Transmisogyny

The Ministry of Strength

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

Anyone involved in any sort of emancipatory activism, from flame wars in forums to robust street protesting, is bound to be familiar with the phenomenon I’m about to describe:

“What’s the big deal!?”

This is most often asked when you broach a subject of media criticism or a critique of seemingly innocuous language. You’re told that it’s ‘not a big deal’ if someone says, say, ‘fag’ persistently in the most derogating way possible. It’s ‘not a big deal’ if a commercial is in any way commodifying or objectifying women. It’s ‘not a big deal’ if, say, a late night talk show host predicates a gag on trans panic. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Such is the power of privilege that the obvious, and in any just universe the only needed, answer never occurs to the offender for even a moment. “It’s disrespectful” ought to be enough, yet somehow it never is; so we are left justifying our anger at a seemingly small bit of errata that must appear like a speck of dust in the night to the privileged people we try so valiantly to reach.

We’re left trying to explain why it isn’t, in fact, so small. Why it is that that speck of dust is just one point in a far larger duststorm.

In that process the next bomb is very likely to be dropped:

“Why are you self-victimising?”

So it is that you pass through the gilded oak doors of the Ministry of Strength.

I.

It should go without saying that such little bits of nonsense are a big deal for the same reason my aforementioned dust storm is a big deal. When one is buffeted and utterly enveloped in one, one tends to be offended by every grain of sand in it. When we take umbrage at an example of irresponsible journalism or other exploitative or bigoted media, we’re merely pointing and saying “look, there’s the dust in my storm; that’s just one part of it, but it’s there.” We are not oppressed by the image or the word en toto, but are instead stung by its existence in a sinful constellation of ideas and legitimations that do us precious little good. In other words, its role in the grander scheme of things.

That much- the fallacy of the ‘big deal’ defence- is abundantly clear. But wither this Ministry of Strength?

It flows out of that all too common accusation that tends to come out of our attempts to show others the storm that swirls around us. The accusation that we are somehow making ourselves victims in pointing out a disrespectful word, thought, or image that is a bolt in the framework of institutionalised marginalisation or oppression. We point it out to say, in essence, ‘this is real.’ In this there is, to be sure, some strength. There is the strength to break free of seeing only the objectivated meaning of these images and instead see them for what their true purpose- latent or otherwise- really is.

So where does being a victim come into it? Needless to say, this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Every single one of you reading this has probably had this happen to you, seen it happen, or perhaps even done this yourself: someone says they’re offended or disrespected by something and they are told they have a victim complex by the nearest available wielder of privilege. It serves to immediately put the complainant on the defensive, and it’s quite effective as a silencer to boot.

And yet the phenomenon goes further still. Witness this recent exchange on a blog written by a rape survivor. Familiar words enter the fray immediately:

“So your life now revolves around victimhood? Perpetual and eternal. That’s sad. You should move on. Life’s too short. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.”

I don’t need to tell any of my readers this is but a small sample of this kind of nonsense. It’s ubiquitous and it’s churned out daily. In my observation of this I found that a nagging question pressed itself ever more firmly into my conscious thoughts: What is with this ‘victim’ poppycock? I believe I can now begin to formulate the elements of an answer.

II.

To say that calling anything “Orwellian” is a cliché is to insult clichés. Yet so rarely is Newspeak found so readily and in its perfect form, just as Orwell intended. So rarely is a meaning well and truly inverted and perverted in the way that words like ‘love’ were  in Orwell’s dystopian future.

“Victim” is the word that we’ve somehow made into a perverse opposite.

Where once ‘victim’ necessarily implied the existence of a victimiser, it has now become an individual phenomenon, located entirely in the person labelled ‘victim.’ Where once calling out oppression was popularly understood as bold and courageous, it is now seen as weak and ‘self-victimising’ (more on that connection in a moment). In our contemporary and popular understanding of the term, if I am a victim it means I’ve made myself one and am wallowing in it for some ill-defined reward; it does not mean, as it once did, that I was hurt by someone or something.

This will take a great deal more careful study but I believe I can trace the origins of this to four points.

  • The changes to the law in the 1960s.
  • The self-help culture that emerged in the 1970s.
  • The backlash against emancipatory activism by the marginalised in the 1980s.
  • And the general form of rationalist-individualist capitalism that has come to dominate our society.

One of the first things that a privileged person, confronted with their privilege or with the existence of oppression, will try to do is to deny that the oppression exists. In this aim, they’ve been greatly assisted by the raft of legislation bequeathed to us by the activism of the 1960s. From the Voting Rights Act to Title IX, a broad swathe of (though by no means the entirety of) de jure marginalisation and oppression was struck down.  This alone facilitates the privileged line that is most often used to combat any number of call-outs: “You have your rights now so any failures you’ve had are your own. You’re totally equal now, you’re just being lazy/self-victimising.”

This ignores the complexity of such things, naturally. The law is only one avenue of oppression. Often it is the most overt, yes, and the existence of legal repression is one of the surest and obvious signs of socially sanctioned marginalisation of some group. But its absence does not mean inequality vanishes with it. If society itself remains unchanged, it’ll merely be displaced elsewhere.

But this is how the raft of 1960s-era civil rights legislation is used in this formulation. In order for it to be used in this way, however, (with special attention to the ‘all your failures are yours’ bit) more needs to be added to this stew.

By the mid to late 1970s the repackaging of the 60s counterculture into manageable, marketable fun size chunks was well underway and a major spinoff of these efforts was the beginning of the now ubiquitous self-help industry. Taking bowdlerised ideas of 60s liberation and individual freedom, they began to project a message that you were entirely responsible for how you felt, and that you had the power to completely alter your personal state, regardless of outside influence or outside forces. Indeed, some even promised that with the right attitude adjustment you could will outside forces to change for you. (This chicanery continues today in the form of the execrable book/program/cult The Secret).

Obviously not everyone bought into this. But society is a funny thing. We are ever in a dialogue with it and are invariably shaped by it. This conversation (or dialectic if you prefer the five guinea word) acts on society even as it acts upon us. Dialectic, in its most literal form, may actually be the best word to use as this is a saga about language and its evolution. For even as people might’ve rejected the deeper mysteries of self-help culture, they came to be entrapped by its argot and its message of individual empowerment. It began to undergird messages in cheerful daytime television (which would take off in the late 70s), children’s television, and the plotlines of popular programmes.

This then segues into the 1980s. “Backlash” is a term most often associated with feminism due to Susan Faludi’s perceptive use of it in her groundbreaking book of the same name, examining the travails of the 80s. But it just as easily belongs to all emancipatory movements. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town best known for one particularly gruesome event:

“Philadelphia is known as the site of one of the most infamous race-related crimes in American history. In 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered by white supremacists on a highway outside of Philadelphia. The crime and decades-long legal aftermath inspired the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.” (from Wikipedia)

Here he declared his unwavering support for “states’ rights”, the same notion trumpeted by segregationist George Wallace nearly twenty years earlier as a bulwark against desegregation.

This would be the beginning of a cavalcade of such ‘dog whistles’ to white men who felt increasingly antagonised and threatened by the sudden growth in power of both women and people of colour in general. It is worth noting that the small but potent transgender liberation movement was no less harmed by this backlash. What small but significant victories we had won in the 1960s were thrown back in our faces many times over as the 70s and 80s ground forward. The AIDS epidemic hit trans women of colour especially hard, and the backlash-mood of the time made it all the easier for much of the government to turn a blind eye to this suffering.

The 1980s then were the decade in which those who perceived themselves the losers of the 60s revolts found their footing again and began to reassert themselves as a political force. Out of this would come the battles against “special interests” (read: NOW and the NAACP), the crusade against “political correctness” and the beginning of such terms as “reverse sexism” and “reverse racism.” All of this nonsense, the New Racism and the New Sexism as I called it in the past, got its true start in the 1980s when the Republican Party’s infamous Southern Strategy was in full bloom. Similar forces were at work to varying degrees in other parts of the English-speaking world as well. It is no coincidence that the 80s were a time of conservative governments blessed with longevity in Britain and Canada as well.

In this period, our final bullet point also rose mightily into the stratosphere. Though individualist capitalism has been prominent in American culture since at least the 1920s, it truly hit the big time in the 70s and 80s with thinkers like Milton Friedman eagerly exporting new and ever more radical ideas to western democracies that praised the individual and the power of markets. All of capitalism’s legitimating mythology- the Horatio Alger myth, social mobility, the power of the individual, and so on- was greatly amplified by the new and ever more expansive pushes towards deregulation.

Needless to say, I do a very poor summary of economic history here and certainly entertain no delusions about doing justice to so complex a subject. I merely hope to illustrate with broad strokes the historical antecedents of our present predicament. (Should one wish to learn more they could do worse than to begin with this documentary.)

At any rate, so it was that capitalism itself- a dominant and powerful part of our social legitimating structure, as well as a source of much of our society’s meaning- came to throw its ever engorging weight behind this notion of the all-powerful individual. The climax of this would come with Margaret Thatcher’s infamous proclamation to the magazine Women’s Own:

“They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

Thus the ultimate formulation of our current problem was writ large. At this point they all intersect: privilege of all sorts, capitalist individualism, the denial of collective responsibility, the exaltation of individual power.

What follows from such a belief, now shared by many, is all too easy to formulate. If you “cast your problems on society” you are self-victimising and therefore weak.

Now where did weak part come from? All of the above? Yes indeed. There’s just one more bit, however, one of great interest to the feminist.

III.

Over the course of this time period we came to exalt a very particular type of masculinity. The classic archetype of the unwavering male-as-stoic-defender, that John Wayne model of manhood that would defy all odds to defend the ones he loved, and so on and so on. We had always worshipped this model of manhood to some extent over the last, especially, two hundred years but it seemed to become hugely popular in the wake of the Second World War with ever diminishing tolerance for alternate expressions of masculinity, perhaps because of the rise of the mass media combined with pervasive fear of Communism (the latter making apparent the supposed need for strong male warrior types).

What we artificially divided into masculine and feminine fell, as they always did, into a hierarchy with all that was good and masculine at the very top, with the dainty qualities of the feminine relegated to a status of tolerated inferiority. Because we as women were reified as the weaker sex, and socially defined feminine traits were reified as intrinsic to us, it followed that whatever was feminine was weak. In regards to this newly juiced up conception of manhood, this meant all feminine traits were verboten for men. Any hint of weakness was to be scrupulously avoided like death itself.

With the rise of the women’s movement, women were increasingly free to take on the roles restricted from them by patriarchy. The unforeseen problem was that this aspirational ideal was still based on a fundamentally patriarchal one: to be masculine is to be good. This would inevitably bring women as a whole into contact with the idea that weakness (as defined through objectivated patriarchal structures, lest we forget) was to be shunned if one wanted to be taken seriously.

Without a doubt, we wanted to be taken very seriously, and we fought twice as hard when we were thought of as half as good. We swam upstream, and indeed are still swimming upstream in many sectors to reap the fruits of our labours. Yet while we still live in the master’s house (a la Audre Lorde), one constructed of patriarchal dark iron, we run into this fear of weakness. Fear of the feminine in ourselves.

Assuredly this branches off into complex topics all on its own; these too I’ll write about in time. But for now let’s return to the Ministry of Strength.

IV.

Thus we live in a society that values a very particular idea of strength, one which women now feel very compelled to live up to (with the added handicap of us being thought of as intrinsically feminine and thus intrinsically weaker). We also live in a society that has constructed the individual as all-powerful, even able to shape her or his surroundings through sheer will, and a society that is increasingly sceptical of its own existence, much less the existence of structures that could repress or marginalise whole groups of people.

At base, to be a victim is to be hurt. In the patriarchal conception, to be wounded is to be undesirably weak. To admit it is an even greater taboo. If one thinks that these masculine ideas don’t afflict women in dire circumstances I direct you to the heartfelt words of a woman I spoke with recently on the subject:

“May I add, and this is something else that others may be familiar with: The alienation from the victim role can inhibit true processing of an event.

Feeling as if something bad has happened is a natural part of grief/processing. Yet, we’re encouraged to ignore this huge step of dealing with things that happen in our lives and encouraged to just get back to normal.

Yes, I refused to accept that I was a victim when I was raped. I thought it would make me sad and slow and weak. I thought that saying I had been victimized would be caving in and giving power to the person who wronged me. Now I realize that I did myself a grave disservice, and thought I was being strong when I did so.”

This is a phenomenon affecting and, indeed, afflicting real people.

Without a doubt, a man who was raped or abused would be compelled to feel even worse by his peers. By social standards we still nurse, he is given every reason to see himself as a failure.

We pretend that we can will away the fact that we’ve been victimised. The assailant becomes almost incidental, tangential, a nonfactor. All that matters is you. It’s not hard to see how this ties into the pervasive culture of victim-blaming that still dominates our society. When a woman is raped the accusations fly, even sometimes from other women, about the clothes she wore, where she was walking, or where she was partying, or what she was having to drink, or what she did or did not do, or who she did or did not sleep with.

In it all, the rapist is lost, relegated to being a merely implied spectre in the whole thing.

If this woman, who is to blame for her own rape according to some in society, dares to socially locate that rape in broader cultural phenomena rather than as a justified consequence of her actions, she is immediately called self-victimising. So it was with Ms. Chester, the blogger from earlier, who uses her words to help combat these evils and knows from whence they sprung. A man accused her of self-victimising to silence her, positing to her that Orwellian ideal that there was strength in supplication, redemption in denial, joy in silence. He enjoined her to move on with her life, unable to fathom that this is how she is moving on with her life, as she comes to truly understand it for the first time.

It is so mystifying and threatening to him precisely because we believe now that the role of ‘victim’ is entirely self created and self-imposed, and that if only one were strong enough it could be wished away, along with all the attendant pain.

In our ongoing conversation with our culture new phrases and ideas have begun to come out of this. “Inspiring stories” in the media will often feature the moment when the subject proclaimed “that was the day I stopped being a victim.” When less-sympathetic victims are spoken of by others it is not uncommon to hear that they “let themselves” be a victim. People fond of giving aggressive, ‘ tough-love’ style help will take you by the shoulders and say forcefully “stop being a victim!” if they feel you haven’t taken the appropriate amount of control over your life. All of this is out there, and until quite recently I myself used many of these phrases flippantly, unaware of how I’d bought into this ugly new concept of victimhood.

It is a Ministry of Strength, in the Orwellian sense, then. A social institution dedicated to the proposition that weakness is strength. The activist, oppositional posture is cast as weakness, whereas apologising for those in power is cast as strength. Strength comes from doing the one thing that obviates your healing: denying that you’ve ever been hurt. The focus for victims of rape and abuse is now on shrugging off the mantle of ‘victim’ before doing anything else. If you can erase the label from yourself, you’ll be cured and pure again, so goes the self-help wisdom. Inasmuch as it exists on the same continuum as victim-blaming and slut-shaming it is plain to see where the interest for broader Feminism lies in this matter.

Some might argue that we see very prominent cases of victims shouting j’accuse at their tormentors. Yet study the discourses surrounding those events. If it is a woman claiming to have been raped, invariably mentions of the Duke Lacrosse team will surface. If it is the victim of a war crime they’re branded as glory hogs or terrorists in disguise. If it is the victim of discrimination in housing or employment, they’re branded attention whores trying to strike it rich in a lawsuit. That is how these people who dare to speak up are cast and framed. They are mercilessly pilloried for their efforts and assumed to be selfish (another rationalist-capitalist idea, by the by), they are rarely seen as entirely sympathetic.

Our present economic structure excels at producing atomised individuals, and when combined with the creaking but still operational machinery of patriarchy, as well as the better oiled rigs of transphobia, racism, and homophobia, it creates atomised victims. Victims who are actively encouraged to not fight back, or even admit that they’ve been victimised. Victims who are encouraged to be alone in their sense of victimhood. Should they dare speak the name of their assailant, he or she will always be Thatcher’s individual- never part of something bigger. There are only individual bad guys out there, and anyway they don’t matter as much as your own self-victimisation, do they?

Conclusion.

Recently I got into a sparring match with someone who deployed the self-victimising ploy yet again. She said to me:

“I don’t know, I want to start a [forum] for women who look out the window and say ‘ “i have more control over my life than the world does over me and i am going to live my life knowing that.” “

I responded as follows:

“Your concept of “self-victimisation” is false and does not exist. To be honest, I look out the window every day and think “I have more control over my life than the world does” in my heart. How could I not? I have things to do, a life to live, degrees to get, dreams to fulfil. How could I not think that empowering sentence each and every day?

I want independence, I want the fruits of my labour to be ripe and bountiful. That’s exactly why I fight sexism, and there is something ennobling about that very act that gives me even more strength to keep right on saying that the world has no power over me. I recognise and grapple with reality, but also try my best to rise above it. Why? Because I can do no other.

Recognising discriminatory or biased behaviour, however small, is not self-victimisation. Fighting against bigotry (whether it be sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, or all of the above) is not allowing one’s self to be defeated by the world or surrender power to it. It’s the very opposite. It’s the seizure of strength, of identity, and independence.”

What struck me most was that it seemed to win over my opponent, who deleted her accusatory posts and left one to me saying she’d love to hear my stories of overcoming adversity sometime, something for which I hope an opportunity soon presents itself.

In this is, perhaps, part of the solution to our problem- and it is a problem we all face whatever our group identities. That solution is to continue to emphasise and frame the strength of activism. Activism need not mean taking to the streets or leafleting. It can just mean having the strength to say “hey, that’s transphobic, stop that.” That alone is the activist posture that resists the perpetuation of marginalising or alienating norms. That alone will do to qualify for the activist label (that’s certainly Fox News’ standard). But it is not enough in the face of these new oppressive ideas that have redefined victimhood. We must smash this new Ministry of Strength with the very real strength we possess, and remind others that this strength stems not from apologising for the way things are but from actively working to change it, and from proactively seizing your identity from others who would define it for you.

In this lies strength, in this lies freedom.

Feminism and I

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

In my recent writings I have taken great pains to criticise elements of feminism that I believe are failing the women this movement purports to serve. I stand by those challenges and will repeat them so long as there is need for them.

But I should also dedicate this space to my own robust support for the ideals that undergird feminism and there is no better place to begin with an introductory question: what does feminism mean to me? What follows is my answer to this question, a modified version of which appeared on Reddit in a thread of the same name.

I will not simply trot out the radical cliches about how “feminism is the belief that women are people” and it would take only a few seconds for an observer to note that I most definitely believe in equal opportunity and equality between the sexes. These two statements, for me, go without saying. The deeper definitions for me have more to do with the following: love and respect for yourself as a woman and a willingness to confront unfairness.

But Feminism is, above all, the standard to which I repair.

When times are at their hardest, it lends me strength. It lent me strength for much of my life, even when I did not think it my own. It gave me an enormous amount of courage, the strength to not hate myself for wanting to be a woman, the strength to see something positive and worthwhile in it, and the strength to face transmisogyny; strength I didn’t know I had.

Because above all else it is the term ‘repair’ that matters most. Feminism gave me the strength to not simply sit down and shut up or hide in a dark corner, but to forcefully assert my dignity, rights, and right to exist. It gave me the ability to repair my strength when it was left mercilessly battered and tested.

When I came out it gave me the strength to stand up to my father, who groped me and demanded to see my underwear. The strength to know this was not only wrong, but why it was happening.

It gave me the strength to stand up to radical feminists who said I had no place in the movement, and to find the courage to never doubt my own womanhood.

But it’s not just about my own life. My mother is not a self identified feminist, yet in making certain things clear to her she began to realise she had a right to self respect as a woman. She began to wake up and see that no, it wasn’t okay for her husband to withhold medication from her in exchange for sex or to dismissively tell her to take a cab on a night she needed an ambulance, it wasn’t okay to force himself on her the night before her father’s funeral after she said no dozens of times, it wasn’t justified or excusable that he used to hit her, it wasn’t right that he constantly put her down, it wasn’t hers to accept her role in his deluded fantasy…

To many men, especially, it is hard to see why it would take something like feminism to get someone to realise those basic and essential things. Well, that’s why it’s still very necessary. Because even in this day and age it is so easy to beat a woman down into self-loathing hopelessness.

That is why I say that feminism is not Michfest. It is more than a building, or a convention, or a sign, or a Women’s Studies Department. It must be that place where you discover it’s okay to have dignity. It must be the ideal that equality is more than a word, or an airy thought, but a reality that you can live.

It’s about more than material political battles, it’s about the battles you fight in your own life.

It is about developing the habit of freedom.

It’s the battle one of my closest friends fought to find self worth as a mother after spending several years in sex work just to raise her child and pay for medical treatment. It’s the battle another friend had to accept that she could be into BDSM. It’s the battle my mother’s still fighting to find the strength to divorce herself from a man who controls all of her savings. It’s the battle my trans women sisters fight every day to see themselves as people of worth, in a society that dumps on them twice as hard because they are women. It’s about the time I launched myself out of my chair to condemn a man speaking to my classmates with pride about how he kicked his pregnant daughter to the curb, with the child of her rapist, because she was a ‘slut.’

This is more than politics, it’s more than a gathering of opinions; it’s my life, and the lives of the people I love.

That’s why I identify outside of the wave system. The whole Third Wave et al. series of designations is useful academically but I do not like to box myself into one mode of feminist thinking. I let my experience, learning, critical thought and observations inform what I believe.

Because as I said, feminism is more than anything tangible; more than something that can be corralled in the neatest of confines.

In all of this is my rejoinder to the ceaseless and witless suggestions about “equalism”. Those experiences are why a separate word is needed. But I am an equalist too. Feminism is about standing up for yourself as a woman, in addition to equalism and humanism.

It is the standard I hold proudly, and I’ll never let it go.

Out in the Rain: Gender Activism and its Discontents

Katherine Alejandra Cross8 Comments

Last time on Nuclear Unicorn I took down an MRA’s  transphobic blog post on trans peoples’ lives. What was most striking about the article were things I didn’t even get to discuss despite the prodigious girth of my response; chief among them was the fact that the author’s entire supposed purpose in writing it, his thesis, was left largely unproven. It became clear that he was following a very classic pattern that cis people indulge in when criticising trans people publicly. It’s a classic transphobic syllogism:

I don’t like x. I also don’t like trans people. Therefore x causes and enables trans people.

This idea afflicts most gender activism as trans people of various types tend to be excluded from it or cast as some kind of bogeyman in various gender studies narratives. Some genderqueers, androgynes, and other non-binaries rail against transsexual people for, as they see it, playing into the gender binary. The execrable Julie Bindel, and feminists like her, follow a similar pattern. She doesn’t like patriarchy and proscriptive gender roles, therefore they cause the existence of the trans people she so loathes. Christians don’t like modernisation, pluralism, diversity, and what they see as decadence, therefore all of those things cause the existence of the trans people they so despise. For Jack Donovan, his hatred of feminism and of women in general, which occludes all else, leads him to believe that trans people could only be a feminist conspiracy.

The mutual exclusivity of all of these theories should be proof enough that they’re wrong and bear little relation to reality. Their purpose is to buttress the ideologies of the speaker rather than actually address the concerns of trans people or discuss our place in society.

The fact that Donovan barely addressed his own thesis and spent a great deal more time whacking trans people with tired old bigotry and inapt comparisons is a reminder of what the real purpose was in writing the article: to be transphobic. His performance in the comments speaks for itself. When a trans woman challenges him he is reduced to a bingo-card ready script. He objectifies her, calls her ugly, calls her a man, and then essentially devolves into gibbering cursing every other sentence while simultaneously claiming he faces lots of discrimination as a white cis man.

All very droll, as Sir Humphrey Appleby might say.

I have to be entirely honest here. In addition to feeling mistrustful of radical cis feminists and most cis feminist websites, I also feel threatened by most MRAs. The Spearhead article is Exhibit A in my case for this. One could easily write it off as one radical that shouldn’t define the movement, but given that Spearhead is linked to so approvingly on many Men’s Rights websites, that the comments were all praising Mr. Donovan for the piece (except a couple of trans people who came in to question it and two others), and that the Spearhead is cheerfully endorsed by fantasist conspiracy theorists, it’s hard for me to trust MRAs or their sincerity.

Like many cis radfems, MRAs have a major centering problem. They define the “What about the menz?” fallacy. Indeed, the entire movement is built around that premise. But the simple reality is that everything is about them and their needs.

Take for example this thread from Reddit. I’m a bit biased, of course, since the thread in question links to your humble correspondent’s journal but it is very instructive to consider what happened there. The thread was meant to call attention to the hypocrisy of radical feminists in regards to their transphobia. But out of 34 comments over 20 of them were written by MRAs or people arguing with them about their “but what about how feminism treats men?” points of view. For context the forum in which this was published is called Equality, and is largely devoted to getting male and female (almost exclusively cis) gender activists to talk to each other. Thus the question of feminism’s problems vis a vis (cis) men is addressed daily.

By contrast this was the first post about trans issues for a while and one of a tiny number discussing trans women’s relationship with feminism. Despite this, the cis men couldn’t help but make it entirely about themselves and their needs. For my money, this was the best, and most telling comment by one of the MRAs about my piece:

“it discussed penises. it was therefore partially about men. Men who changed their gender, but men (or at least, formerly men) all the same.”

I don’t need to dwell on what’s wrong with that statement or why it’s transphobic. What’s most important to consider right now is that it’s appropriating, trying to shoehorn my argument into a pro-Men’s Rights agenda, never mind that you have to completely mangle trans women’s identities to do so. It is a reminder of the fact that when it comes to cis centering MRAs are as bad, if not worse, than a lot of cis feminists.

Every discussion about feminism must be about them and their cis male concerns. Never mind that trans women are routinely silenced and marginalised, rarely spoken of, and often spoken for in absentia and very poorly.

“Not supporting people who were born biologically male, and infact demonizing them and trying to strip rights from the non-females, is exactly what feminism is all about.”

Here’s a clue, sweetie. I am not you. Nor am I a man. Do not include me in your chest-beating ranting. Please. Seriously.

It ought to go without saying that I do not support discrimination against men, and my writing record does speak for itself on this matter. I believe that feminism must have a good relationship with as many men as possible. Just as Patriarchy could only operate with the consent of large swathes of women, the solution to Patriarchy must come with the cooperation of many men. I also never bought into the arguments about the power of the penis, whether used against pre or non-operative trans women or cis or trans men.

But the fact that so many cis male MRAs got huffy about the fact that I didn’t make half the article about them was quite significant. I spent 100% of my energy discussing trans women’s relationship to feminism because it doesn’t get talked about very often in the public square. So to have that public discussion derailed by cissexist MRAs was incredibly telling. That only one other known feminist chimed in to give her support or say anything at all was equally telling.

This is what leads to my complicated relationship with gender activism and my mistrust of MRAs in particular stems from the fact that they don’t notice or care about their erasure of trans people, never mind the men they routinely leave out or refuse to speak for directly (men of colour, disabled men, etc.). This is not to say that feminism has reached the mountaintop, only that more and more feminists appear to be acknowledging that there is a mountaintop to reach.

There is quite a long road ahead, for certain. Feminism at least has the tools of liberal liberation ideology to work with that make it a much easier fit with the cause of trans rights. As discussed last time, Men’s Rights being largely a reactive movement of the privileged, draws its intellectual inspiration from the right.  Halting steps forward are being taken by feminist groups. More and more are at least operating from the basic premise that trans women are women and trans men are men, and that all other gender identities on the spectrum are also to be respected. That MRA websites like the Spearhead are 50 years behind on this is a reminder of why trans people should be very wary of that movement.

Yet before feminists begin patting themselves on the back for how tolerant they are, as white liberals are often wont to do, it would be instructive to consider the higher level failures that feminism has stumbled into of late. Feminists should think long and hard about Recursive Paradox/Genderbitch’s withering criticisms there, and ask themselves why such a strong willed and beautifully passionate activist could be turned off to feminism, to the point of downright despising it. The answer matters a great deal.

In many ways, the failure she talks about isn’t even especially “high level”. The fact that I feel tempted to call it that simply because the feminist in question that she lambastes is self proclaimed trans positive is a terrible reminder of how far we have to go. Much like the cis men in the Reddit thread, Melissa McEwan centered her own feelings and ideas in a discussion that had everything to do with real life discrimination against trans people, and in that sense there’s nothing ‘high level’ about this failure at all. It’s the same thing, except with a smile on its face.

It is not enough to mouth the words about trans people, and to say that you accept and tolerate me. That comes with a great deal more responsibility than many feminists are willing to accept it would seem. Many recoiled when we challenged them for their public mourning of noted transphobe and radfem writer Mary Daly. Feministe got it right with this excellent obituary written passionately by a cis feminist who told a complete story of Ms. Daly’s life and how her journey with feminism was tainted by it.

That is called accepting responsibility and being accountable for the history our movement has, which is often very chequered and complex.

This excellent comment by another cis feminist is still another example of how to get it right while still remaining committed to feminist principles. But far too many other cis feminists clearly didn’t even try, thinking that footnotes or lofty claims to ‘starting a debate’ would mollify the many trans people who were offended at endless pictures of Mary Daly with that goddamned axe of hers (or labrys, as one pedant corrected) and the glowing obits she received from many feminists who claimed to be trans-positive.

All of the comments there are worth reading, of course. The words of little light, an excellent trans woman blogger are powerful as always.

Without a doubt, MRAs are still trying to pass Trans 101. Many don’t even realise they have to take the course. Feminists are fucking up, by and large, at the 301 level. Annoying and even angering but still a sign of (oh so slow and iterative) progress of a sort. But if you stop there and disown us for those failures, then it’s all for naught. As Melissa McEwan and others must come to understand, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot be trans-positive and still wallow in cis privilege when it is convenient. You have to give up some of your idols, yes, because you ought to believe that the higher commitment to human rights, to women’s rights, and to equality matters much more than burnishing the image of Germaine Greer.

Individuals like her need not be feminism.

Feminism is more than a person, or a building, or a blog, or a Women’s Studies Department, or a single march, or a Guardian column. You have to let go of that sense and remember that feminism is about all of us, and that feminism is liberation. It is a higher ideal that should always transcend the worldly and human failings of individuals, and thus you should be unashamed to call them out for their failures and acknowledge their role in the movement. There need be no contradiction in any of this. If we are to be better than our enemies then we must own our failures, not make cheap excuses or go on privileged tirades about “the important things.”

Fighting bigotry is the important thing.

Celebrating it or eliding it is the antithesis of that.

Don’t let feminism go the way of Men’s Rights; an insular, reactionary, ideology that spends its time boxing with shadows and kicking the oppressed while they’re down.

Be feminist.

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.

PC is for Cookie

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

In one’s travels through the Tubes you’ll often find rather a lot of fecal matter clogging it all up. Perhaps the grandest of these turds is the notion of ‘political correctness.’ There have been long and thoughtful deconstructions of this ultimate, Voltron-like straw man, but suffice it to say: the next time someone chides you for being “PC” just replace ‘politically correct’ with ‘respectful’ in your mind to keep your focus on what it is the speaker is actually trying to communicate.

Privilege is many things. Pervasive, invisible, colourless, odourless, noxious. It’s a lot like carbon monoxide. In this particular case, privilege manifests itself as the simple belief that you are entitled to a higher level of respect than other groups of people. At heart, that’s what it’s really about. The idea that being decent and respectful- values many of our parents raised us with- is somehow uncouth or even verboten when one is talking about Black people, or Muslims, or trans people is simply privilege made manifest. People found a term that enabled them to get away with being assholes. It’s not being a horse’s ass. It’s being politically incorrect. You sound edgy, and awesome, like a latter day beatnik.

Plus you get to put uppity [insert group here] people in their place.

It should take you all of five seconds to start seeing how this works in regards to trans people. Calling me ‘she’ and ‘her’ and ‘a woman’ becomes a privilege, something I have to earn. Why? Because it’s ‘politically correct’ and implicitly untrue as a result. Time after time I’ve read the words of people who insist that the truth is that I’m male and that any suggestions to the contrary are mere politeness on their part, into which they’ve been strongarmed by the “PC Police.” When basic respect and common courtesy to you is no longer considered correct but ‘politically correct’, you know you’re being marginalised.

But that’s what it’s for, in truth. The term political correctness is just a recent addition to our lexicon to describe a weapon of privilege that has been wielded for a very long time. The simple idea that if you are marginalised, any respect given to you by a privileged person is a bonus, a boon, a privilege unto itself. One you probably had to dance to earn. But the moment you say or do anything they dislike, the cookie is taken away. It is, above all, a tool of control. One that is designed to remind you that respect for you exists at the pleasure of the privileged.

It also divides marginalised people into worthy and unworthy classes. Deserving and undeserving.

Take for example the case of a trans woman who is in prison for life in Massachusetts for murdering her wife. A gruesome crime to which she has confessed and for which she is doing her time. Yet, when the Boston Herald calls her a “transvestite”, a man, and refers to her by her old name which has since been legally changed, what is one to think? That she does not deserve to be called a woman because she committed a terrible crime. If that makes sense to you consider the inverse. Was Timothy McVeigh ungendered or misgendered because of his murderous crimes? Was he termed a drag king for it? No. Any journalist would’ve told you his gender was just a fact about him and the story is his terrorism, naught more.

So why can the same respect not be paid to a trans person?

Because that respect is still seen by society as a privilege. Something one must earn. When one looks at ‘bad’ cis people and the fact that they do not get misgendered, it’s quite clear what’s going on here. Cis people use this as a weapon against you: if they deem you unfit, they can try their damndest  to take away your identity. If it can be taken away from that woman in prison it can be taken away from you. This is far from a slippery slope argument: we’ve long since slid down it.

Early on in my transition I told an erstwhile friend of mine what I was up to and came out to him. He seemed quite accepting at first and he started to refer to me appropriately. I was still riding high from the successes with other friends so I thought he’d be no different and went on my merry way. A couple of months later I penned an article criticising the Catholic Church, of which he’s still a proud member. He told a mutual friend behind my back some rather grotesque and trans phobic things as he complained about the piece, the gist of which was “this is how he thanks me for accepting his lifestyle!?”

True colours revealed, I broke ties with him. It was less than pleasant, for sure, but it had to be done. I wasn’t about to come within ten feet of anyone who dared wield that cudgel. My womanhood is not a privilege, it simply is. Calling me by my real name, addressing me as you would any other woman… these things are not cookies that I am to be given for pleasing you, nor something you have any right to take away when I upset you. “Good trans women get called ladies and bad trans women get called trannies” is bullshit, yet that’s exactly what’s going on here and it sure as hell doesn’t happen to cis people.

If you try to misgender me because you’re mad at me, you’re telling me exactly one thing: you do not take me seriously as a woman and you’ve got unresolved issues about the whole thing.

I don’t need that crap. It’s not a matter of political correctness, just about simple correctness.

Yet for anyone who would think of accepting this arrangement on the basis that you intend to be a “good person” who will surely please the cis majority, and that thus this isn’t really intolerance or transphobia, just another way ‘bad’ people get punished… consider the following.

By now many of us have heard of the elevation of Amanda Simpson to the US Commerce Department where she will be responsible for overseeing weapon exports. She is smart, accomplished, determined, and was tapped for a high level government position. To top it all off, she’s also white. All of which should be the nadir of what our “polite society” considers accomplished, acceptable, and ‘good.’ Now consider the reaction to her in the media. Many mainstream outlets were, to their credit, quite good about her. One, however, was especially and frighteningly egregious.

The New York Post ran an article about her with the oh-so-witty tabloid headline: “Obama sez: You Da Ex-Man!” Genius. But it gets worse. Out of all the articles about her I’ve seen, this was the first to include the dreaded ‘before’ picture, from when she was living as a male. The caption under the pictures was headed with “Tranny Nation:” More sheer brilliance. She was also called a “gal” which again goes to the heart of the male chauvinism that often lies within transphobia against trans women.

But this is just in the headlines. There was exactly one thing the Post got right; calling Ms. Simpson a ‘her.’ The rest was beyond atrocious. I actually crushed the paper in my hands as I read past the halfway point where the reporter said Ms. Simpson declined to talk about her medical history… and then proceeded to regale us with how he went and dug it up anyway from Arizona records and news clippings he’d cobbled together to reveal in detail what her medical history was and how much it cost.

So take note: Upper middle class, white, graduate education, years of experience, accomplished… and you’ll still get trashed in the media as a tranny who had a sex change, and by the way here’s how much it cost, what you did, and to top it off I’ve got this hugely witty pun for a headline.

So imagine the rest of us.

The cookie is made of bullshit.

It is, of course, worth mentioning that the New York Post was a positive paragon of decency compared to the legions of internet comments about Ms. Simpson, which put the final lie to the idea that you can earn the respect of cis people by assimilating to what they consider respectability.

But how then to report on trans people respectfully? Let’s refer to one Rachel Maddow for assistance:

Goddess bless her. *eyes her dreamily*

What is most fascinating to me is that in a world where column inches are at a premium and every second counts when one is on the air, reporting respectfully is actually less time consuming and unwieldy.

  • No time spent on “before” pictures.
  • A couple of seconds shaved by never uttering the old name.
  • Loads of time and space saved by making no mention of medical procedures.
  • Lots of time saved by not making needlessly complex constructions like he/she or giving hackneyed explanations of what a transgender person is, beyond a basic and objective definition.

It’s so easy, guys. We all have everything to gain.

In the end, never back down from demanding the basic respect accorded to everyone else. It is not a privilege. To accept that, and play the game of cissexists in so doing, is to put your rights and dignity in their hands, and to empower them with a weapon that can be used against you. This isn’t just true of trans people, but of all who face marginalisation, great or small. Respect for you is not a joke, nor a privilege, nor politically correct.

It’s simply correct.

Feminism’s Folly

Katherine Alejandra Cross2 Comments

One of the many ironies of the trans life is the fact that oftentimes your worst enemies can be found among the very people you should be able to trust most. One who spends much time in any number of activist circles will not take long to learn this the hard way. The LGBTQ movement as a whole is legendary for its internal strife and battles between cis LGB people who feel the T really ought not be there. Never mind the Q. But today we’re going to focus on the other bastion of sad, activist irony in this sordid and political mess: feminism.

Feminism, near and dear to my heart, is a force for good in this world, ultimately. Its basic tenets have lent me much strength in recent years, and a great deal of pride in myself; the perfect antidote to the shame that trans women are so often made to live with. It was second nature for me to find the numerous intersections between feminism and trans activism, and to see how the issues trans women face are often times part and parcel of wider misogyny. What has so often puzzled me is why some feminists like the execrable Julie Bindel can’t see them. The answer, at the end of the day, lies in the fact that they do not know us and they do not care to know us.

Otherwise they wouldn’t destroy the work of their foremothers with every stroke of their pens, now would they?

How can I make this charge? It’s quite simple really: there are a lot of arguments transphobic ‘feminists’ use against trans people and all of them are entirely hypocritical from a feminist point of view. The arguments only make sense if you see trans people are some kind of set type, where we’re all the same and all caricatures in precisely the same ways.

What are those arguments?

  1. Trans women are parodies of femininity. This is a popular mainstay among radfems who insist that we’re all caricatures of women who, as Julie Bindel might put it, wear ‘fuck me heels’ and have ‘birds nest hair’ or who all look like 50s-era, Mrs. Cleaver style women. This idea allows them to portray us as agents of patriarchy who fetishise clothing and other feminine trappings and thus pose as ersatz women to complete the illusion. So we become the bad guys! Emphasis on guys, of course. I do not need to go into great detail about why this is stupid. Suffice it to ask: how many trans women do you know who dress and act like fembots? We encompass the same vast diversity that is reflected in all women: from butch to femme and everything in between, to every character trait, interest, spiritual pursuit, comportment, or ideal you can think of. There’s a trans woman for that. But this neglects a broader point, after all. How is it a hypocrisy to feminism? Because it relies on media stereotypes and nothing more. The only way you could get away with believing that, as Ms. Bindel does, the world would look like the set of *Grease* if everyone were transsexual people is by not knowing real trans people and going by the ample number of caricatures of trans women readily available throughout the media. This violates a feminist shibboleth:hear the voices of real women. Real trans women would show them such stereotypes are untrue, and the testimony of their experience should matter more than what one sees in *The Crying Game.* It also violates a second shibboleth: do not take media imagery as gospel. We as feminists spend a great deal of time critiquing the media precisely because it presents a false image of the world, and of women in particular. To go by what the media says about trans women with total unquestioning faith, when one knows what’s going on, is rank hypocrisy.
  2. Trans women’s femininity is imposed on them by doctors. This may sound somewhat innocuous, if conspicuously lacking in detail, but it is another popular trope of certain ‘feminists’ to suggest that we are made into fembots who wear pounds of makeup and favour hairstyles that went out of fashion in 1969 because psychiatrists made us do it in an effort to reinforce the patriarchy. The funny thing is, that statement by itself is not wrong. Many trans women have unpleasant stories to share about how psychiatrists would chide them for wearing trousers (even those cut for women) and would not consider them to be ‘making progress’ unless they acted as feminine as possible, often hyperbolically feminine. The stories get much worse certainly and there is a lot of room for a feminist response to this barbarous behaviour on the part of psychiatrists, which even continues to this day in some (thankfully diminishing) quarters. After all, it is misogyny that motivates these therapists who gleefully seek to control women.  Yet what do the ‘feminists’ do? Blame us for it. This violates what is perhaps Rule 1 of Feminism 101: don’t blame the fucking victim. Many trans women who underwent this harrowing will tell you they didn’t enjoy it and shrugged off the mantle of false femininity at their earliest convenience. But for feminists to blame us for this as if we were in collusion with the psychs and in control of the whole process is laughable. Our lack of control over the psychiatric establishment’s response to us has been a major problem for years.
  3. Trans women should use the men’s restroom and other male sex-segregated facilities. One may note that this is an irony among ironies in that it’s a popular demand of the Christian Right as well. But this one is often trumpeted by feminists and I find it to be a very curious demand indeed coming from a movement that quite rightly spends a great deal of time fighting the ongoing sexual and physical abuse of women in the world. How could a feminist in good conscience demand that by law a woman should force herself into a male sex-segregated facility with no regard for her personal safety? Do these people sincerely believe there’s no risk to trans women? It is not a part time job, being a woman. It is not something I can switch off so that I can take a wazz. It’s who I am. I am a woman. At best you are asking me to humiliate myself by walking into a men’s room only to get tossed out, and at worst you’re putting me in a place where I could easily get hurt, whether or not I have conditional cissexual privilege at the time. How can a feminist violate one of the highest rules of all: reduce violence against women? Under any circumstance if such a law were being proposed feminists would rightly tear it down as misogynist madness. A law that made Muslim women use the men’s facilities, for example. This is no different.
  4. I know this trans woman and she likes pink/wears makeup/likes sexy lingerie, no real woman does that! You’ll notice a lot of these are related and are often variations on the same argument (most feeding into the Big Fallacy at the end of this list), but I’m taking them separately to address key issues with each manifestation.  In this instance what you have is an ostensible feminist talking about what good women ‘ought to be.’ This is playing with fire, certainly. Patriarchal fire, one might say. At its heart, it’s cissexism. Cis women can shop at Victoria’s Secret and not be misgendered, but a trans woman cannot. One might argue there’s a No True Scotsman fallacy in this as well. It’s also a feminist hypocrisy in particular because it involves one woman guilting another over her choices. A great many women, quite a lot of feminists among them, are sexual and proud of it. It’s been a time honoured feminist tradition to not shame women because of their sexual behaviour. So why do it to trans women for their choice of dress, underwear, makeup or whatever? Making a woman feel dirty because of those choices has long been the preserve of patriarchs and their enablers. Why carry that water just to splash a trans woman with it? In the case of pink and other stereotypes, would you presume to go up to a cis woman wearing a pink blouse and tell her that her Woman Card was revoked? I didn’t think so.
  5. Trans women’s penises are symbols of male power and thus threatening. This is, in particular, an argument often used to exclude trans women from women-only safe spaces on the grounds that it might upset a rape victim. It is, however, very much worth mentioning that this argument is oftentimes not made by those rape victims, only ever in absentia by women who claim to be speaking for them. That’s known as appropriating, especially when it’s done in bad faith (as it is here to justify discrimination). In stereotyping, speaking for, and using rape victims feminists are committing a pretty grievous sin that is only compounded by its use to legitimise hateful stereotyping. Against other women. But back to the matter of this symbol of male power… Aside from the matter that they wouldn’t know I had one unless I told them (Schroedinger’s Cock?), are these so called feminists seriously suggesting to me that they are going to allow a penis to have that much power? Well, what if I were post operative? Evidently, I’m told, the ghost of my penis is sufficient to disqualify me from true womanhood. I see, so a feminist is allowing the mere spectre of a phallus to overshadow all else? Alternately, she is reducing everything about this woman to a penis. Everything she is: her personality, her way of life, her hopes, dreams, fears, experiences, and all else about her, is erased and reduced to that knob of flesh. That is the exact opposite of feminism. Too often women are reduced to their body parts. How is this any different? Feminism stands against phallocentrism. Why indulge in it so much just to discriminate against women?
  6. Trans women seek to reify the gender binary! This is a biggie and it often starts off most “feminist” rants against us. But I saved it for last because it rests on such an elementary and basic fallacy that I’m astonished people still use it. The fiction goes like this: instead of seeking new and vibrant ways of expressing ourselves as, say, men, we’re resorting instead to this parody of femininity that only serves to reinforce the gender binary that feminism has tried to smash. After all, gender is a social construct, yes? We’re rocking the boat! We’re totally reifying the idea that a person is stuck in a predetermined role into which they are born! ..Wait. Remember the whole reason trans women are being picked on in the first place, yes? Because we were born with wee wees, that’s essentially why. Emphasis on the word ‘essentially.’ Now, remember that they’re saying we are reinforcing the binary? Well, what pray tell, is more binary than asserting someone born with a penis could only ever be your idea of a man? In attempting to tar us as being anti-constructionist they ended up making a mind bogglingly essentialist argument that undermines the whole enterprise. Wrapped up in that is the corollary that a woman is, and must be, essentially a vagina. How could any self respecting feminist ever court that kind of nonsense? If gender is indeed societal, then what difference do genitals make? What’s more transgressive than seizing my womanhood in the face of mountains of societal opposition to the idea? That, to me, seems pretty bloody feminist. A woman forced to be a man instead fights proudly for her womanhood! It’d make a good movie. Maybe if Julie Bindel saw it she’d realise we don’t all have ‘birds nest hair’? She seems to swallow everything else the media tells her…

Bitterness aside, these are some of the biggest hypocrisies of the feminist movement for certain. For feminists to take a group of women and judge them entirely by media images, blaming them for their victimisation, silencing or failing to hear their voices, devaluing their experience, and applying biological essentialism to them is beyond bad faith hypocrisy. It’s something that undermines the very foundations of the movement. Women cannot do this to other women. Least of all if they claim the mantle of women’s rights. Feminism is for all of us, and that is what I’ve always stood for. It was never meant to be the club of upper class white cis women that it became.

Pursuant to that idea, I’m taking it back.

I’m normally not the sort to police labels, but I put feminist in quotes many times in this article because I have a very hard time accepting that any person calling themselves a feminist could simultaneously be so hateful to any group of women. To say “I’m a feminist for everyone except trans women” is a contradiction in terms. The term feminism is marvellously elastic and encompasses many definitions and many ideas, several of them mutually exclusive or contradictory. Yet that elasticity simply snaps when one throws bigotry against a group of women into the mix. It is, as I said, a contradiction in terms.

There is one final matter I have not explained in great detail and it is the notion that in feminism experience matters more than anything and is the testimony from whence our strength and knowledge derives. For any group of people that have been marginalised this is a fine policy. Shared experience is strength, for it reminds one that they aren’t alone and reminds one of realities and institutional problems others would deny out of ignorance and privilege. Lived experience tells one’s story and can light the fire of one’s activism. It is to be heard and not silenced; valued and not cast aside. Yet these radical feminists who make the arguments I’ve debunked above are failing on that most basic premise: honour the experiences of your fellow women. Do not just go by what you see in the media. Hear us. Read us. Learn about us.

As I said before, the only way those arguments could possibly work in your mind is if you don’t know us.

For Fuck’s Surgery

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

(Trigger Warning: This post quotes hateful/transphobic language at points.)

Being a young transitioner I’ve gone through a couple of fairly common rites of passage in my quest to live life as myself. One is, of course, TSRoadmap which has acted a sort of bible for transition; information compiled in one place that can help a broad cross section of the community. The other is Lynn Conway’s well known website, the centrepiece of which is the TS Woman Successes page, which is something even I’ve linked to others.

The younger ones among us with the privilege of a steady internet connection have probably used these sites in one way or another and we may, perhaps, even remember them fondly in the same way one looks back with a smile at a beloved first grade teacher.  That is certainly my own feeling. To Andrea James in particular, I feel I owe a great debt as her website was one of the first I encountered on this issue and helped me feel less alone. Without TSRoadmap, which I still link on this blog, things might well have gone a lot slower for me.

Yet in time I came to realise something about both websites. They are definitely, at best, 101 sites and not perfect authorities. They are also very much a narrow perspective on the full spectrum of trans women’s experiences, especially in the case of Lynn Conway’s website, which much to my consternation, I came to have serious problems with as I delved into it. Both websites represent the perspectives of perhaps the most privileged group of trans women, white and upper class. I do not deny that both sites are incredibly useful, and to a trans woman who was just getting started I’d still link them.

Yet I cannot get over my supreme discomfort with Ms. Conway’s website as I think it broadcasts some rather unpleasant and demeaning messages that I’m quite confident trans women do not need to hear. Today I’m going to go through my reasoning on this, with all due respect to Ms. Conway and the work she’s done.

One thing that will often be pointed out in the activist community is that both Ms. Conway and Ms. James still insist on using the term MTF to describe trans women, a crude bit of argot that does tend to reinforce the idea that we were at some point essentially male. That doesn’t quite jive with the experiences of many trans women, including many of the ordinary people whose stories are given prominent space on both sites. This isn’t a simple matter of political correctness (a subject to which I’ll return in a later column) but simply of correctness. There are exceptions, of course, where some transsexual women will identify differently, but in the main one should never presume an innate male identity for a trans woman, and the language of “MTF” or “M2F” should just be ditched. It’s nothing a simple FAQ couldn’t clear up.

But the much deeper problem has to do with Ms. Conway’s views on trans women’s body image, and it borders on body fascism, quite frankly.

The first stop on our tour here will be her SRS warnings page which is actually quite useful. It does pay to make sure one is truly ready, mind body and soul, for gender confirmation surgery and it could be instructive to consider a few examples of people who had these surgeries but ultimately regretted it. Conway does not quote these people for the insidious purposes malefactors like Julie Bindel do (i.e. to undermine and delegitimise us), rather she does so to make sure that any trans woman considering surgery is fully informed.

What troubles me is Conway’s commentary.

The first story she recites is that of Renee Richards, the famous tennis player who in her later years has infamously been quoted as saying some rather demeaning and damaging things about other trans women. Hers is, perhaps, a worthwhile story to tell here but Conway’s psychological commentary gets into some very bizarre territory:

“Part of Renée’s problem with public acceptance, and possibly (though unconsciously) with her own inner self-acceptance, was undoubtedly her unusual facial structure. She had a very feminine, well-toned and attractive body, and must have thought of herself as being very beautiful. She sought media attention at every turn, and her photos were widely disseminated.  Unfortunately, she never seemed to realize that she had a very prominent male brow-bulge and large male jaw and chin.”

As I read this I couldn’t help but boggle. Does she even realise what she’s saying and what she’s speculating on?

A bit of background is in order: Conway and James are both major proponents of facial feminisation surgery. They believe that if you have problems “passing” you can make them all go away with a trip to a plastic surgeon. To some extent they are correct that adding female gender cues to one’s face may allow one to gain conditional cissexual privilege more easily, and there is some truth to Andrea James’ assertion that “passing is from the neck up.”

But at the same time, Conway’s nigh-on religious advocacy delves into insulting territory on this website and she starts to sound like a mad barber as she analyses (often very cruelly) the faces of trans women. What is most irksome to me is that both women, but Conway in particular, seem to ignore the fact that many cis women have ‘masculine’ facial features and structures. The kind of scrutiny they may receive for it is a source of huge insecurity for women, whether cis or trans, and Conway’s offensive commentary does little to help that body image problem.

Whatever Richards’ sins in later life may have been, to dismiss her face as ‘unusual’ is incredibly insulting, and to say that she “never seemed to realise” certain things about her face is equally so.

I see myself in the mirror every single day. I am very aware of the fact that I have a slight bossed brow and that my jaw line is a bit more square than that of the average woman’s. Very. Very. Aware. It is an uphill battle to fight the impulse to see myself as lesser, or as not womanly enough because of this. It is a heinous intersection of the body image problems that are heaped on all Western women by the media, and the transmisogynist element of tying one’s womanhood to their ability to “pass.”

I’ve little doubt Renee Richards was aware too.

For Conway to feed this insecurity, especially when many of the people reading her site might be young women who could ill afford such surgeries, is the height of irresponsibility.

Further down, Ms. Conway relates the case of  Dani Bunten Berry, who regretted her SRS and wrote an essay on the subject. Conway’s thoughts are extensive and she speculates on whether Ms. Berry was a crossdresser who might’ve been happier without the surgery and in the final diagnosis says the following:

“Dani would threfore have been much better advised by her counselors to undergo FFS to correct her very masculine facial structure…”

That this is the first thing she writes is annoying enough. That she seems contradicted by the very picture she herself posted of Ms. Berry just makes it maddening. Berry does not have what I would consider to be a singularly ‘masculine’ facial structure.

But I know that to argue this point with Conway is to miss the point and play her game of turning these people into objects to pore over as if they were lifeless sculptures. To do so to Ms. Berry, who passed away in 1998, seems particularly disrespectful. How Ms. Conway could objectify them so is beyond me.

It is also worth looking at the language: “correct” her facial structure. I believe that if one undergoes FFS it should be a matter of choice. Not one of ‘correction’. Trans women have to fight for years to overcome the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with them, even after coming out, and even after having lived as themselves for many years; then Ms. Conway drops that kind of bomb, implying that, yes my dear, there is something intrinsically wrong with you.

In the end Ms. Conway says this:

“In cases where serious difficulties are expected in social transition, it might be wise to give FFS priority over SRS, because FFS has a much more profound effect on the reactions of others to one’s transition.”

After all this I’m tempted to use the FFS acronym in a different context.

Ms. Conway and her supporters might argue that I am being overly idealistic and unrealistic. That, gee, it would be nice if women could be comfortable in their bodies no matter what, but we have to adapt to the fact that people will judge trans women based on their faces and it’s best if we cater to it.

I disagree.

I post a lot on the aggregator/link voting site Reddit and I came across a thread not too long ago where someone linked to a lovely little game on some website called “Spot the Transgender.” You can see where this is going. The link was to a website that showed ten pictures of Thai women and you had to guess which were trans and which were “real women” as everyone termed it. To say this was an orgy of objectifying hate would be an understatement, but reading the comments was instructive in a grim way.

A lot of the men (and 98% of the people who commented were males) went through their thought processes, proudly telling everyone how they did it and spotted the “men” or the “fakes” or the “trannies”. I quote their othering language to give you an idea of where they’re coming from as these are the kinds of people Conway ostensibly seeks to mollify by frogmarching us into an FFS surgeon’s office.

Guess what? They weren’t looking so much at the faces.

Hands, hips, shoulders, thighs, belly buttons were all mentioned more than facial elements, although a few people brought up things like “creepy smiles” or jaw shape. But the point is that what they were using to objectify and other us were taking parts of the kathoey women’s bodies that could not be “corrected” (to use Ms. Conway’s stupid term) with some kind of surgery.

You could argue that the comment section here had a sampling bias because everyone was told in advance that there would be trans women in the photo gallery, but the point is that if they do not objectify your face, they will objectify the rest of you. One even said that trans women will probably have “ bigger boobs” than cis women.

I am quite sorry, but I’m not going to go under the knife to please these macho, bigoted jerks and as much of a fight as it can be to keep this in mind: I know I’m beautiful. Among the people who matter, I have been told that. Frankly, I’ll go with what my heart says and what those who care about me say rather than what these monsters do. If they know I’m trans, they’ll work overtime to objectify my body no matter how many surgeries I’ve had.

Even when my status isn’t known, I’ve received enough ogles, enough up-and-down looks, enough stares, enough wolf whistles to know I’m being objectified already. I will not do a damn thing, nor spend one cent to please those people, and other  trans women should not be guilted or cajoled into doing so either.

This worship of a cis female standard of beauty is particularly pernicious and harmful to trans women, but it does not affect only us. When I see cis models mocked for “looking like trannies” or Ann Coulter being routinely taunted as Man Coulter, or countless cis women berated for thick eyebrows, extraneous facial hairs, square jaw lines, adam’s apples, or any other features that can be plucked out to mock them with, I see where the problem’s source lies: fundamental misogyny. All women are measured very harshly against these models of Ur femininity and are often told they are deficient if they don’t meet that standard; the entire “you look like a man” bullshit meme is part and parcel of the same phenomenon. The idea that you don’t look enough like a particular standard of feminine beauty and you are lesser as a result comes from that.

I’m not saying “don’t ever get FFS.” I am saying don’t do it for the wrong reasons.

I’ll continue this at a later date as there’s more to be discussed about Ms. Conway’s thinking about post-transition trans women that I feel is somewhat harmful and projects too much of her own experience.

The City of Cis

Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

Cissexual Nuke

Endeavouring as ever to prove the veracity of the sentiment behind this journal’s title, reality dealt another interesting pinprick the other day. Apparently the trans-sphere exploded over a series of posts and comments made on Pam’s House Blend, a blog way more popular than this one and with more employees. This link is a very good place to start.

Another nuclear situation exploded in the blog-O’Sphere apropos us damn bitchy trans people and all our irritating talk about oppression and what not.

Apparently the terms “cissexual” and “cisgendered” are now offensive according to one professional gay man and Autumn Sandeen deigned to agree, fundamentally, with him and his ideological fellow-travelers in a very long blog post meant to rationalise the fundamentally fallacious idea- saying over and over that the term was “weaponised.” At first, I will admit, I wanted to empathise with her. But as I read her links and really absorbed the meaning behind her post, that was quickly replaced with the sort of solar plexus punch I wasn’t expecting from someone in the trans community.

Silly me.

As I absorbed what she was saying, I really began to take serious umbrage at it. She was handing away our ball to people who couldn’t care less about our struggle. Our verbal ball. The ball of equalising language. Sure, I’m straining a metaphor to death here, but it’s not even half the equal of Ms. Sandeen’s crime against language in this case. The terms cissexual and cisgendered are neutral terms used to (essentially) describe those who are not trans. There are complex exceptions but that’s just another reason we need these handy grey terms for any discussion about the issues trans people face. Why?

Well I’d sooner not say “normal people want to do x, y, and z” to me. That’s accepting a rather unpleasant first principle, that I am implicitly abnormal, and thus making it much harder for me to argue for my rights. Even the term ‘non-trans’ is a bit othering. Cis- terms level the playing field and decentre things in everyone’s favour.

The word is not meant to be insulting. Some folks didn’t get the memo, however.

“And one last wading into the deep:
For the record, I find cis- to be offensive. In general, I thought our community (I mean the whole LGBT rainbow here) uses terms that are acceptable to those being described. That is, we use the preferred gender of trans people, we call someone bi if they identify as bi, we don’t say tranny, etc.

So why is it okay for (some of) the trans community to call us cis-? If members of the trans community said “stop calling us trans, we find it offensive” would we here at PHB continue to say “trans”? I doubt it very much.

Why the lack of respect in the other direction?”

The problem with seductive arguments like this is precisely their succubus (or perhaps in this case, incubus)-like nature. They allure you with all of these other verbal sops to our dignity while fundamentally arguing to take back something that matters a great deal to us. A lexicon that allows us to fruitfully and fairly discuss our issues.

I wish I didn’t have to discuss oppression in my life or why it occurs. I wish I didn’t have to deal with the sort of nonsense that underlies crap like what I spoke about last time, the simple fact that by casting me as abnormal I cannot legally use the women’s bathroom in some places. But it’s there, and I do. I won’t stop using the terms cissexual and cisgendered to describe those who very often have the power, privilege, and authority to pretend I’m a paedophile or say that it’s “immoral” for me to change my passport’s gender marker.

This is all stuff Lane will never have to consider, and good on him. I don’t wish it on anyone. But you set me back a few unnecessary steps when you even try to redefine my language on terms that are favourable to your privilege. How would he feel if the Christian Right began a campaign to remove the term “heterosexual” from our discourse because they found it insulting? Would he simply roll over because a soccer mom from Missouri pleaded with him about how offensive it was to her? I somehow doubt it, don’t you?

If we divorce all these terms of their deepseated historical and political context and move to this wonderful, abstract plane of pure nothingness where only us and these words exist, maybe we can horsetrade and talk about offence on equal terms.

But look out the window, we’re not there, are we? We’re in a very real world where all of that context does matter and it does materially impact peoples’ lives. I have no authority to deny cis-people their rights, and my use of the term is heard by virtually no one except perhaps the people who read this blog which number 20 on a good day. I’m not wounding anyone with it, I’m not perpetuating a cycle of oppression with it, I’m not restraining people from living their lives as human beings because of it. As my good friend at Femmessay put it, even if I did say something meanspirited about cis people, it has no teeth whatsoever.

If I did happen to angrily declare Raaar, all cis people should be put to death. Fuck yo vagina! that’d be pretty hateful, stupid, and, yes, offensive. Because it’s a complete thought. Not, however, because of the term cis. I could’ve easily replaced that word with ‘brown haired people’ or ‘Sephardic Jews’ or ‘Blink 182 fans’ and the sentiment would’ve still been the same. The adjective, the descriptors, were not the offenders. The complete thought (putting them to death) is.

Yet even with those words, stinging as they are, hurt feelings are all people like Lane will ever have to grapple with in that department. When I feel the reverse, if someone were to say “all trans people should be put to death” I know that it’s not just hurt feelings I have to deal with. I have to also confront the reality that this sentiment is why I am legally restrained from adopting children, altering my birth certificate or social security info, why I can’t get certain jobs or live in certain parts of the country, why I might be restrained from even using the bathroom of my choice, why I might be regarded as a perv, or a paedo, or a freak, or a sin against nature. All of that is rolled up into those barbs. Whereas… what exactly is rolled up into “cis” other than its default, neutral, academic meaning? What does the occasional angry, thrashing insult of a trans person who might use that term in a rant do to ruin a cis person’s life, exactly?

What’s astounding about this post is that I feel like I’m giving a basic grammar lesson here, but it demonstrates how far behind trans people are in so many areas that even this can be easily denied to us when it suits the privilege of others. I’m having none of it. I will not abandon my use of these terms so callously and so easily as this:

To begin with, I’m giving up on the words cissexual and cisgender. I saw these as neutral terms, and now I see these are not. Thank you for your reasoned explanation as to why.And yeah, civil tone matters, and thinking in terms of broad communities matter. I see these as being more and more as important as time goes on.

One more MLK Jr. quote:

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

For Ms. Sandeen to justify her betrayal with the words of Martin Luther King is even more stinging and unnecessary- and just a little ironic. Does she not seem to remember the fact that his speeches had to make mention of “white people” in ways both entreating and shaming? She might as well be saying that the words “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” or what have you are weaponised. That the onus of guilt is placed on us for merely using a term that academics responsibly use all the time to have a language to describe the various issues the trans community faces… that is irritating. For a transgendered person to do so is unconscionable.

Perhaps she thought she was doing it out of some misguided sense of fairness, perhaps she thought she was saying something meaningful, but what she did was give our ball away to the wrong people. To anyone who might be inclined to be as “accommodating” as Ms. Sandeen to those who really don’t care for us to begin with, let me quote George Carlin here:

“They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you! They don’t care about you! At all. At all. At all!”

I am not giving back the cis words. Language does belong to us all, which is precisely the same reason you cannot take it from me, and I will continue to use this terminology to assist me in talking about what matters when it’s relevant, as opposed to whatever appeasing constructions Ms. Sandeen decides to put together to please those who barely regard her existence. Because what she doesn’t seem to get is that it doesn’t matter whether you call them cissexual or zootsexual or zooblehsexual or wagga-waggasexual, the whole point is that some are miffed that language is putting them on an equal footing with us freaks. It’s not the word, it’s the idea that we’re in equal consideration that gets under these peoples’ skin.

If I am to be labeled an “angry bitch” for it, then so be it. I’ve cause to be angry. If it makes you uncomfortable, help do something about it, rather than blame me. For Ms. Sandeen to do this seems, to me, to forget the sacrifices made by trans people in the past, to claw ourselves the tiny bit of dirt we have today, like the fact that I can legally change my DMV ID’s gender without having had surgery. That tiny bit of dirt there? People died for that. Were raped for it. Had their killers and rapists go free because of it.

The cis terms are another clutch of soil that our bloodied hands have claimed for ourselves; the right to have de-centering language so we can talk about this stuff equitably.

If you think this is melodramatic, then look at the history of trans people, how hard won some of these rights are, just as the rights of other out-groups were clawed inch by bloody inch. I doubt Ms. Sandeen was thinking of this, and I know for certain that Lane and his set certainly gave not a thought to this, merely mouthing the words of tolerance to get to a fundamentally bigoted point: that he had no privilege to examine or consider.

Which is, of course, a privileged way of thinking. So, what do I want? Well, I’ll let Femmessay explicate:

“The point is not to give the gun over to the oppressed person — and it isn’t as though that could ever happen in any universe that doesn’t exist in your own head, and every transperson knows that, just like women know that we’ll never have a matriarchy — the point is to get rid of the guns. The prefix “cis” is one tiny step in the epically difficult process of removing the bullets from the cisprivileged gun.  It is not being loaded into their own gun — they don’t have one! — it is being thrown away in the hopes that maybe one day we can all sit at the table together and enjoy our relationships without the unspoken threats sitting between us.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

I do not wish to hurt or offend cis-people. I’m just trying to get my rights and be respected as just enough of a human being to, you know, use the bathroom without being considered a perv. Without having everything I do, even my most intimate and private moments, second guessed in a way no one else has to contend with.

For example, if you are a cis-woman and you, say, enjoy kinky sex, there might be a slight stigma attached to that in certain circles but no one questions your womanhood. If you like sexy underwear, that will not be questioned, and will in some cases be encouraged. If you like having dirty words hurled at you during sex, that’s just considered a kink. But if you’re a trans woman, suddenly you’re a male pervert for wanting all or any of those things and fetishising your womanhood.

When something that private, personal, and intimate is questioned and held aloft as proof of my non-personhood, something is terribly wrong in this society, and if I can’t say that that comes from cis privilege, then something is really wrong.

Because understanding that hurt isn’t easy, and it has to begin with language. Language is the concrete poured into oppression’s foundation. Eliminating it also begins with our tongues. I, for one, will not stop.

Neither should you, my brothers and sisters.

Invisible Woman

Katherine Alejandra Cross2 Comments

“This is a bill that begins to confuse the gender differences between men and women to the point of trying to allow men to use women’s restrooms, and, of course, that means sexual predators going after young children,” Tom Minnery, senior vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family Action, said… (Source.)

There are things that words often fail to describe adequately. My reaction to the above quote was one of those things. But I will take a good stab at explaining why this is wrong using my usual flawless logic.

First of all, the onus is on the Christian fundamentalists to demonstrate using anything other than tautological bullshit that gender-identity discrimination protection empowers sex offenders. I like to think of myself as a fair minded woman, willing to walk in another person’s shoes for a while (they’re probably less painful than heels for sure). But for the life of me, looking through the eyes of these Christian radicals I still can’t see what they see apropos paedophila. All I see is that they’re scared of me.

Again we return to the nuclear unicorn thing. I am again being portrayed as this deadly weapon that is an unmitigated threat to society, restrained only by a lack of laws recognising my dignity.

To address this directly, we all know that tragically women and children have been raped or assaulted in restrooms. Yet that’s exactly the point, the absence of pro-trans legislation hasn’t in any way restrained these monsters. If such legislation exists, exactly what loophole can they exploit to do something they’re legally unable to do now? If a man walks into a women’s bathroom and starts leering and groping, he’ll get arrested. Why? For sexual assault. This bill is not decriminalising rape, assault, or sexual harassment. It only ensures that I’m not discriminated at work because I’m a trans woman and that I can use the bathroom of my choice.

Why does this matter, asks the ignorant Christian rightist? Well this may shock you, quite a bit, so prepare to have your mind blown. I use the restroom to relieve myself. I go in there to pee and if I’m really desperate, take the occasional dump. I do not go in there to draw pentagrams on the floor in goat blood and sacrifice babies to our lord Beelzebub while groping various asses that may come my way.

This is quintessential othering. Here’s one more thought exercise: if they’re so concerned about sexual assault, why would they send me- a woman- who is dressed like a woman, looks like a woman, sounds like a woman, into a men’s bathroom? They’re not worried about the catcalling, questioning, groping or leering I might experience? But of course, this isn’t about protecting women or children, and as ever it is a mere smokescreen of incredibly acrid bullshit meant to make people hate us. Yesterday I said that as we are de-voiced we are tragically made all things to all people. Well, you can add ‘paedophile’ to the list of things Christians insist on believing about us.

The fact that it never occurs to these people that I might just want to use the bathroom to pee and wash my hands tells you how deeply ingrained their sense of us as this evil alien species is, and of course they view gays and lesbians in much the same way.

Logically speaking such laws do nothing to help sex offenders. This argument has been trotted out countless times and every time so-called liberal lawmakers do not get up to bat and beat this down; we’re just trannies, why risk their careers on us? But it’s a monumentally stupid and offensive argument. In New York City we have an ordinance that allows trans people to use the sex-segregated facilities of their choice. That’s brilliant. You may also have noticed no commensurate increase in bathroom rape here. That’s because no one can reasonably use those laws to get out of an assault charge. Why? Because the law isn’t about assault.

It’s about allowing me to use the restroom and dispose of my bodily waste.

But really it’s starting to get very tiring to hear these conservative arguments on an academic level just because they’re so old and repetitive. Really, what’s next?

“This is a bill that begins to undermine American energy independence by charging so-called polluters for their waste, and, of course, that means sexual predators going after young children.”

Or:

“This is a bill that will allow poor families to access healthcare for the first time and prevent people from being denied coverage, and, of course, that means sexual predators going after young children.”

Come up with something new, guys, seriously. Also, word of advice: Don’t talk about “the children” until you stop opposing things that actually help kids like Head Start and CHIP.

This particular brand of hate meshes very well with that of the malevolent forces in the psychiatric establishment who work tirelessly against the liberties of trans people by attempting to categorise us as disordered. Recently I took this piss out of Kenneth Zucker, the lead doctor at Toronto’s infamous Clarke Institute in Toronto, part of the Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and with good reason. This man embodies the precise threat of transmisogyny to not just trans women, but women as a whole.

Dr. Zucker, seen here trying to melt his arch nemesis, Barbie, with his mind.
Dr. Zucker, seen here trying to melt his arch nemesis, Barbie, with his mind.

He is a staunch proponent of the idea that “men wanting to be women” are psychiatrically injured and need to be ‘cured’ of this malignancy. Time and time again trans women are at best aggressively questioned and at worst aggressively beaten for ‘wanting to be women’ because, as most men would wonder, why on Earth would anyone want to be a woman? They’re so… frilly and inferior.

Women as a whole must recognise this and take umbrage at it.

Furthermore it’s worth noting that he also enables a particularly stupid argument that a small minority of gay men love to indulge: “Failure to intervene increases the chances of transsexualism in adulthood, which Zucker considers a bad outcome. … Why put boys at risk for this when they can become gay men happy to be men?” This was written by J. Michael Bailey, a fellow traveler of Zucker’s who cannot believe that I am happy and empowered by being a woman despite the downstairs mixup.

But the point is, folks, I’m a lesbian. I’ll defend the rights of gay men to the death, but I’m not one of them. I’m part of the GLBT movement we all share, yes. But I am not a gay man. I’m a lesbian (trans)woman. That’s just how my cards fell. What does Zucker say to that? I should also add that I’m a very broad minded woman. It took a lot of introspection to get to where I am now and most important of all, self acceptance. Given everything that trans people have to endure and the stigmas we carry (see: what started this article) I cannot fathom that any real person who has gotten to this point is suppressing gay-ness to do something that is monumentally harder, more expensive, and more inviting of trouble on one’s house.

In short, if I truly was gay, and assuming all else about my mind and personality were equal, I’d have had no trouble accepting it.

I’m a woman and it’s as simple as that.

Why should I be ashamed of that or need to be cured of it? Why must I and my experience be made invisible because of it? That’s a worthwhile question for all women to consider.

The Trans-feminine Mystique

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

When I first began writing this journal/blog thingy I wondered in my very first post if I should come out or not; if I should restrain myself from letting that little dirty secret slip into a Google-searchable journal. In the end I realised something rather important, so I just said “fuck it” and wrote that into the very first post. I knew I couldn’t hold that back. It’s in the DNA of this journal’s name, as the first post explained.

But what I also realised is that there are still so precious few outlets for trans people to get the message out there. There are certainly more than ever. The Internet has been a remarkable help in this regard. Many books are now on the shelves that are autobiographical, political or both, and that’s a wonderful thing. Yet even so, none of us can name a really good movie that portrayed a trans person sympathetically, seriously, and non-stereotypically, much less a TV show.

We are shown as crude caricatures, or with our high heeled legs pointing up out of a dumpster, or as cruel temptresses who will defile unwitting young men with our secret sausage. Trans women are those crude and cruel mockeries, trans men don’t even exist at all in the media, save for the needed telling of some tragic tales like that of Brandon Teena. But beyond those sad true life stories, we do not hear much about trans men or trans women- certainly not the triumphs of our every day lives, nor do we see any beautiful pictures painted on screen depicting the realisation of our simple dreams.

Transamerica came closest but even that film, despite having had several trans women consultants like Andrea James whose life story would make a damn fine movie on its own, blew chunks in its portrayal of us. Felicity Huffman’s character was portrayed as a hyper feminine almost wanna-be character that stumbled in her high heels. That’s bollocks, for one thing. You adapt to high heels pretty quickly. Her character is years into transition and that stumbling does little more than assist the audience in not taking her seriously as a woman; as if to say walking in heels is some arcane art of women that cannot be imitated by trans women because of their knobbly bits.

There are countless moments like this, such as the portrayal of her putting on her makeup and spending a tremendous amount of time ‘putting woman on’ which reinforces the idea that she has to put on a costume and deceive. Unlike an actual woman, is the implicit message, intended or not. This belies the countless stories of real trans women who roll out of bed in a tank top and jeans and get groceries in the morning without spending two hours putting on makeup.

What was particularly annoying about this portrayal was that it tapped straight into a deeply othering meme that infects the wider media. Showing trans women spending lots of time putting on makeup. Even in sympathetic news or talk show outlets that have shown positive stories about us, like Oprah or Vermont’s CBS affiliate, there’s always that money shot of the trans woman putting on makeup. It reinforces this asinine idea that our womanhood is artificial and revolves around the rituals of cosmetics and wigs and stuffing our clothes in the right places. The idea becomes very much implicit in all of this: we’d not be women but for that artifice.

This is insulting to trans women and it’s insulting to women as a whole. I am taken seriously as a woman despite not wearing much in the way of makeup. The most I ever use is a little lipstick because I happen to like what it does to my face. That’s not a crime. But I sure as hell don’t spend hours in front of the mirror using layers of foundation to “make myself a woman.”

In an earlier entry I remarked that trans people were an excruciatingly de-voiced group. These examples highlight the consequences of this. When the powers that be deign to cover us or give us a very filtered voice, it must always be channelled through the filter of their own definitions and biases. This has profound consequences and also explains a particular aspect of what I might call a little ironically The Transsexual Mystique: the fact that we’re all things to all people.

To Christians, Muslims, and other religious conservatives we are sins against nature whose very existence flies in the face of God. To liberals we are diversity chits to showcase their tolerance but not to be taken too seriously as ‘actual’ men and women. To macho, patriarchal men, we are incredibly gay sissy guys who need a beatdown and also a place for them to project their worst misogynist fantasies. To some feminist women, we’re sleeper agents of the patriarchy itself, men in drag who denigrate womanhood by being parodies of it. To psychiatrists we are their social experiment and a place to project their personal ideals so that we might be moulded into them. To some gays we’re merely deeply closeted gays and lesbians unable to grapple with our own latent homosexuality.

You may note that many of these stereotypes are trans woman-specific. This is because trans men are thinly regarded at all by society in this. Their existence puts lie to some of those stereotypes and is thus inconvenient.

The only way this happens is because who we really are isn’t part of the narrative. They know we exist as transsexual people but they don’t know what to make of us. So they project their fears, worries, and fantasies onto us. We are blank slates on which they may write their values, and in so doing they merely rationalise us into some role that buttresses their worldview. Because we sure as hell aren’t being allowed to do it. So few of us can stand up and say “this is my life, I’m a human being and here’s my experience…” So we simply become MacGuffins for everyone else’s political ballgames.

When we are allowed to speak, we always have our words edited by the demands of commercial media and parsed by psychiatrists who allegedly know us better than we know ourselves. Our experience is forever qualified by the desires of others.

So I’m telling this story. My story, and my observations. I don’t pretend it applies universally, but it’s part of the true tapestry of the lives of all trans people. What can be done to fix and redress the media portrayal problems? A good place to start looking and see what the future might look like is Venus Envy, a webcomic by Erin Lindsey that deals with the lives of trans people in a small Pennsylvania town. It can be a little soap opera-ish, but what matters most is that I identified with the main character, Zoe.

She wasn’t a caricature, she wasn’t a cardboard cut out, and she wasn’t comic relief. She was a fictional character who was going through what I went through with the same thoughts, worries, fears, hopes, and some experiences that I had. It matters so very much to see and I ate that comic up, finding hope in Ms. Lindsey’s excellent and heartfelt storyweaving.

One of the other main characters is a trans man as well, and their issues are handled so deftly and expertly that I never felt condescended to. I just felt like this was a reflection of my experience. Trans people as a whole were being taken seriously in this artwork. Lindsey knows how to make us laugh about our own foibles and some of her earlier comics make great play of that. But the joke is not on us, it’s on the absurdity of the situations society leaves us in. That is a critical distinction.

This is why I get so annoyed at people who decry “affirmative action” on television and in films, like some morons at the University of Connecticut’s Young Republican club who actually denigrated Star Trek: Voyager for being such a thing. To hell with you. There is a very distinct power to seeing a reflection of yourself in the media. It makes you feel like you’re part of the society and that your stories and experiences matter enough to be reflected into the general public. I can empathise with white characters and with cis-women characters, and even the odd male character. But it makes my heart sing with I see a trans woman I can truly identify with.

Because the trans part of my womanhood is a very specific and very involved set of experiences that are not easily replicated in other demographic groups. Zoe Carter as a character matters a lot to me because of that. Erin Lindsey truly Gets It. It’s no surprise then that she’s trans herself. But we all need to tell our stories, and in her way this is how she tells hers.

I also added a link to the blog roll to Lady Jade Lioness’ Den, a good friend who is writing a wonderful piece of erotic fiction starring a trans woman who, aside from being elegant, strong, and intelligent, can kick some serious ass and knows how to use a pair of daggers to deadly effect. In a word, a badass I can empathise with. It matters to have those sorts of heroes and see them portrayed positively and sympathetically.

It matters not just because we need to feel less alone or because seeing ourselves reflected positively is empowering. It is also because we need to stop being all things to all people and instead be ourselves.