Transphobia

Outside: An Exodus From Patriarchy on the Backs of Women

Katherine Alejandra Cross5 Comments
Intersectionality is often lost on those who most need to make certain connections.

The operation of Kyriarchy in its peculiarly patriarchal forms never fails to impress me. As I look at a certain claque of radical feminists who claim to be fighting against a system of gender oppression in our world I find myself confronting women and men who have, in truth, merely internalised patriarchal power arrangements and are regurgitating them in a strange way. I’m speaking, of course, about radfem transphobia. Joelle Ruby Ryan, a trans woman academic, recently attended a conference in New Hampshire called Pornography as Sexual Violence. In trying to present on the often untold story of how trans pornography impacts both our community and gender in general, she found herself attacked by two transphobic feminists: Robert Jensen and Lierre Keith. Her story, passionate and quite understandably outraged in tone, can be found here.

In it she quotes at length a screed from Ms. Keith. You’ll forgive me if I decide to take a shotgun to yon barrel of fish. Some might say that it only dignifies the remarks of such people to debate them or to fisk them. I prefer, however, to think of it as providing a learning resource to someone who might find themselves oppressed or harassed by such ideas. The power of symbolic violence- the use of rank, position, privilege and entitlement to impose meaning on a subordinate person- should not be understated. I and many other trans people have learned the hard way why such arguments are wrong, but someone still struggling to find themselves and feeling vulnerable might be hurting. To me, the more responses there are to this kind of nonsense, the better. Now, on with the show.

A Journey Down a Familiar Path

Keith begins by saying the following:

Well, I’ve personally been fighting about this since 1982. I think  ‘transphobic’ is a ridiculous word. I have no strange fear of people who claim to be ‘trans.’ I deeply disagree with them, as do most radical feminists.

When I was a wee lass back in high school I used to argue with this rather tiresome Republican boy (incidentally his name was Robert as well) who one day angrily declaimed “there’s no such thing as homophobia! I’m not irrationally afraid of gay people! And ‘homo’ means same! I’m not afraid of things that are the same!” Now, I know what you’re thinking. “He has a career waiting for him in Fox News!” Quite. But secondly he sounds quite a lot like our friend here who’s supposedly from the opposite side of the political spectrum, which is not uncommon when dealing with this minority of radical feminists whose stock and trade is inverting reactionary arguments and using them against the oppressed in the guise of being anti-oppression.

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I Am Whoever You Say I Am

Katherine Alejandra Cross9 Comments

In the long march into academia one naturally becomes intimately acquainted with the geeky and esoteric minutiae of whatever discipline one has chosen for their career. Over the last two years I’ve found myself up to my eyeballs in gender studies text and find it utterly fascinating. I’m often seen scurrying to and fro with a book or two tucked under my arm and my desk is covered in all manner of books appertaining to my passions. But importantly, when you are trans-anything and delving into the wild and woolly world of gender studies you have to be ready for the fact that there will be lots and lots of highly credentialed, intellectual academics theorising about you who do not know what the hell they’re talking about.

This occupational hazard is, to put it bluntly, both annoying and the reason I’m doing the sociology of gender in the first place. The only way this is going to be truly fixed is when we start writing the theory and we start conducting the research, casting our eyes not just on this wild and strange tribe of “transgender” but also on cis people whose views are far more powerful in shaping how our fractioned community is gendered and understood. What I’m looking at today is a particular strain of thought that is increasingly common in Third Wave feminist theorising; it is ostensibly trans positive but ends up being highly fetishising, stereotypical, and ultimately transphobic. It stands in contrast to that Janice Raymond school of theorising that constructs us purely in terms of an outsider, an enemy who constitutes a patriarchal invasion-cum-Body Snatchers. This vision instead sees us (or some of us) as ‘useful’- we have utility in the quest of certain cis feminists to smash the gender binary. Yet what unites both of these seemingly oppositional philosophies is that they are theories formed by cis people about us, relative to their gender ideology, and that construct us as ‘other.’

There are a few major currents in this new feminist theory that merit deconstruction and they will likely be familiar to most readers in one way or another:

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Lost in Trans-lation: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Part II

Katherine Alejandra Cross2 Comments

Here follows part two of the amazing epic story, nominated for six Golden Raspberries, and a Grammy for Best Kazoo Solo: Lost in Trans-Lation. The witty title of this series will, I hope, reflect, what focus on trans issues I can provide in the context of our readings. But as you’ll see today, save for one cisfail at the end, there wasn’t much discussion this time around. That said, the connections that exist between all three of these readings: biology utilised to buttress discrimination, power and privilege, and neo-bigotry disguised as liberalism all bear heavily on transgender people in our daily lives and are part of understanding our particular social locality.

There is also the fact that while quotas may not exist for affirmative action, this blog has a quota for a certain number of trans-puns per year. So, bear with me on that. Now, without further ado, the curtain rises on our gallant heroine going way past the page limit of her homework assignment…

The New York Times article “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show” is an interesting overview of contemporary genetics and the view increasingly common among researchers that race is nearly a wholly political rather than biological question. Clearly, race matters tremendously and as a subject remains one of the critical fulcra on which our histories and cultures remain precariously balanced, and yet race has precious little biological basis: we are far more alike than we are different, in other words. Thus it’s clear, from the statements of many of the scientists in the article and the results of recent research that what makes race matter is entirely social; such power as race has was given entirely by us, particularly by the group of “us” that has historically held more power along racial lines.

The reification of racial distinction was bound to enlist the nascent science of biology in its social legitimation process in the 19th Century, just as the reification of sex/gender differences was doing precisely the same thing. Dr. J. Philippe Rushton’s views on the subject of race are, certainly, very disturbing and seem to chase cultural stereotypes rather than any kind of objective facts, but while many today might balk at his ideas, they defined what was collectively understood to be science for generations. The pseudoscience behind Social Darwinism and Phrenology had great influence on the minds of the powerful for a very long time. The changes now afoot that Times reporter Natalie Angier documents are, in many ways, the result of political struggle as much as new science. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has spoken at length about how science is often shaped by the culture, rather than the inverse.

When the prevailing political winds legitimise overt sexism and racism, science is marshalled in its service and used to justify and reify its existence (“women are naturally more weak or more nurturing, thus they should do x, y, and z” and so on). But in the post-1960s era, overt racism has become more passé and more taboo than it has ever been in the West. This hardly means that bigotry is gone, simply that it has taken another form, which will be discussed shortly vis a vis the third article. But this evolution has seen science follow along to catch up with the culture and at last recognise what people for many centuries have known- that what divides us is of our own doing, largely.

Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” is another well traveled read in gender studies classrooms and with good reason. She delineates with clarity what, exactly, white privilege is and can look like with a carefully numbered list of privileges great and small. Her ‘invisible knapsack’ metaphor has passed into common use in academic and activist circles along with her list format, which has been reproduced many times over for several groups. In seeing Ms. McIntosh’s name writ large in textbook after textbook it is hard not to see the veracity of point number nine: “If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.” Indeed, she has found several dozen and a kind of immortality in gender studies departments right around the country. There is a certain irony, perhaps not lost on Professor McIntosh, in the fact that the leading paper on white privilege has been written by a white woman. That metanalysis is very material to Professor McIntosh’s point, however, which is that simply put opportunities are not equal.

She may well come under fire from whites for her statements, but there is no doubt that her writing will not reflect badly on her as a white person, nor be seen as selfishness. She herself makes that point in her list. Her ideas will be disagreed with, but she will not be seen as an envoy of whiteness by most of her critics, many of whom are also likely to be of her racial group. If a black author had written this, however, she/he/ze would be more than likely to be accused of bitterness, “reverse racism,” or otherwise simply being too selfish. This ties into her thirtieth point: “If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t [one], my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of colour will have.” Among whites (and others as well, frankly) she may be seen as more credible precisely because she is white. This is, in and of itself, another privilege. Despite the fact that she has little to no direct experience of racial antagonism, she becomes an authority on it precisely because she isn’t discriminated against. Hegemonic thinking in our culture presumes victims of discrimination to be “biased” and “angry” rather than, say, experts on the experience with something to teach.

What is compelling to consider is how many of these things tie into male privilege as well. Men will have an easier time finding publishers, men will be taken more seriously when discussing matters of gender, and so on. Men will be construed as less biased on the matter of discrimination against women, whereas women speaking out against sexism will be seen as selfish or otherwise partisan. Membership in a historically marginalised group can often be intuited by seeing if the person’s attempts at reclaiming their dignity are met with cries of group bias. It’s a curious projection of institutional racism, sexism, and so on, that many whites, men, cis people, able bodied people et cetera presume a binary, zero sum system when regarding the progress of marginalised groups. If women gain, men must lose and women will only ever look out for other women whilst trampling on men. Substitute ‘women’ and ‘men’ for any two groups and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of the dominant view of racial and sexual progress.  This is, in large part, down to privilege. The idea that women and minorities should be content with what they have and not dare to dream for more, lest they ‘take something away’ from the dominant groups who have reified their worthiness of that dominance in several ways.

She also identifies small ways in which we reinforce popular cultural ideas about race, such as the fact that bandages are often a colour more closely approximating white skin colour, or that “flesh” as a colour is conspicuously similar to white European flesh whereas darker tones are never called that. She also testifies to white normativity; as mentioned earlier she explicates how she is not viewed as a representative of her race. She may well be viewed as a spokesperson for her sex, which relates to male privilege, but not for white people as a whole. Thus anything she does that is culturally unacceptable for her class, be it showing up late, being unkempt, talking with her mouth full, having a particular ‘bearing’ or body odour, and on will simply not make people stereotype whites in a certain way.

Time and again I have seen and heard from whites who say that many blacks or Latina/os “are like that” because they met a handful that fit a certain stereotype. This segues beautifully into the final piece, which is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “Colour-Blind Racism.” This piece makes many very critical and important points and speaks to what I meant earlier about the evolution of racist practise in our society. It has gone from being largely overt (a la segregation and explicitly enabled legal discrimination) to covert (nominally equal under the law but not in social practise and elided with neologisms and circumlocutions like ‘political correctness’ and ‘reverse racism’). Professor Bonilla-Silva goes through several ways in which modern racism is executed in a way that grants plausible deniability to its speaker. Instead of appealing to an overtly racist ideology, he says, they instead appeal to the seemingly liberating ideology of liberalism- everyone is free, justice is blind, equal opportunity for those willing to work, and so on. Many white racists use anti-racist language in demeaning minorities now such as saying that affirmative action is racist against whites and does not involve choosing the best person for the job, implying quite firmly that a white man is usually going to be best and that no racism or sexism ever undergirds such choices in hiring.

There is a tremendous amount to be gleaned from Professor Bonilla-Silva’s opus here: the idea that racism can be unconscious, the idea that the ‘lone bigot’ is not the most important or significant reproducer of racist ideology, the idea that there is a ‘New Racism’ that is more subtle and no less pernicious than its predecessor, and more and more. Stephen Colbert, in his satirical character of a conservative cable pundit, often proclaims “I don’t see race!” which is a conscious and often very funny send up of the very mentality that Professor Bonilla-Silva is describing here- which is the fact that colour blindness is simply an excuse to use liberal means to rationalise one’s racist ideas. Put another way, as a scholar of race has said, to be “colour blind” in our society means to be blind to only one colour: white. Thus the obvious privilege exercised by whites is ignored, despite their ubiquitous over-representation in the media, in government, big business, higher education, good neighbourhoods, and so on, whites are more likely to believe everyone is racially equal because the law says they are. This type of racism is not as overt, conscious, or maliciously intended as, say, the racism of the Klan. But the intent and the consciousness are largely irrelevant. The outcome of this collective exercise in delusion is to perpetuate the marginalisation of several million people.

What was especially striking from the interviews of white Americans that Professor Bonilla-Silva conducted was how many respondents seemed both defensive and stuttering, as if grasping very hard for words, their minds in overdrive as they clearly tried to express a racist thought (“all blacks are lazy” et al.) without actually being blunt about it. This is the age of circuitous racism that dances merrily around its subject but does not engage with it directly. Misconceptions about affirmative action also abound. The idea that it’s the law of the land, for example, or the idea that there are quotas (a popular word among several of the professor’s interview subjects), or the idea that affirmative action meant hiring inferior candidates due to race (something I consider another projection of internalised racism/sexism: a privileged person can only imagine the inverse of what is already happening- in this case, that underqualified white men get good jobs or get into good schools all the time by dint of their racial and sexual privileges. Yet this causes precious little outcry among these so called liberal-minded people, even when such incompetence leads to disaster, as has happened in the Middle East and with our financial markets).

Professor Bonilla-Silva’s description of the ‘elastic wall’ created by this kinder, gentler racism is very apt. It allows for the new reification of racism to account for people like, say, Oprah who remains everyone’s favourite black success story (“She makes more money than I will in a lifetime, how can you say blacks are still oppressed!?”). It’s a definition that allows for exceptions, to prevent cognitive dissonance, while still enabling you to say “but most minorities are thus and so.” As mentioned earlier, many of these whites extrapolate from experience with a few black citizens to stereotype the entire group as lazy wastrels who are only holding themselves back. This is what is meant by a marginalised person always being made to represent and be responsible for the image of their group in a way that privileged people simply aren’t.

A final note, however, must be made. From Professor Bonilla-Silva’s description of one of his interview subjects: “Thus Henrietta, a transsexual schoolteacher in his fifties, answered…” It was beyond disappointing to see transphobia rearing up again. All of the other interview subjects were described as men or women, but Henrietta becomes “a transsexual” full stop, and is quite apparently misgendered. It is important to consider her words along the other racist statements made by the other white interviewees naturally, but no person’s immorality should excuse transphobia. Like the new racism, transphobia is very often a subtle exercise in the reinforcing power of hegemonic ideas and language. Like Judith Lorber, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is in a position to know better.

Gender Identity Dismissal

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

Political conflict is one of the oldest human games and it never goes out of style chiefly because it’s perpetually self renewing. It’s not a coincidence that the only remotely funny things on Saturday Night Live these days are skits mocking contemporary media and politics. It has an odd quality of breaching new boundaries and regurgitating themes that are centuries old at the same time. Its almost addicting, sport like quality is what drew me into many seemingly pointless arguments on the Internet lately about transgender issues. Yet as I reflect on what happened and what I took away from these debates, I’ve begun to realise that there is, at least for me, some benefit to them. After all, what better crucible to thrash and grind one’s own ideas in than one where they are constantly under assault? Like a planetessimal being shaped and hewn by the random bombardments of an infant solar system, one’s ideas may emerge pockmarked and flawed, yet simultaneously fully formed.

So it is here.

The first conclusion I’ve come to after these many often heated discourses with conservative and anti-feminist men, as well as browsing through this week’s right  wing media is this: the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder can no longer do this community any good.

Far from validating us or lending us the touch of Scientific Truth what I have found in the crossfire is a fundamental truth: GID stigmatises and marginalises us. It devalues our words and erases our experiences. It empowers people in white coats to speak for us, our preternatural and perpetual custodians without whose validation we do not exist- no matter how loud, urgent, and insistent our existence may be.

Not long ago when discussing the many foibles of the so-called Men’s Rights movement through the lens of a particularly transphobic article I discussed the phenomenon of the Cis Man’s Burden, which is the cultural belief that trans people are little better than deluded children and that it is the noble duty of a self-respecting cis man (and less often, woman) to do what is best for us and cure us of our mental illness. We do not love ourselves, they say. We don’t love our bodies. Not like they do.

Yet time and again when I have encountered these hideously frustrating sirens of cis supremacy (and often, male supremacy), the slightest scratch tears away the smiling masque to reveal a snarling visage that denies you angrily and recoils in terror at your ‘mutilating’ ways. To claim the smallest bit of the terra firma of your own soul angers them greatly. Visions of hacked off penises fill their minds, and the men among them squeeze their legs together in fear at the thought of what we do.

Never mind protest after protest from our lips; the million and one voices raised up to both allay their fears and assert ourselves.

“That’s not how surgery works.”

“Not every trans person gets SRS.”

“My body, my choice.”

“My relationship with my penis is complicated.”

“But I love my body, why can’t you?”

Tears, joy, anguish, love, fear, rise up like a symphony they will not hear. Cannot hear. Why?

Because to them we are disordered and “Look!” they say “Here in this here DSM is the proof! This isn’t politics, it’s a fact! Gender Identity Disorder! You’re sick!”

Time after time I see it elevated high in an already cis-centric discourse- that simplistic reading of the DSM’s deeply flawed and conceptually troubled diagnosis for trans people. Even the psychiatrists who support the diagnosis would say that reading it as a mental illness is not an apt way of regarding it. But then who can blame the threatened layperson for grabbing onto the D in GID like a solid rock in a roiling tempest of gender uncertainty?

And who really rises to challenge this in the media but the precious few independent trans voices we possess in this community? Who, unchaperoned by some doctor or “expert”, regularly shatters the cis discourse and defiantly insists on existing before the eyes of millions?

This past week I have seen the Washington Times, that sure bastion of white male privilege and cultural conservatism, articulate just that dismissive thought on our mental states when they deemed fit to opine on the upcoming ENDA legislation:

“Similar problems abound in this bill, which treats a conscious decision to choose a new or different sexual identity as if it were an inherent, unavoidable condition. But it’s not. It’s actually a psychological disorder, officially listed as such by the current American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Our children and our co-workers should not be forced by law to be held hostage to such disorders, nor should employers be forced to have psychologically troubled persons as the public face of their businesses.”

Those words in black and white, words I know in my heart are believed passionately not just by conservatives but by many cis people on the left who hate us or simply do not know better, were the final angrily hammered nails in the coffin of my own naivete about GID.

I had long been in the camp that argued we needed this diagnosis to access health care, and that the movement to end it was dominated largely by white and economically privileged trans people who were not sparing sufficient thought for those who would suffer the most from a revocation of this diagnosis. Part of me still believes that, and I’ll return to that very important issue in a moment.

But let’s look at the reality presently. GID already fails to grant many of us needed healthcare. Advice on how to secure black market hormones abounds precisely because of this systemic problem. Most insurance refuses to cover it, most states in the US have laws explicitly banning Medicaid from covering transgender care.

And what do we get in return? “Proof” that we are a mentally ill community of ‘self mutilators’ and disordered penis-hackers (as always the transmisogynist discourse ensures little to no regard for trans men’s issues. It is the trans woman that is the fixture of cis anxiety, owing to the patriarchal nature of our present culture). In exchange for empowering psychiatrists to speak for us, judge us, control us, and in exchange for a diagnosis which supposedly proves beyond our own sense of knowing that we’re correct about ourselves, we have to accept that people will always see us as mentally ill.

At this juncture I wade into the territory of ableism and the discourse thereof which I’m certainly a good deal less qualified to speak about as I’m coming from a position of privilege. We shouldn’t live in a society where a person can be marginalised by labelling them as “mentally ill,” nor one where anyone is stigmatised as ‘disordered’ and thus ‘abnormal’ and subject to dehumanising or degrading treatment. I hope my effort to undo this diagnosis does not appear ableist. Rather what I want to do is shatter it so that trans people themselves can gain a needed boost in shaping the dialogues around our lives; dialogues that are less medicalised and more humanised. In other words revoking the right of privileged scientists to name us as “other” against our will.

As to the matter of transgender healthcare, Callen-Lorde Community Health Centre, a place near and dear to my own heart, recently had this to say about a new and improved diagnosis for GID which I had initially approved of, called “Gender Incongruence.”

“We appreciate the APA’s proposed “Gender Incongruence”(GI) diagnosis is an effort intended to de-stigmatize gender non-conformity and improve transgender-identified people’s access to mental health care. We agree with the intention behind this effort; however, we endorse an alternative viewpoint, based on our years of collective practice knowledge. We believe GI will continue to inappropriately pathologize gender non-conformity, maintain barriers to medically necessary health care, and lend justification to gender based stigmatization and discrimination.”

While Helen Boyd’s beliefs and my own do not always coexist happily, I support her signing onto the Callen-Lorde letter. After many debates I’ve come to realise that what has happened with GID is not simply a matter of misunderstanding or lack of education. It’s, perhaps, the intended effect. To keep us marginalised in a little box where we’re perpetually under the purview (and control) of a patriarchal psychiatric establishment. What I hear time and again from trans people who have found sympathetic doctors and therapists is that those who didn’t give a toss about the diagnosis or the DSM were the best. They treated them as people that were trying to grow and change in accordance with who they knew themselves to be.

By contrast the horror stories I’ve heard have come from trans people who dealt with doctors and psychs for whom the DSM was a bible, whose printed text spoke louder than the voices of their patients and could never be challenged. These doctors were not terribly big on seeing their patients as people. Access to healthcare was restricted all the same, GID or no GID. A trans woman I know in Minnesota, unable to work due to disability, is beholden to the lone psychiatrist in her area who refuses to let her take hormones until her deeply conservative parents agree to the treatment, despite having a GID diagnosis.

She’s 24 years old.

The fact of the matter is that this diagnosis is a sham. Clinging to it is to accept the idea that without psychiatry and the men in white coats we are nothing. It is to accept their whispered warnings of worse things to come if we leave their loveless embrace.

But to steal a phrase from old-guard socialism, the truth is that we have nothing to lose but our chains.

From the Callen-Lorde letter once more:

“An inappropriate pathway to transgender-specific medical care: There is legitimate community concern that removal of a mental health diagnosis would limit access to transgender-specific medical care. While a minority has succeeded in using the legal system or in fulfilling their insurer’s requirements for coverage to access care, the majority of people needing transgender-specific medical care are denied coverage. GI maintains these barriers to care. Medical interventions are better substantiated by the use of medical diagnoses, not psychiatric diagnoses. Access to transgender-specific, medically necessary care can be directly and more effectively addressed by utilization of a revised medical diagnosis in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The psychiatric needs of transgender people are better addressed by existing psychiatric diagnoses.”

I’m very much inclined to agree. The path to healthcare must be sustained by the agency of the trans person themselves and individual diagnoses tailored to who they are and what their needs are, not a one size fits all lie that stigmatises more than it saves. Already in Britain the GID diagnosis is becoming obsolete as the NHS pledges to provide care with or without it.

Love, not masculinist pseudoscience, is what will ensure we get the care we need. How we will get there, however, is also an important matter. It will not simply ‘happen’ once the diagnosis goes away. We’ll have to fight, we’ll have to build new frameworks of meaning and come up with new theories to give intelligible form to our experiences. It certainly won’t be an easy task but I’m ready to do my part. Many activists, unregarded and forgotten, even by other members of their own community, have already toiled on these issues. I have faith that a post-GID world can be a better one for trans people of all classes.

The fundamental, bedrock truth is and always has been that gender dysphoria was never really about us per se. It’s actually not that different from what a cis LGBQ person might feel in a conservative environment prior to knowing there are others like them out there and people who will love them: the oppressive sense that you ‘know’ you’ll never fit in, never be what your parents want you to be, the fear of losing friends, family, loved ones, status, and one’s sense of place. That does not arise from a discrete condition one may label a ‘disorder.’ It’s an understandable sense of fear, self-loathing, and depression that arises from feeling that to be your true self will make society hate you.

This is what gender dysphoria is.

Yet no matter how many times I explain this, men thrust their fingers angrily at the DSM and hearken to its supposed objectivity, and the alleged scientific truth it brings.

But I know better.

I know my own heart, my body, my spirit, and my life.

I am not sick.

I am not disordered.

I am a trans woman and I’m not going anywhere.

I need no chaperone, no white coated man or woman to act as a walking, talking identity card.

I need only to be.

The Ministry of Footnotes

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

My previous article was, in a word, a doozy. It is, if I may be immodest, ambitious and expansive in its arguments. This leaves it especially prone to puncturing from any number of people with ready examples of individuals and institutions or events that fall outside the parameters I laid out in The Ministry of Strength. So, tonight, I’ll address some of the weaknesses of my argument and anticipate some responses thereto.

I certainly don’t deny that exceptions to the theories exist. I’d be a little scared if they didn’t. No modern society contains 100% socialised individuals. Indeed, no society ever has. The very proposition of individuality requires that one not be ‘fully socialised.’ By fully socialised I mean simply that the individual has fully internalised the mores, folkways, and ideas of their society and never challenges or personally interprets any one of them. Such people do not exist, of course.

To construe any totalising argument from the thesis of Ministry is to miss the point of such a theory. It’s never meant to explain absolutely everything, only to corral what factual realities it can find into a cogent framework of understanding.

This theory is intended to explain a broad social trend, not society as a whole. If this reads like a lengthy disclaimer, it is in a sense. I was fortunate to learn when I was very young that no philosopher or social scientist could ever explain the world at a stroke. But this is also going to be an attempt to clarify Ministry of Strength against a backdrop of competing ideas and common arguments.

i.

The first issue comes from what one might call the countervailing (and very arguably dominant) ideology to the notions put forth by my previous article. The Culture of Victimisation. Just this afternoon I got a slightly used sociology textbook in the mail, much to my delight. Not far in, however, under the chapter headed “Culture” there was an aside in one of those ‘Thinking Critically’ insets entitled “Don’t Blame Me! The Culture of Victimisation.” In it you are presented with five cases of this supposed culture that are very sensational indeed.

Among them are things like a man leaping in front of a Subway train in New York, surviving, and then suing the City for 650,000 dollars due to the nature of his injuries. Four similar examples are given and the author then begins to discuss what he sees as the possible existence of a culture of self-victimisation. I find the examples to be spurious. Not because they didn’t happen, but because it’s rather hard to fit these sensationalist outliers into a true understanding of victimhood. We occasionally hear some story about an outrageous lawsuit or enormous rewards being reaped from them by people with relatively minor grievances but is this really victim culture?

This Culture of Victimisation is a popular theme among conservatives to be sure, but the argument there is very often expanded to include women, people of colour, LGBT people, the disabled, and so on. To claim that they are perpetuating such a culture. Many white conservatives are fond of arguing that ‘self segregation’ occurring in poor neighbourhoods is the product of this “victim culture.”

This, however, seems to support my argument that as a society we’re redefining ‘victim’ into a self-created category. Oftentimes without much in the way of real evidence. The author of the textbook, John J. Macionis, says the following:

“What’s going on here? Is US culture changing? Historically, our cultural ideal was “rugged individualism,” the idea that people are responsible for their own triumphs or tragedies. But this value has weakened for several reasons. First, everyone is more aware (partly through the work of sociologists) of how society shapes our lives. We now recognise that categories of people (such as Native Americans, African Americans, and women) have suffered real historical disadvantages. But more and more people these days are saying they are victims, including white males, who claim that “everybody gets special treatment but us.” ”

Needless to say, I have trouble swallowing this. The most glaring solecism in my view is that he seems to suggest individualism is on the decline in our society. As I said last night- and stand by today- the very opposite has occurred. In the United States especially we have become increasingly individualistic, to the point where we are actually denying the existence of social forces, institutions, and most acutely oppression itself. The idea that, as Macionis states, “people are responsible for their own triumphs or tragedies” is a consensus view in our culture, not one that is withering away.

Out of that idea comes the notion that one can self-victimise. Ironically, Macionis makes a critique that could not exist but for a culture in which individualism was so powerful. The very idea that a whole culture of individuals victimising themselves exists could only come about in a society that exalted the supreme power of the individual.

ii.

It should be noted that Macionis points out that white men are among those engaged in this sort of culture. Up until very recently I’d have agreed with that idea.

It’s worth taking a step aside now for a mea culpa. Even up until quite recently I have inveighed against reactionaries like Men’s Rights Activists for being ‘self-victimising’. I myself, without realising it, participated in the shameful exercise of perpetuating this insidious idea; that one could make one’s self a victim and attempt to profit from it.

A far better critique, I realise, would be to call out such groups for their hypocrisy. Oftentimes conservatives of various stripes will accuse me and others of being self-victimising before immediately turning around and bemoaning the sorry state of the white male at the hands of faceless feminist or NAACP oppressors. This is less self-victimising than it is pure selfishness, I realise, and naturally hypocritical. It’s just better to point that out to them: “if I’m being self victimising then surely you are. Or can we both agree that this idea is a fallacy?”

This is certainly what I’ll try to do from now on.

iii.

I should clarify my views on capitalism a bit as well. I threw around the term “rational-individualist capitalism” without defining it clearly, which is a huge faux pas on my part. Its meaning can be adequately intuited but I should not leave such things to the reader as that’s just kind of mean.

Essentially, rationalist-individualist capitalism is as much a theory of society as it is a theory of economics. It holds that all human beings are rational actors serving their self-interest, always calculating and strategising to their maximum advantage. Thus, in this model, even apparent altruism has a selfish core. It also posits that individuals are supremely powerful and can overcome all obstacles if they are talented enough; if they fail or stumble it is entirely their fault and no one else’s. It minimises the role of group action and collectives, it also minimises (or in extreme cases outright denies) the existence of a society.

This is, in short, the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” capitalism.

I went to pains to call this rationalist-individualist capitalism because to call it “capitalism” full stop as my Marxist and leftist friends are so fond of doing, is perhaps a grave mistake. Such is implicitly determinist, presuming that what we have at present is the inevitable form of capitalism that it was destined to take. The essential and basic ideas of capitalism do not lead to this society inevitably, however, at least not capitalism as an economic theory.

A good sociologist must always keep in mind that no social institution is inevitable. The institution could’ve been different had the historical chips fallen differently. Capitalism and the economies of every country are no exception.

What makes our version of capitalism so special is that it is not just economics, it’s philosophy as well. The individualism and rationalism therein which posits that economics can objectively prove human beings are entirely selfish and are best left to their own individual devices out of which an orderly and efficient equilibrium would emerge… are entirely political ideas. There is precious little that is objective about any of this, and it isn’t even really economics either. It makes many assumptions about human nature simply to make mathematical models of global economies work.

The rationalist part in particular is what gives rise to this idea of humans as inherently selfish, who’ll stab you in the back if given half the chance and if there was profit in it. This, of course, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy among both the capitalist class and economists, but that’s a tale for another day. What’s important to remember here is that underlying this notion of victim culture is the idea that the self-victimiser is trying to leverage something out of you with their victim status.

Macionis’ idea was that it was money, of course, as seen in the cases of those high profile frivolous lawsuits. In the twisted ideology of those who promote the idea of “victim culture” those who call themselves victims are actually making themselves part of a privileged class, because then they’ll be pitied, sympathised with, and perhaps even lavished with money or book deals.

Furthermore, mutatis mutandis, this also relates to the MRA obsession with false-rape allegations. In their construction of this idea, they see every woman who accuses a man of raping her as coldly calculating her maximum advantage. Rationally pursuing a selfish interest. This plays into, of course, the stereotype of women as deft manipulators who can play the fiddle of emotion, but with the coldest of intent behind it.

The selfish individual, always ready to screw over who they can for profit (financial, social, or spiritual), is a key figure in the Ministry of Strength.

iv.

A worthy question may be asked now, however. How does that square with the idea that victims are weak? It does require a bit of cognitive dissonance, really. It exists for the same reason that entitled people can believe trans activists are self-victimising before going off to complain about how they themselves are victims of some social ill.

I might also say that you can accuse a person of being weak by accusing them of taking the easy path (self-victimising to win an argument or win sympathy, say). In this view, there is no contradiction between the weak victim and the conniving victim.

But at heart the idea remains: in a society of selfish individuals, a person must have a selfish reason for claiming the title of victim. Thus the privileged person asks first “what do they want from me?” In this vein it’s instructive to consider the constant panic among white conservatives in the US about the ‘threat’ of black citizens demanding reparations for slavery. For them, this is the selfish motivation underlying black community activism.

In this racist assumption you may find the core that resolves the cognitive dissonance of the privileged. A person is too weak to win resources the hard way, ergo they call themselves a victim in an attempt to guilt people into handing it to them- or in the case of the female false accuser, dodge responsibility for a regretted night of sex. This is how many people are now conditioned to understand any activism or any accusation against victimisers (whether as groups or individuals).

v.

A brief aside may be spared here for media portrayals as well. One may raise the objection that many women are often portrayed sympathetically in the media (fiction and nonfiction) as victims we’re supposed to collectively care about. One might further argue that some form of misandry keeps us from seeing male victims brought onto Oprah to shed their tears.

Two points to be made here:

  1. The use of women as sympathetic victims in the media is usually conjoined with some sort of redemption wherein they throw off the shackles of the label and reclaim themselves. They proudly tell how they “stopped being a victim.” Alternately they may be set up as someone for men to save (see the Jessica Lynch story) or as a tragic victim of their own failings.
  2. The unwillingness to show male victims often is borne of misogyny at heart, not pure misandry. The aversion to countenancing the male in society as a vulnerable figure who can be hurt, and who would be comfortable with sharing their feelings and admitting their struggle is ground in ideas of masculinity that are directly tied to patriarchal ideals. There is no feminist conspiracy barring public sympathy for men who’ve been in some way victimised. This aversion is very strong when it comes to men who are victims of sexual violence in particular. Rape is still understood as something done only to women. Some laws even explicitly define rape as unwanted vaginal penetration by a penis. This exists largely because the patriarchal construction of Man will not tolerate a man being the victim of sex crimes.

vi.

Here might be a good place to address another spinoff of the selfish victim argument. The idea that we want to induce guilt in others. The accusation of ‘guilt tripping’ is familiar to any liberationist who has debated the privileged and I regret not addressing the matter sooner. One MRA I sparred with recently made the thinking on the matter quite clear. They said in no uncertain terms that feminists and similar groups wanted to induce guilt in order to squeeze tangible concessions out of people and thus gain more privileges. It’s not hard to see how this fantastic idea dovetails with the concepts I outlined earlier.

As I see it, guilt is the exact opposite of what we want. I do not want men or cis people in general to feel guilty because of the things I tell them or argue for (unless they themselves have committed some grievous wrong, in which case, guilt away). But in general, no. Why? Because it’s ultimately counterproductive. Guilt is self-centered by nature “I feel bad about what I did, woe is me.” What is being asked for is not yet more selfishness (which is what gets us into these predicaments in the first place) but more empathy.

See the world differently than you saw it before. See me as a human being, if you’re feeling inclined towards the radical. Consider new ideas. But don’t debilitate yourself with guilt.

vii.

While this is nearly last I think this is among the most important connections to make. As a trans person how often have you heard from some particularly callous and callow sorts that you have “created your own class to self-oppress in” or somesuch.

Consider that for a moment.

You are being accused of inventing a marginalised group to be a part of so you can… reap the rewards of being marginalised? It sounds bizarre but with the elements outlined above and in conjunction with those put forward in The Ministry of Strength it’s not really that odd. Privileged people and even those who are not so terribly privileged think that it’s very common and desirable for people to claim a victim status for some selfish end. Thus it entirely makes sense that trans people would be attacked by bigots and entitled sorts who feel, in all sincerity, that we actually made this up just to get the apparent special favour that comes with being a victim.

Not too many other people get hit with this exact iteration of bigotry. It’s hard to accuse a black person of making up their existence as a black individual, for example. The bigot can argue that they invent their oppression, yes. But beyond that, no. It is a testament to how far behind trans people are when our very class is accused of not existing. The odious Jack Donovan, MRA extraordinaire and professional ironic gay man, levelled this charge at trans people multiple times claiming that we made up our class to reap some ill defined benefit to being oppressed.

Think of how this pervasive ideology benefits those with power and privilege. To actually convince the mass of society that it is those who claim to be marginalised who have or seek privilege. How many times have you heard the LGBT lobby accused of pursuing “special rights”? How many times have you heard it claimed that we seek privileges over the rest of the hardworking, God-fearing populace? All of these ideas derive from this individualist ideology surrounding victimhood and the attendant notion that one can make one’s self a victim, with all emphasis taken off of any victimisers.

Like most cultural and social forces that afflict the marginalised, it seems trans people are prone to getting it especially bad.

viii.

Looking over these “footnotes” I know I may raise more questions than answers. None of this is easy and what I propose is an expansive way of examining this subject, part polemic, part sociology, part historical, part political science. But I feel we’ll be the better off for looking at this matter in a very different way going forward. Inasmuch as the fallacy of “victim culture” was put forward in a sociology textbook by an author who otherwise seemed disinclined to conservatism, it’s clear that what’s being challenged is a deeply engrained consensus viewpoint.

As illustrated last time, however, the need is urgent. Real people are being harmed by this ideology and its failings become abundantly clear in those cases.

Edit: Footnote seven was added a day later based on some thoughts I had after publication.

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.

The Single-Story of Trans Experience

Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

Yesterday’s post may prove to be a jumping off point for an exploration of how to tell my own story. It’s been on my mind since the events that led to me penning that piece and quite fortuitously when reading through Border House Blog I came across a link to one of the best TED talks I’ve seen in quite a long time. It’s worth taking the time to listen to this woman’s words.

What Chimamanda Adichie’s beautiful lecture makes clear is a point that has relevance for many oppressed, marginalised, or othered communities. It is a powerful rebuttal to the insistence of the privileged that they wield no power. Oftentimes you find people writing the most baroque, intellectual arguments against the idea that power, as we often describe it when regarding Kyriarchy, even exists. Yet Ms. Adichie’s stories make one thing powerfully clear: a story itself contains power.

Is your story told? Are the stories of your people valued? Do people outside of your community hear those stories? Who tells the stories? How often? Why are they told? What’s in the stories? All of these questions have some measure of urgency for the trans community, I believe, and this lecture has sent me thinking about my own relation to this larger puzzle. Yesterday I spoke of the Progressive Coming Out Story, a liberal-leaning tale that is designed to be comforting and simplified for an audience that otherwise couldn’t relate to LGBTQ people. It seems that, for many of us, this is the single-story that Ms. Adichie warns us to avoid.

Too often, the stories trans people are allowed to tell are designed to fitted into that single-story, or the narrative, as I called it.

When I recently criticised radical feminists for their assault on the dignity of trans people, and trans women in particular, I made a point at the end that asserted they could not feel as they did if they truly knew us. I stated that transphobic ‘feminists’ seem to be working on stereotypes garnered from the media and funnelled into gender studies academic writing. It is a different sort of single-story that they’re working from: the myth of the trans woman as an invasive parody, or as a drag queen. This tale has reared its ugly head multiple times in the media down the decades and it’s as corrosive as ever. It is a story of trans women as seen through the cruel eyes of certain cis people.

Just as Ms. Adichie shared with us how John Locke looked at Africans and imaginatively saw people with their heads in their chests, so too have cis people looked at us from afar and seen only what they wanted to see, building a narrative on top of that grainy image that became a story none of us ever asked for.

We have been the victims of a single-story about trans people for far too long. Curiously, however, there is evidence of an evolution of that story. Among conservatives, radical feminists, and traditionalists their single-story is that of the illegitimate trans man or trans woman who is a caricature and a deceiver; among more liberal minded people, the Progressive Coming Out story takes precedence. The latter story at least no longer sees us as villains but it still does not reflect us. It’s only one story. To the extent that many of us relate to it, we know it’s only formed a part of our lives. Just one thread in a much larger and more vivid tapestry.

Yet too often, among liberals it seems to be the only story we’re encouraged to tell; it is the definitive story.

It isn’t that I don’t see a bit of myself in that narrative, it’s that I see only a bit of myself in that narrative. As Ms. Adichie said about certain stereotypes: it isn’t that they are untrue, it’s that they are incomplete. Too often people mistake such ideas as representing the totality of our experience, and the precious few bits of media that tried to get it right for us only ended up reinforcing those tropes and those stereotypes. Transamerica was the closest thing to a decent film about us that hit the big time, very, very relatively speaking. In real terms, it was a bad, almost offensive portrayal of trans people. Yet this is the ‘best’ there is.

In watching it with my mother I did see bits of myself and my own experience in it. But I also knew that large swathes of it were predicated on cis-centered or cis-friendly perspectives. The free use of terms like “genetic girl” to describe cis women were part of that. But the spine of the narrative was built on the Progressive Coming Out Story. Things were bad, then I came out, then I dealt with some bigots, then I got the surgery, and happily ever after!

Our lives are about more than transition. Even those parts of our lives that are directly related to our being trans are not all connected to the process of physical transition that so obsesses cis people. That’s another dimension of that single-story, by the way. The body. In both the conservative and liberal version of the single-story of trans people the body and its appearance, as well as its history, are central. The “change” and “transformation” are most profoundly marked by what surgeries we’ve had, what drugs we may have taken, and are considered central and essential. For many cis people I am “becoming a woman” as we speak because I’m still in the throes of physical transition. They don’t understand me as always having been a woman. Biographies of trans people that follow the format of “In 1970 Johnny was born and he did this in his teen years; then in 1990 she became Jane and she went on to induce nuclear fusion, she’s a real peach today” indulge in the same idea. The physical transition is the fulcrum on which gender rests, the dividing line between he/she or she/he.

My story, however, would hold that I’ve always been a woman. Transition is the process by which I discovered and began to seize that on my own terms. That includes changing my body. I don’t owe anyone an explanation of why my body is undergoing certain changes. If I say because it makes me feel right and true to myself, that ought to be enough. Being true to one’s self is part of that progressive narrative, of course. But it always felt incomplete to merely leave it at that, and at times I wonder if I ought to get my story out there to counteract the oppression of the single-stories that bear down on us every day.

There is no true single-story of trans people, no singular “transgender experience.” There are millions of stories of trans people, and they deserve to be heard.

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.

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.