relatively accepted, suicidal behavior among known transsexuals is over or around 20%.”

‘See? Trans people commit suicide lots! Just like Christine Daniels! That’s proof they’re troubled. Now watch this really sweet transphobia I’m going to crap out guys, it’s gonna be killer.’

“To be clear, I am not discussing female-to-male(FTM) transsexuals, but only male-to-female(MTF) transsexuals. Female transsexuality is a different ballgame; it seems to be almost entirely a feminist tom-boy fantasy and it is difficult to separate from feminist politics.”

Golly, these guys just love themselves some trans women don’t they? Why is it that trans men tend to always be pushed to the wayside and dimly regarded when a cis person who hasn’t done a lick of reading about trans experience and gender issues wants to start writing their theories all over us in crayon?

Rest assured though, trans men, Mr. Donovan has your number:

“At some point I will write something titled “Chaz Bono is Still a Fat Chick,” but today is not that day.”

‘Today is not the noble day on which I bravely write something that I saw scrawled in the men’s toilet stalls earlier.’

Still with me? We’re just getting warmed up here.

“I have met a few convincing post-op transsexuals. Some of them were Pilipino ladyboys who started hormones early; some were simply “pretty” boys who were naturally delicate and soft-featured.”

Again, this fills up a bingo card by itself. Aside from the flagrant transmisogyny that comes with judging by appearance, he also uses the term ‘convincing’ in that snide way that deftly implies deceit. Don’t believe me?

“They lived as women and bedded straight men (watch out fellas). As passable women they were also highly promiscuous. I knew of at least one who married a guy who paid for the expensive transition, and then dumped him later. It is worth noting, too, that many of these individuals occasionally engage in deceptive behavior, “hiding” their birth sex from potential sexual partners. It’s not just a comedy cliché. It happens, and it’s ethically reprehensible.”

‘Watch out fellas’? I can’t even make a joke about this, this is just evil. He’s actually trying to cultivate trans panic, a defence which has seen cis men get off murder charges when they just couldn’t control their murderous impulses after discovering someone they slept with was trans. (This is a running theme in Men’s Rights, by the way: they will say cis men are totally wicked awesome, but sex and murder are like their kryptonite; cis men just can’t help themselves and suddenly become a mere twitching lump of evo psych! Men’s Rights: Empowering men.)

Earlier I said that he was ‘deftly implying’ deceit, well now he just comes right out and says it. We’re deceivers, luring poor innocent cis men into paying for ‘sex change operations’ so that we can conquer the world with our newfound hoo has. It’s just another way women are trying to defraud men! (Money is a huge concern in the Men’s Rights movement. All women are gold diggers trying to get men to pay for all their girly shit, that kind of thing.)

“The majority of MTFs, however, are not even remotely convincing as women. Like Penner (as far as I can tell from this photo), many of the trannies I’ve known and seen have been rather tall men.”

A quick note here to Andrea James, Lynn Conway and all other trans people who use the MTF/FTM thing: this is why you should drop it. Look at who is using it. Trans man/trans woman works and doesn’t mislead people into thinking you’re essentially a certain sex or gender. That, however, suits Donovan’s purposes just fine. Consider that a man who hates us and even calls us “trannies” in an article that had to pass editorial review finds “MTF” an acceptable and ‘useful’ term.

It’s time for us to put it to bed.

Also, this quote highlights Donovan’s commitment to not speaking ill of the dead wherein he rubs his arse on Christine Daniels/Mike Penner’s grave and asks the audience to help him objectify hir. Stay classy, Spearhead.

“At 6 foot 6, my pal’s landlord was only ever going to pass while sitting down in the corner of a very dark bar. A lot of them you can easily pick out a block away.”

Let’s not delve too deeply into several inconvenient facts (that there are plenty of cis women over 6 feet tall, that lots of models who comprise a cis beauty ideal are over six feet tall, and that lots of trans women over that height still gain conditional cissexual privilege) for a moment and examine a fundamental truth:

A cissexist will not know someone is trans if they aren’t visibly gender variant in any capacity. Ergo, for all he knows, he could be surrounded by us. He’s premising the entire article on a few trans people he’s met in nightclubs. Aside from dehumanising them when they are among the most heavily marginalised and vulnerable people in the United States right now, he’s made a simple and idiotic mistake of presuming this is a representative sample of all trans people. But at any rate, his cissexism isn’t remotely connected to the struggles faced by the trans people he encountered in NY and SF, nope; they’re just “crazy.”

“While I’ll assume that some FTMs end up passing as women and live long, happy lives, I have a hard time believing they represent a majority of the males who identify as transsexual and undergo some sort of gender transformation.”

‘because this is, like, so totally inconvenient to my argument, man.’

The misgendering is so common that I really can’t keep pointing it out or I’ll double the length of what promises to be an already ponderous article.

“Why does our federal government now recognize it by giving these men special protected status with the new “hate crimes” law?”

That he puts hate crimes in quotes not long after drumming up trans panic and encouraging his (almost exclusively cis male) readership to actively fear us shows again how far out of touch he is. Having heard cis men grant utterance to this “nightmare” they have, seeing it played for laughs on the insistently unfunny Letterman Show, and having had to have a MRA tell me that “transgenders” actually “rape [cis] men” and that he’d “fucking kill” any woman he slept with that didn’t turn out to be cis… forgive me if I’m extremely and passionately unsympathetic to the following bit of clichéd conservative whining:

“Why isn’t this considered child abuse? How long will it be before even asking these questions will be considered illegal “hate speech?” “

‘Because, hey, guys what’s hateful about making you all paranoid about trans women and calling them names that they’re usually called when someone is trying to kill them? Effin liberals and feminists, spoiling our fun, right?’

“Why, in some communities, are very confused young boys being encouraged to identify as girls—virtually ensuring that they’ll spend the rest of their lives in therapy, that they’ll never feel normal or comfortable in their own skins?”

‘I mean, heaven knows, I’m never going to let them feel normal or comfortable. And remember guys, watch out! They’re crazy and might fool you! With their black market hormones!’ *spooky fingers*

Let’s just leave aside the fact that ‘feeling normal and being comfortable in their own skin’ (something I feel every day since I came out) is not his fucking call to make.

“The only thing that “proves” any theory of transsexuality is a feeling expressed by transsexuals that they were born “the wrong sex.” The available physical evidence strongly suggests that they were born male, and that they only thing wrong with them is in their heads.”

‘The available physical evidence I just pulled out of this Cheetohs bag, that is! Mmm… crunchy.’

A trip to the blog of Zoe Brain, who earns her surname with everything she writes, and who valiantly stood alone against Sauron’s Hordes in the comment section would be instructive in considering why that paragraph is ten kinds of wrong. The neurological and biological evidence and research that she has catalogued and ably summarises everywhere she can is ample enough proof of the utter falsehood of this statement.

But beyond that, it is not his entitlement to have any sort of biological proof that I exist. I do. The depression, self-loathing, and suicidal tragedies he’s shamlessly appropriated for his agenda are the direct result of hatred like his, not anything intrinsic to being trans.

“The idea that they were born “the wrong sex” is impossible to even contemplate without wandering into metaphysical territory”

‘And that is too adult a matter for the readers of this blog so I will not make your tiny heads explode. MEN RAWK!’

“If a man takes hormones to look more like a woman, or a woman takes hormones to look more like a man, we accept it and legally recognize the switch. If a man takes hormones to enhance his own natural masculinity, we call it immoral and we’ve made it illegal. We call him a cheater and threaten to put an asterisk beside his name.”

I actually howled at this. The way he’s worded it makes  it sound like some kind of national tragedy that we discriminate against super rich cis male athletes who’ve doped up on steroids. Pity the millionaire men, but heap your scorn upon those uppity and crazy trannies!

He might as well compare this to the cis women who go on HRT for various medical reasons to boot. But of course it makes sense to him to be this flagrantly disingenuous when he thinks that this is all “in our heads.”

I’m not even going to bother quoting the “this is like amputation fetishism!” cliché. That’s just old and stale. This is new and exciting. Let us open the gates to Failtopia, cue the chorus!

“It all fits too easily into the feminist/Marxist desire to subvert the patriarchy, to craft a society where sex is meaningless and distinct roles of men and women are a thing of the past. This sort of encouragement of those who, despite questionable mental health and the lack of a real understanding of the problem of transsexuality itself, want to change genders muddies the waters of public perception. Among transsexual writers—these people who are so obsessed with gender and being something different—the questioning of gender and the attack of traditional gender roles, especially traditional patriarchal roles for men, reaches a fevered pitch. The transgendered are most often on the far left of the radical left. In their world, only when gender is meaningless and every variant on a continuum between male and female are accepted wholeheartedly and without reservation—only when being a man means absolutely nothing—can men and women truly be equal.”

I present to you my new title: Spy of the Matriarchy!

Thank you so much Mr. Donovan, I’ve been grinding that achievement forever. I have to say, after so much time feeling threatened by the Janice Raymond school of radical feminist theory, this is almost hilariously refreshing. Apparently I am now a feminist conspiracy. Take note, m Andrea! They’re onto us!

I could milk this for the sake of more bad humour but what it boils down to is this: Trans people of all identities are all things to all people except who we actually are. For radical feminists we’re a plot by the patriarchy to subvert womanhood and turn us all into Stepford Wives. And now, fresh out of the radical MRA oven: we are a feminist plot to subvert manhood and all gender roles to impose a Marxist paradise on earth.

‘Only when being a man means absolutely nothing’ he says, ignoring the fact that in his own theory’s logic this would mean ‘being a woman’ would mean nothing either.

But who cares about logic when trans women’s bodies are just there waiting for you to write your cockamamie theories on them in permanent black ink? It is simply much too tempting. Nevermind the decades’ long history of hateful antagonism against trans women from feminists, nevermind Mary Daly seeing us as “Frankensteinian” while calling for our deaths and Janice Raymond saying we were an “empire” of infiltrators, or the demands of many rank and file radfems that violence be perpetrated against us. Forget that these ideas influence feminists to this day, like mAndrea, Julie Bindel or the policies of carnivals like Michfest.

Forget all of that because, dagnabbit, Jack Donovan has a theory.

Why let history or reality stop you when you can write all sorts of interesting, self serving narratives on us? For conservatives, traditionalist/extremist religious folk,  trans people are a sign of moral corruption and the rot of wanton decadence. For liberals, we are diversity chits to be toted about like iPods and able to furnish them with hipster transgressive identities. The list goes on and on.

We are everything except ourselves.

We are everything but that one thing we are most vociferously insisting we are.

Ignoring the irony of accusing trans people of being obsessed with gender after playing gender studies professor for the last several paragraphs, Donovan goes on to make a bunch of other ludicrous analogies and finishes off with this:

“[Christine Daniels] never could have known what it was like to really, truly be a woman. How could he? He would have always been an imposter, a poseur, a freak.”

Because Mr. Donovan and his ilk would’ve been right there reminding Christine of this every day of hir life. “Don’t do this or I’ll oppress you and blame it on you!” is a very old, very tired sleight of hand. Many trans people do not regret whatever transitions they had to undergo to be themselves. We lament the fact that articles like this still inform the opinions of people who try their damndest to hurt us, legislate against us, and even rape and kill us, yes. We lament that marginalisation. But if he actually cared to listen to what so many of us have to say he’d learn how to thread that apparent contradiction.

For my own part? I’m keenly aware of the hate that I’ve exposed myself to by announcing that I’m trans. It will stalk me until the day I die. But I know my only true chance at happiness came from coming out. Living a lie and “making the best of it” never, ever ends well. One makes the best of a temporary situation that is a waystation on the way to a better situation. Making the best of an ostensibly permanent bad situation is to resign one’s self to oblivion.

Had I not come out and just kept burying this, I know I’d have no chance at happiness.

But what am I saying? I’m only a trans woman who’s actually lived through all of this. What do I know?

Well, I know what this entire article is. The Cis Man’s Burden.

In the wake of Christine Daniels’ tragic suicide I have seen it come up time and time again in comment threads and blog posts, from feminists right around to conservatives. It is the belief that it is the duty of cis people to enlighten us from our deluded ideas of sex and gender and to save us from ourselves. Feminists believe that they can save us from our dreaded ‘reification of the gender binary’ and some sickeningly pitying comments have talked about how we’re poor souls who are simply the hardest-done by the ‘gender binary.’ The more conservative of the bunch, like the estimable Mr. Donovan, believe that we must be saved from politically correct nanny staters and evil psychiatrists who are lying to us and egging us on in ‘delusion.’

It is so often framed as a loving and benign viewpoint that is also used to deflect any accusations of transphobia or cissexism. How can I hate trans people when I want to save them? will rise the refrain.

Let me make this abundantly clear: We are not yours to save.

They cannot fathom the fact that it is their very attitude that leads, in large part, to the ongoing assaults on our community and contributes to our depressingly high suicide rates. If the world insisted that Mr. Donovan was not who he said he was he would lose his mind in short order as well. He merely dismisses our self-knowledge out of privilege and conveniently purports to be able to save us from ourselves, and from the wicked feminists for whom we are both spies and Trojan horses.

We’ve seen this story before. So very many times. The heavy burden that whites must undertake to liberate the noble savages from themselves and their arcane, primitive ways. The heavy burden straight people must bear as they do their level best to cure gays, lesbians and bi people of their perverted predilections. On and on. Even in liberalism these ideas manifest themselves as white and cis guilt- a lengthy topic for another day.

But at the end of the day the only thing I need saving from is cissexism and transphobia, and I learned long ago that the only woman who can do that for me is me.

The Cis Man’s Burden, much like the White Man’s one before it, is built on hatred disguised by a sunny and ennobling dressing. I do not believe any of my readers doubt me on this in regards to Mr. Donovan’s real intentions, as the tells were writ quite large and blatantly in his piece. But should any doubt persist, and if you’re up for some real hate, just read the comments. A few brave trans people peeked in to challenge him and the bigoted commentors. What Donovan says to them is painfully instructive and a reminder of the fact that neither he nor any one who indulges in this Cis Man’s Burden suffers no love for us, not an iota of compassion.

It is merely prettified hate and fear. You do not show compassion for a community by calling for its extinction, and you do not show love with erasure.

But one supposes this is all a matter of girly empathy to, Mr. Donovan and his readers. Luckily for me, and for us all, we have spears of our own.