Why Feminists Should Accept Transwomen as Women
| December 30th, 2005Expect light posting from me until 2006 - I’m just too busy to spend a lot of time on “Alas.” But I wanted to point out this excellent discussion of transwomen and feminism, which took place in Feministe’s comments, mostly between three writers I respect a lot: Piny, Emma of GenderGeek, and Tekanji of Shrub.com. Tekanji, in particular, did a wonderful job of arguing that a definition of “women” that includes transwomen is compatable with, and desirable for, feminism.
From Tekanji’s final post on that thread:
But, part of what I see as a gender democracy is that it focuses on adding to existing definitions, not taking away. Just because I choose to work outside of the home and not have children does not make some other woman’s choice to become a stay-at-home mom any less valid, right? In that same regard, the ability for a transwoman to call herself, and be seen as, a woman should not invalidate the womanhood of women-born-women.
Also, on the “helping our cause” area, I disagree. I think that in order to get society* to a place where the transgendered (et, al) are accepted - be they woman-identifying, man-identifying, neither or both - is to get to a place where a person’s choice is not seen as genderdized. In that way, I see the struggle of women-born-women and the transgendered (et, al) to be one and the same: we all want the same opportunities, rights, and freedoms as men-born-men have traditionally have, as well as the ability for the traditonally “feminine” to be seen as something of equal value so that men-born-men can aspire to it, too. If “masculine” and “feminine” were seen as equal, then I am quite sure that the gender binary wouldn’t be nearly as important as it is now. [...]
I don’t believe having a less strict (more mutable, more inclusive, etc) definition of “woman” necessitates the eradication of the subtleties of the current defintion. We already have a diverse set of people who fit under the word “woman”, we already need specific subsets to deal with their distinct needs, so what’s adding yet another subset onto that in order to help alleviate the oppression of some of our sisters?
That last paragraph in particular does a wonderful job of putting into words something I’ve thought about this question for years. Like Tekanji, I’ve long been disturbed by a strong streak of transphobia among some feminists; that was a major reason I grew disenchanted with the late, great Ms. Boards.
There’s more good stuff in the discussion at Feministe, so I’d recommend reading the whole thing.
December 30th, 2005 at 2:19 am
Over twenty years, I changed my opinion on transpeople considerably.
When I first became aware that transwomen and transmen existed (sometime in my teens) my view was simply that they were not (and could not be) anything but the gender they were born in. A transwoman, I thought as a teenager, was a man who had had surgery and hormone treatment.
Gradually I changed my mind: I met trans people, a close friend came out to me as trans MtF, and various other things happened. It took 20 years, I think, but I do now think that a transwoman is a woman, and a transman is a man, albeit with a rather different history and background.
But one thing I always thought: that discrimination against transwomen by feminists and lesbians, banning transwomen from women-only space, was just plain wrong. Even when I thought that a transwoman was “really” a man, I accepted that when a man has decided to live as a woman, to the extent of hormone treatment and surgery, rejecting this person from women-only space is nothing but cruelty. (Further, it is bigotry based on how people look - since it’s not possible to conduct chromosome tests at the door.) And refusing to call a transwoman “she” and “her” is just rudeness, and unacceptable.
I have a twenty-plus year history of thinking about trans issues, and if you asked me what I thought of trans people over the twenty years, I’d have given you a different answer depending when you asked. But cruelty, bigotry, and rudeness have never been acceptable to me, and I would always have opposed banning transwomen from women-only space for those reasons alone.
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December 30th, 2005 at 4:23 am
I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot as well and much of what I’ve read from radical fems is not transphobic, they simply don’t believe that women-born-women and mtf share the same experiences because women-born-women and mtf’s were socialized from birth differently. There is also this idea that kept popping up that some men feel so entitled that they think that they can steal women’s experiences and colonize them as their own. It was also compared to blackface. I’m still working through what I think about this matter, but I do think that it’s dishonest to call them phobic. Most of them, from what I’ve read, do not hate mtf’s, they critique what they believe is a function of male privilege.
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December 30th, 2005 at 6:55 am
jessant said:
There is also this idea that kept popping up that some men feel so entitled that they think that they can steal women’s experiences and colonize them as their own.
That is saying that transwomen are the same as men. They’re not. They’re women, and like other women, they have come from different places of power. Just because I once had heterosexual privilege, should I be denied access to a queer space now that I ID as bi/pan?
I haven’t read all that much from other radical feminists, but the article that Feministe linked flat out denied that transwomen were “real” women. Furthermore, on my blog one commenter denied the possibility that women could oppress the transgendered because it would turn us into the “oppressor class” (which makes me wonder what her take is on racist, homophobic, classist, etc. feminists who come from positions of power in those areas), and that transwomen are, and always will be, the “oppressor class” (ie. men).
Also, if you can’t tell, I take issue with using the term “oppressor class” because, to me, that implies active participation. I see men (and whites, and heterosexuals, and able-bodied people, etc) as privileged, because they (we) are accorded certain privileges that minority groups are not, and furthermore that can and is used to oppress those without the privilege. But not all people do it actively. Indeed, I’d argue that most privileged people (including myself) participate mostly or solely in a passive way, rather than going out to “oppress” people.
And, in terms of other writings, I don’t remember exactly who said these things (I once knew, but it wasn’t an important enough detail to keep in my brain), I’ve heard of terms like “gender traitor” and “spy for the patriarchy” be used for transmen and transwomen, respectively, by a feminist or two.
All that is pretty transphobic in my book.
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December 30th, 2005 at 8:06 am
I just got done reading through all the comments over at Feministe and Shrub.com, and I just wanted to offer kudos to Piny, Tekanji, and Thomas. You three were impressive and eloquent, and I’m learning quite a lot from watching this debate continue to unfold. Thank you.
—Myca
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December 30th, 2005 at 8:15 am
I’ve always thought that the argument that a MtF isn’t and can’t be a “real woman” because of different socialization and experiences growing up was spurious and reactive.
Whose socialization “counts” towards their being a “real woman?” There must be hundreds of ways that our socialization and experiences growing up differ, and while gender is a useful analytical lens, it is always tinted by other aspects of experience: race, class, ethnicity, location, physical ability, religion, sexual orientation, political perspective of the family, family structure, intelligence, appearance, social skill level…just to name a few.
What makes the experience of being in the wrong body growing up qualitatively different from any of those other tints to the gender lens?
IMO, nothing.
Plus, it has always seemed to me that one of the core values of feminism is the right of self-determination and the power to identify one’s self as one chooses. In the earliest stages, that may have been both as a woman and a voter or a woman and a public speaker. It evolved to woman and athlete, woman and engineer, woman and in love with another woman, woman and, woman and….
I admit, it’s hard for me to imagine how one could be so convinced that they were born into the wrong body that they would need to have that body altered in such a fundamental way.
But there are a lot of things in the world that are obviously real, even though I don’t get them. Again, trans identity is no qualitatively different.
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December 30th, 2005 at 8:16 am
The thing here is that so many “traditional” boundaries are now gray. We used to have straight and queer - now that queer is becoming more acceptable, many people are fessing up to really being bisexual. People used to identify as black, white, native, asian, etc - now most of my friends identify as what we all have been all along - mutts.
My sister and I are both half Native American, but neither one of us have any real knowledge about the culture. However, every time I want to go to a native gathering, I practically have to bring along a box of documents to prove my ancestry, because other than my extremely dark hair, I look like my swedish father. My sister, on the other hand, is a near identical copy of our full-blooded Iroquois great-grandmother. I understand that because of my appearance, I have a great deal of priveledge that my sister does not. But it doesn’t make me any less part of that heritage. And I would really like to be more in touch with it, but it is very difficult for me to get past that “but you don’t look native!!!” beginning.
I imagine it is much the same for transpeople, or bisexuals in a hetero-relationship, or african-americans who can pass as white, or anyone really on the borderlines between our binary definitions. Most of us NEED an identity, especially with a group of some kind, but for those of us who aren’t really in any particular camp, it can cause quite alot of needless strain and suffering.
Transwomen are women. They are women with certain priveledges, yes, but they also have their own unique oppression. For one, they could certainly be enlightening for both men-born and women-born, and especially the biological determinists camp, about the claims feminists have been making for so many centuries. The oppression of women has more roots in culture than in biology - what can prove this more than the treatment of those women who are not biologically women???
But more importantly, transwomen are women because that is how they choose to live. Most have taken drastic, mostly permanent life-impacting steps to validate this choice (they could stop taking hormones, but wouldn’t everyone still remember that they had taken them???) and this is not something that men do lightly in a culture that is so denigrating of things so ephemerally feminine as pastels and reading. Do not make light of such things - just as they cannot understand what it is to grow up female, you can not understand what it is to choose to go against everyone you may know, love or care about to do something that makes you less in everyone’s eyes.
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December 30th, 2005 at 8:47 am
Jessant, you don’t have to come out and say ‘transpeople are a travesty againt nature’ to be transphobic. Saying that transwomen’s behavior stems from male privilige is basically saying that transwomen are men in disguise, and deciding that transwomen are really men in disguise is quite enough to earn you that title.
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December 30th, 2005 at 8:49 am
Dammit, I misspelled “privilege”. I can’t *tell* you how much I hate it when I do that.
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December 30th, 2005 at 9:29 am
From a radical feminist perspective I do think it is important to acknowldege that some transwomen will have experienced male privilege — much in the same way that I’ve had to acknowledge the snippets of male privilege that I have had thrown my way for my previous butch appearance. My goal, as a radical feminist, is not to cordon women off into an impermeable class in an attempt to keep us safe or to let us “heal.” Most specifically I’m interested in disecting aspects of society, especially patriarchal norms and misogyny, that affect the well-being and quality of life for all women. I do not have a problem with including transwomen within the rubric of “woman”. I do however have a deep theoretical problem with how the transgender political movement frames gender. IOW, transsexuality seems natural to me; transgenderism not at all. I do not see gender as an individual act/choice or performance, if you will. It is a social structure that is imposed on an individual based on physical markers that have been ascribed social value *before* the individual is even born. Gender is one of the ultimate signs and tools of hierarchical power [i.e., patriarchy]. It is a social system, not an individual act/choice, that designates social worth to an individual, whether that worth be physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, etc. The problem that I see with transgender politics is that gender is viewed as mutable and wholly of an individual nature… which is a very creative and unique approach to gender. However, I think it is problematic from a feminist POV because it ignores the socially laden implications of being gendered in the first place. It ignores the vast majority of people who are gendered into a power structure that benefits one “half” and assigns negative values to the other “half.” IOW, I think it is important not to lose sight of who ultimately does benefit from us being gendered, and how gender is enforced — largely to the detriment of women, to include transwomen.
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December 30th, 2005 at 9:36 am
>>The problem that I see with transgender politics is that gender is viewed as mutable and wholly of an individual nature… which is a very creative and unique approach to gender.>>
I have to think a little more about this–you know, so I can offer arguments that are better than, “Nuh uh!”–but I don’t think this is exactly how transgender politics* sees gender. Performance can be an important political act, but advocating gender autonomy isn’t exactly the same as believing that gender is free or that freedom of _gender_ expression means that you should be allowed to treat other people like shit in gendered ways.
*That is, the variety of trans and trans-interested theorists, activist, and writers who have formulated a diverse set of opinions about how transsexuals, transgender people, and gender variance fits into society at large.
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December 30th, 2005 at 9:37 am
magikmama,
I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to my own feelings about the inclusion/exclusion of transwomen from feminist discussions. And having known at least two trans individuals in my life, I can say that their experiences of patriarchy and its opression are unique.
I have in impassioned dislike for the silencing of the voices of the oppressed, even within the feminist community.
I myself am a bisexual woman in a hetero marriage. I came out late in life due to my family’s religious beliefs, but my partner is totally accepting of who I am, even as that view changes.
I think there is much more “gray” in this world than “black/white” (insert binary pair of your choice), and those gray areas are causing confusion as we try to apply the historical “normative” ideologies to the variations inherent in any group.
Transwomen are as much women as those that are woman-born, but their experiences and viewpoints are no less valid. Rather than silence their voices, I would rather listen and learn from their unique and different view of patriarchal oppression.
Just my opinion.
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December 30th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Hey piny: I was just reading what you wrote on the other thread about rad fems and trans politics and I was hoping you would write more. Can you expand a little on what you were saying above? My exposure to transgendered politics has been from personal IRL experience, what I’ve seen on message boards, and a few books (Judith Halberstam). It is certainly not a broad exposure, so some of what you wrote above, specifically in writing “how… gender variance fits into society at large” is interesting to me. My feminist background would argue/assume that the majority of women are gender variant and that to be women, period, in this society is an act of gender variance.
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:28 am
Q Grrl, I think your comments about gender as performance are really interesting. Judith Butler, the feminist philosopher that many identify as one of the founding writers of queer theory has written quite a bit about her frustration with the various misreadings of her stuff on performativity and gender. Here’s a link to excerpts from an interview where she talks about it a bit:
This comment was written by dorktastic.http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm
Most trans people that I know, both IRL and online have no interest in Butler or Halberstam, but I think that is sometimes reflective of differences between people who identify as genderqueer or transgender as an umbrella term for gender variant people of all kinds, and transsexual (not like there are any hard and fast distinctions, and there are lots of people who are both transsexual and genderqueer).
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:35 am
Yeah, I agree about Butler being misinterpreted, specifically if one hasn’t read her essays on hegemony and universality. Halberstam I like b/c I recognized myself in her writing.
I personally don’t hold that gender is a performance; but I would say that the majority of the transgendered individuals that I meet hold this to be a basic tenant of their lives. It’s hard to argue that point without coming across as phobic.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
December 30th, 2005 at 10:39 am
Q,
I empathize with your suspicion of individualist politics. But I think transpolitics go well beyond your description–gender ‘performance’ is a political act that profoundly reacts to the structures of gender oppression you describe.
Such performance, on its own and even cumulatively, however, I think does little to alter the gender system we know. Of course, I recognize that a lot of what I do to fight back against gender oppression (flipping of street harassers, calling out rape-culture crap on blogs, etc) has similarly limited impact on the big picture. But that’s not a reason to condem it. Its a reason to get together and a chance to think up new political projects that might make big changes.
Feminism has always been about women–all women. But at its best it is also about more than women.
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:40 am
“Tenet,” Qgrrl. Not “tenant.”
Normally I wouldn’t care, but I don’t want another protracted “confuse-the-lawyer” fest like we had yesterday. Ahem. :p
[ducks to avoid flung coffee mug]
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:44 am
Sorry for being a bit oblique. I also wanted to argue that we should be talking about including not only transwomen but transmen and *even* biomen in conversations that can move past “feminism: good or bad?” “women: liars or whores?”
All of these folks have important things to add to conversations about the way in which gender hierarchy punish the vast majority of human things and build opression at the most intimate levels.
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:45 am
>>My exposure to transgendered politics has been from personal IRL experience, what I’ve seen on message boards, and a few books (Judith Halberstam). >>
Depends on which message boards. Lots of transpeople, but by no means all, have a complicated relationship with Halberstam. I think she’s brilliant, but she makes me feel used.
>>My feminist background would argue/assume that the majority of women are gender variant and that to be women, period, in this society is an act of gender variance. >>
I’m not sure this will make any sense, but:
I’m not comfortable with this elision. It’s true that our society divides people into men and not-men, i.e. women. Women are the variant gender and men the default. But I would differentiate between that and being gender variant within your proscribed role. Phyllis Schlafly is very different from Lisa Vogel.
On one level, _everyone_ is gender variant, because gender is an inhuman, inhumane abstract that doesn’t really describe any of us. The role women are expected to fill is more dehumanizing and less humane; tradition doesn’t really see them as people at all. But there are people who buck convention to various degrees, in the face of different consequences, and in markedly different ways. I would argue that to be a feminist–or a pro-feminist man by ginmar’s standards–is to be gendervariant in that sense. There’s also the issue of how gendervariance is more permissible in some contexts than in others. I mean, Ann Coulter is the antithesis of June Cleaver, but she is still rewarded by remarkably sexist people.
Transwomen are gender variant in that they, y’know, transitioned. They are the second sex as well, and they suffer from being expected to fit into an especially inhuman, inhumane position. As a transsexual, I too am gendervariant. However, I now belong to the default class and receive male privilege. _And_ some transpeople are sexist and married to traditional gender roles, while some are feminist. Some pass completely, and some are incongruent in their post-transition gender. And they benefit and suffer accordingly.
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Heh.
I *knew* that didn’t look right.
Q
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:47 am
>>I personally don’t hold that gender is a performance; but I would say that the majority of the transgendered individuals that I meet hold this to be a basic tenant of their lives. It’s hard to argue that point without coming across as phobic. >>
I’d be curious to see how you read this argument. I’ve seen it interpreted–and, actually, refashioned for new viewpoints–in a bunch of ways. Are you including transsexual in transgendered here?
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:51 am
I’m not sure we’re saying vastly different things, are we? My biggest comparison is the trans scene in my town where gender variance often means an uber-role playing of butch-femme dynamics. I don’t know that many MTF’s, mostly trannie bois and FTM’s. So I don’t know that I *see* what they are doing as variant. Maybe that’s what I’m getting hung up on; the word variant. Is androgyny variant? Femme? Butch? And what is it variant in relationship to?
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December 30th, 2005 at 10:53 am
No, I see transsexuality and transgenderism as two separate politics and lived realities, with some crossover.
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December 30th, 2005 at 11:02 am
>>My feminist background would argue/assume that the majority of women are gender variant and that to be women, period, in this society is an act of gender variance. >>
There’s another thing related to this line of reasoning–not that you’re making it here or that most feminists do this–that makes me want to throw something. It goes a little something like this:
Transsexual: I was miserable for a large portion of my life because I didn’t fit into my gender. I didn’t feel comfortable in my body.
Transphobic Feminist: We understand completely. We’re women. We didn’t feel comfortable in our genders either. We wanted to be boys when we were growing up, and do boy things.
Transsexual: No, but that’s not why–
Transphobic Feminist: Everyone suffers from gender dysphoria.
Transsexual: Look, gender ROLES are different from–
Transphobic Feminist: All we need to do is create a society without sexism, and you people will cease to exist.
Transsexual: You know what? Never mind.
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December 30th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Maybe not.
>>My biggest comparison is the trans scene in my town where gender variance often means an uber-role playing of butch-femme dynamics. >>
We have some of that here. The problem is that queer women can get a partial picture because mtfs tend not to be welcome in practice, unfortunately, and all the queer male-oriented bois who _aren’t_ interested in a butch/femme dynamic go elsewhere. Although I and other transguys have been assumed to be masculine and/or interested in butch/femme just because we are ftm.
I would argue that a butch dyke, however sexist, is gendervariant in that she probably reads as a woman doing traditionally male stuff. I would argue that an ftm, however sexist, is gendervariant in that he’s undergone a sex change. But sexism does mean that you support an oppressive, conformist system.
>>No, I see transsexuality and transgenderism as two separate politics and lived realities, with some crossover. >>
Hm. I’m not sure I know what–or rather, who–”transgenderism” describes. “Transsexual” is a condition, but transgenderism seems a little looser. I also know a lot of transsexuals who do describe themselves as transgender. What political views besides gender as performance do you see as specifically transgender rather than transsexual?
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December 30th, 2005 at 11:19 am
Piny: I understand how your narrative becomes one of transphobia, but why can’t the first two instances be ones of communal understanding?
Most of the transgender politics that I see are really as I described above… a throw back in many ways to very traditional 40’s and 50’s butch/femme dynamics, with the emphasis on gender being an individual choice and that the root of gender transgression is assuming roles that a diametrically opposed to the social gender they were assigned at birth. Most of these women identify as bois. And around here, boi almost specifically means someone who has not transitioned and probably won’t. Not sure if this clarifies anything or not.
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December 30th, 2005 at 11:55 am
>>Piny: I understand how your narrative becomes one of transphobia, but why can’t the first two instances be ones of communal understanding?>>
Sure, as long as there’s understanding that the two situations aren’t exactly the same.
The feminist is talking about being uncomfortable because she was oppressed. She wanted to do “boy things” because they were the things that the privileged children got to do: play interesting games, have interesting adventures, receive approving attention. No one’s identity is congruent with being used, slighted, and fucked over all one’s life. Had the transwoman been allowed to grow up female, she would have likely been as pissed off and jealous as the feminist. Had the woman been treated like a human being, she probably wouldn’t have cared too much that her brother also got to climb trees.
The transsexual isn’t talking about being uncomfortable because of oppression, although his or her story does contain transphobic constraint. Transmen don’t transition because they want to do boy things, but because they’re men. This argument tends to cast gender dysphoria as a problem of sexism, one which will be solved when sexism disappears. That doesn’t match up with my experience. I know lots of deeply feminist, deeply fuck-gender transpeople. They firmly believe that gender roles are bullshit, and they act out that politic in daily life. However, they are as interested in and as desperate for physical transition as the transsexuals who are invested in gender roles.
>>Most of the transgender politics that I see are really as I described above… a throw back in many ways to very traditional 40’s and 50’s butch/femme dynamics, with the emphasis on gender being an individual choice and that the root of gender transgression is assuming roles that a diametrically opposed to the social gender they were assigned at birth. Most of these women identify as bois. And around here, boi almost specifically means someone who has not transitioned and probably won’t. Not sure if this clarifies anything or not.>>
It does, actually. I’m about to describe something that’s one big identity clusterfuck, so apologies if this doesn’t make much sense. Where I live, transition is kind of a variable thing; physically and internally, a matter of degree. This is one of the only places where you can live liminally, so people don’t always choose sides. I don’t think I’ve heard boi used to describe an uncomplicated transguy, but I have heard it used to describe people who take hormones, have surgery, and live at least some of the time as male. Boi tends to describe people who have contact with the queer female/female-bodied community, but it doesn’t necessarily mean butch-femme. A lot of bois and transmasculine people prefer to date each other. I think, too, that butch-femme here is mutating away from the classic version, in part because bois and ftms are read in a different way than butches. I see a lot of couples who seem to almost have a mommy-boy thing going. Most of the femmes I know are also definitely not interested in being queer June Cleavers.
As far as confusing acting-out with switching sides…That’s definitely true of some people. But I don’t think that there are too many people here who have such a simplistic view of transgression.
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December 30th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
I just want to pop in and extend my thanks to you all. I’m learning a lot here. I’m quite upfront about my ignorance regarding trans issues, and this ignorance informed my beliefs (I used to ascribe to some of the notions about trans people–for example, a MTF being a man with hormone treatments and an operation, for example). The more I learned about the issue, the less sure I was about my assertions.
And really, this thread has me thinking I’ve got a whole new subject for book collecting/reading for the next few months. (Anyone who wants to give me suggestions should feel free to share them with me via email. I’m going away for the next week and won’t be able to check the thread.)
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December 30th, 2005 at 1:24 pm
This thread is wonderful. Thank you all very much. And now I have a lot of books to add to my reading list, too.
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December 30th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
Piny: thanks for your answers. I have more than a shite load of work to do before the long weekend and the hints of a nasty cold. I hope this thread survives the weekend.
Can you point out some good sources for transsexual politics? Other than you? :)
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December 30th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Wow, I can see why Amp respects you Piny, you’ve really nailed what I find troubling about a lot of the stuff I’ve read about mtfs. There’s so many variations and experiences that its hard to ascribe a motive or an impulse to why people become mtfs of ftms or bois. Some trans-women are really invested in the gender binary but not all are, as you said. And mtfs are doing something I also think is quite brave, they’re giving up their male privilege. I wish more men would do that, the world would be a better place. I’m a genderfucker myself, I do it because I also think gender roles are bullshit, as well.
I was wondering if either of you, Piny or Q-girl have read what Levey wrote about bois and trans-men in her book Female Chauvinist Pig and how your experiences deviate or match up with it?
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December 30th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Q-grrl,
Sorry to hear it. I hope your health improves.
It’s hard to recommend stuff because every book that nails something contains some passage or chapter I have huge problems with. For example, Sex Changes is mostly brilliant, but Patrick Califia says some dumb things about being a woman under patriarchy. Gender Outlaw is mostly fascinating, but I agree with some of Califia’s complaints. Trans Liberation is mostly awesome, but I agree with some feminist critiques of it, etc. I loved The Empire Strikes Back, by Susan Stryker, which is an essay in response to The Transsexual Empire. transacademics.org is a sleepy board, but they have some neat discussions going on. There are transpeople communities on livejournal (I think there’s a transfeminism community), so you can do some searching. Most of them are practice and theory. I’ll ask my friends if they can’t come up with other stuff.
>>I was wondering if either of you, Piny or Q-girl have read what Levey wrote about bois and trans-men in her book Female Chauvinist Pig and how your experiences deviate or match up with it?>>
I read that chapter, and have read some of the book. I agree with her central premise–that sexualization is not sexual autonomy, and that some people seem confused on this point–and understand that ftms and bois make up a brief chapter in a book that’s about, y’know, women. Still, for fuck’s sake.
She claims that transitioning has become (I may be paraphrasing slightly) “so widespread as to be faddish.” She has a great deal of evidence to believe that people, queer women in particular, fear this and believe it to be true. It’s certainly true that transition is more common than it was when it was virtually impossible. She has no reason to believe that transition is a hot new trend, or any reason to believe that it’s _too_ common, and she doesn’t cite any numbers at all.
She also based her ideas about ftms on an interview with exactly one ftm, IIRC. That’s like using any given lesbian (possibly Susie Bright) to form opinions about all lesbians (including Sarah Hoagland). She took a very heteronormative view of bois, which was disappointing, and she accepted the lone transsexual’s statement that you can draw a thick black line between “boi” and “ftm,” which a lot of people in both groups dispute. She decided that “bois” became bois because they didn’t want to be adults. I also recall a discussion on an ftm livejournal community about her article, “Where the Bois Are,” much of which found its way into this book. Most of the commenters were extremely disappointed by her language and her limited portrayal. One commenter said that a friend of his who was interviewed in the article had done a snarky, sarcastic impression of a stereotypical boi that was then quoted as though in propria voce.
All in all, I wasn’t terribly happy with it.
I’ll just say that I know a lot of feminist ftms and bois. I know a lot of ftms and bois who don’t feel compelled to present that kind of stereotypical brittle masculinity, but I don’t think it’s fair to see that as an act of courage on their part. Basically, we’re like everyone else: when we feel safe and comfortable being gendervariant, we are. When we have role models that aren’t traditional, we feel no need to be traditional ourselves. When our community doesn’t condone woman-hating, we don’t.
Although I think that critiquing misogyny is always a good thing, I’m bothered by critiques that read sexism among bois, butches, and ftms as a special phenomenon or something especially related to transition–or a new thing, considering that butches have been around for a long time. It’s how people behave when they live under patriarchy. Their sexism isn’t much different from that of other men.
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December 30th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
Oops. Sandy Stone was the author of The Empire Strikes Back.
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December 30th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
Levey bothered me because the impression you get from her portrayel of bois and trans-men was that these women were fleeing from their own gender to take on male privilege, and it’s even more damning if you look at it in the context of the book, which is basically arguing that some women are trying to take on more power by stepping on the backs of other women by accepting sexism and women-hating.
Thanks for your answer Piny.
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December 30th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
I was hesitant to post that article at all, but I’m so glad I did. When the hell are you getting your own blog, Piny?
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December 30th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
>>Levey bothered me because the impression you get from her portrayel of bois and trans-men was that these women were fleeing from their own gender to take on male privilege, and it’s even more damning if you look at it in the context of the book, which is basically arguing that some women are trying to take on more power by stepping on the backs of other women by accepting sexism and women-hating.>>
Yes, exactly! And don’t get me wrong, ftms get male privilege by transitioning. (There was a discussion of this on livejournal some months back, and one commenter wrote, “People assume I’m competent now!”) And bois _definitely_ receive a kind of male/masculine privilege in queer circles that are sexist. But that doesn’t mean either that we understand that when we do cost/benefit analyses, or that we transition because of it.
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December 30th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
My head hurts. In a good way. For once, a high-quality, non-trolled discussion. I admit I am low on theory, high on practical issues, and tend to pay more attention to physical/medical issues dt my medical/scientific orientation. I am still on Trans 101, trying to stretch my imagination to understand what the various trans experiences are to transpeople, since I have always accepted my female body, and what I object to are attempts to make me conform to restrictive gender expectations. In other words, I am a typical woman-born-woman feminist, and have been politically active in the usual feminist causes, mostly reproductive rights, chosen for professional and political reasons.
What I have heard from here and from transfolk IRL is that trans identity is existential. They just “know” they are the gender opposite to their birth assignment. Which calls into question how non-trans people “know” they are the gender congruent with their birth assignment. It isn’t as logical as looking down at your privates and looking at pictures labelled “male” and “female”, and deciding which one you look most like. Children form gender identity earlier than they develop rational thinking. Trans folk disprove the 100% nurture thesis that parents decide at day one and start dressing the baby in pink or blue and treating the baby as sugar and spice or puppy dog tails. Some portion of personality (or spirit, if spiritually inclined) resists the outside categorisation from early childhood. This sense of dislocation, and the resistance, seem also to be the theme of many lesbian and gay childhoods, seen in retrospect when those children grow up.
I have always felt gendervariant, in that the mental/spiritual “me” felt non-gendered or androgynous, and this mental/spiritual “me” just happened to reside in a typical female body. The body isn’t incongruent, it just doesn’t tell the whole story. I have experienced some distance from my body in that despite my intellectual affiliation with feminism and lgbt rights, familial and social pressures (and endogenous depression) kept me from exploring any sexual orientation other than heterosexual, and I have known since early teens that I can’t be sexually heterosexual, even if I could be feminine for public purposes.
Forgive my wool-gathering, which is neither political nor theoretical.
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December 30th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
>>However, based on my experiences with those in the trans community and my (admittedly limited) reading of trans literature, there does seem to be some overwhelmingly common ideas and beliefs that go against my very core beliefs about the world and feminism.>>
Which ones have you encountered?
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December 30th, 2005 at 4:17 pm
Kind of a link dump, but most of these address trans politics or identity in interesting and pretty accessible ways:
Emi Koyama has some interesting things to say about trans feminism, her readings are here: http://eminism.org/readings/index.html
I enjoyed Jay Prosser’s “Second Skins” a lot, although it’s very much an academic text, so although it’s fairly accessible it’s not a very good introduction.
Raven Kaldera has also written a number of interesting pieces, unfortunately his own listing of his writings isn’t up at the moment, but there are a set of pieces on Scarlet Letters that are good: http://www.scarletletters.com/current/nonfic.html
“The Empire strikes back” by Sandy Stone is hosted here: http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~sandy/empire-strikes-back
And the ever useful suggested rules for non-trans people writing about trans people are here, they’re actually more interesting then they might sound initially, as there’s a bunch of discussion\information around each rule:
http://www.transfeminism.org/nontrans-rules.html
On a lighter note, Trainwreck’s spoken word stuff is moving and really very funny (at least if you’re trans or immersed in particular segments of the dyke community, perhaps less so if you’re not.) In the context of discussing bois I kind of want to suggest her piece “Estrogen made me a boy” from here: http://www.trainwreckspokenword.com/
I also wanted to echo Piny’s post about how important physical transition can be (although there are of course trans people to whom it’s less important.) I transitioned largely as a result of feelings about my body- those huge decisions were made on the basis of what were in some ways very nebulous, although very strong, beliefs that my body was wrong for me in some fundamental sense and that feminising my body would help resolve some of those feelings. Much of the discussion of trans issues (on both sides) fails to address that deep seated sense of wrongness very well, ending up with unhelpful cliches like “an a in a b’s body” or flatly disregarding the validity of trans identity in the way that much Radical feminist thought on the subject does.
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December 30th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Ah, for the world of Varley’s Steel Beach
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December 30th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Do you believe that BDSM and feminism are essentially incompatible? If so, why?
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December 30th, 2005 at 6:53 pm
i’m a trans woman. i don’t believe that i have an “identity”. i never “knew” that i was the gender opposite to my birth assignment. i lived as a man for 40+ years, and it never worked for me, and just became worse as i grew older. for me, it was about how i feel most congruent (or really, how i imagined how i’d feel most congruent) with regard to how i interact on an intimate basis, and how i prefer to express myself on a social level.
i don’t believe in “gender identity”, at least in my own self-context. as i see it, “gender identity” involves the need to know what it “feels” like to be both male and female, such that one can say that they don’t “feel” male and instead “feel” female. since i only know what it “feels” like to be me, i can’t claim that i always “felt” female. frankly, i don’t know that i ever “felt” male either. perhaps the only feeling i do know is what it is to be transsexual.
even though i have undergone gender reassignment surgery, have been on hrt for close to 6 years, and have had well over 100 hours of electrolysis, i’m still in the same body i’ve always been in. a few things have changed for sure, but it’s not like i feel, or have ever felt, like i was “born in the wrong body”. since this is the only body i’ve had, it’s the only “feeling” i know. i don’t understand how anyone can “feel” that they’re in the “wrong” body, without ever have experienced being in another body.
while i can imagine what it might feel like to be in a different body, and wish that i’d been born into a different body, i can’t know these things. and this may seem like splitting hairs to some, but i think it speaks to the whole idea of “gender identity”, and the very language, along with the limitations therein, we use to speak of these issues.
This comment was written by nexy jo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 30th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
i have to say, this has turned out to be an amazingly enlightening discussion. My head is spinning. I consider myself relatively informed about transgendered issues (well, lets say at least in comparison to the general public, and maybe in comparison to the general GLB community.. though neither is saying much really) and i’m learning a lot here.. damn i have a lot more to learn.
If this is going to be the caliber of threads without anti-feminists, I’d say bring more of them. please.
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December 30th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
What is/are “bois”?
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December 31st, 2005 at 12:13 am
RonF, it’s not my impression that you’re “feminist, pro-feminist, or feminist friendly.” So please, don’t post on this thread. Thank you.
To answer your question, bois is the plural of boi. As used in this thread, I think boi means “a female-born or female-bodied person…sometimes transsexual, transgendered, or intersexed, sometimes not…who generally does not identify wholly or at all as being feminine, female, a girl, or a woman, though some bois identify as one or more of these. Bois almost always identify as lesbians, dykes, or queers; many are also genderqueer or genderfucked. Bois can prefer a range of pronouns, including ‘he,’ ’she,’ or gender-neutral pronouns; it’s usually best to ask to avoid offence.” (Quoted from wikipedia).
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December 31st, 2005 at 12:20 am
What is/are “bois”?
lots of definitions here, but the one you want i think is number 2.1
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boi&defid=377470
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December 31st, 2005 at 5:02 am
a lot of time on “Alas.” But I wanted to point out this excellent discussion of transwomen and feminism, which took place in Feministe’s comments, mostly between three writers I respect a lot: Piny, Emma of GenderGeek, and Tekanji of Shrub.com. [...]Continue reading at Alas, a blog … posted 2:24 am at Alas, a blog
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December 31st, 2005 at 10:11 am
>>Those whose primary obsession seems to be BDSM, pornography, strippers, and eschewing gender roles (which, as far as I can tell, essentially means eschewing anything remotely connected to femininity and embracing masculinity).>>
Yeah, I would have to say that doesn’t sound either representative of transpeople as a whole, of the transpeople I’m acquainted with, or of the transpeople on this board. It also sounds as though you’re referring only to ftms and bois here, since you say that the transpeople you know take “eschewing gender roles” to be eschewing femininity. Have I read you wrong?
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December 31st, 2005 at 1:43 pm
BDSM is the red flag, I think.
I talked about Ariel Levy’s article upthread.
It may in fact be the communities you hang out in. I’ve noticed the same dynamic here, but it’s a very small part of a very big picture. Ftms and bois who aren’t interested in that dynamic go elsewhere and drop off the radar. The ones that fuck men hang out in gay male spaces. The ones that aren’t happy with the way the queer women’s community can sometimes treat “trannybois” (like myself) find other circles to run in. Most of us just transition fully and thereafter live stealth–we date as people who are in one small way different, rather than staying in trans or trans-specific spaces. The latter can be constricting and incestuous, and you tend to run into a lot of really disgusting trannychasers.
Mtfs tend not to hang out in the trans community that bois hang out in because they tend not to be welcome. Around here, trans-friendly means ftm-friendly (and only the ones who still look cute and boyish, generally). Mtfs who date queer women are left hanging. Mtfs face more scrutiny and more shaming. Many of the ftms who stick with the queer women’s/boi’s community are coming from inside; they identified as butches prior to transition.
>>I realize that not every trans will be a part of this community, and that not every trans community is even exactly like this. But that doesn’t change the fact that this sort of thing exists … and seems to be becoming more and more prevalent.>>
Well, transpeople, and ftms in particular, are becoming more prevalent. There are many more of us, now that transition is a realistic option. There are also more of us who are able to live openly as trans and stay in the communities we come from, rather than having to relocate and go underground. I can tell you that there are definitely more of the _other_ kinds of ftms as well. Ten years ago, gay ftms were largely invisible, and ftms who dated other ftms were unheard-of. Now they’re both status quo here.
I think, too, that anyone interested in BDSM will have to run in BDSM circles; it’s a rare proclivity, and it necessitates a lot of networking. Being a queer BDSM-freak in San Francisco is like being a lesbian in Grand Rapids. That may explain the prevalence of BDSM enthusiasts in sexuality-specific communities.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
December 31st, 2005 at 1:44 pm
Yup. Mine’s awaiting moderation, too.
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December 31st, 2005 at 2:31 pm
I’d like to echo what piny said about the disconnect between transsexuals descriptions of transsexual and some feminists hearing of what’s being said.
I think that the disconnect comes from two different perspectives of “the woman question”. To me, transition was about social relations and peer groups, and not at all about my ability to wear dresses. But it’s the “wearing dresses” that seems to be the common perception by certain groups of feminists.
Now, having arrived in this reconstituted body of mine, yes, I do experience oppression in society as a woman. And yes, it does suck. But whether it was going to be better (as one might argue it’s better for f2m types), or worse (as one might argue it’s worse for m2f types) was irrelevant. Whatever the change in social class, I was going to change.
I think that what piny posted
Transsexual: I was miserable for a large portion of my life because I didn’t fit into my gender. I didn’t feel comfortable in my body.
Transphobic Feminist: We understand completely. We’re women. We didn’t feel comfortable in our genders either. We wanted to be boys when we were growing up, and do boy things.
is the root of the problem. Because even if I was allowed to do all sorts of super girly things (which I was, by and large growing up), I still wanted to be a woman. We have to find a way to move past that disconnect or else “transphobic” is going to be the most common modifier in front of “feminist” in situations like this.
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December 31st, 2005 at 5:41 pm
As a feminist my problem with transsexuality is the belief that we are either male or female. I don´t believe that we are born with either female or male brains - apart from the physical differences I think that all our other differences lie in our gendered socialisation.
The very decision to claim one gender as irrevocably ones own goes against my feminist belief. Naturally we cannot escape our deeply ingrained conditioning, but for me being a feminist means constantly trying to become aware of my own gendered behavior. The goal is being human - not male or female.
Trying to change myself and my own perceptions comes first and only secondly comes trying to change society´s perceptions and sexism.
Sorry if I ramble on or seem unclear. I´ve been up a long time celebrating the new year and am still a bit drunk. I´d like to add that none of the above should ever stop us from treating a person as whatever gender they choose - that is simply curtesy.
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December 31st, 2005 at 8:14 pm
>>As a feminist my problem with transsexuality is the belief that we are either male or female. I don´t believe that we are born with either female or male brains - apart from the physical differences I think that all our other differences lie in our gendered socialisation.>>
So…how would you explain us?
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December 31st, 2005 at 8:18 pm
Because even if I was allowed to do all sorts of super girly things (which I was, by and large growing up), I still wanted to be a woman.>>
I had absolutely no problem doing many girly things–still don’t, really. And I grew up in a family of women who, god love ‘em, never expected me to be anything more or less than I wanted to be. And I had no problem at all passing as female–there seems to be this corollary belief that transsexuals switch to the other gender because they’re terrible at being their birth gender.
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January 1st, 2006 at 3:39 am
Piny - I don’t understand it. I’ve been thinking about how I would feel if I woke up tomorrow as the opposite sex all other things being equal and, while it might certainly bother me, I don’t think I would ever want to go trough the effort to switch back. But that’s me.
I suppose that in a gendered world, where characteristics and activities belong to certain genders, there will allways be people who feel that the other gender is a better personal choice. This is at the bottom of my feminist belief - I want to get rid of theese gendered stereeotypes and allow us all to be whatever people we want to. For me transexualism is a strange route to go to be oneself, and maybe it depends on to what degree you have internalised the male-female dichotomy but it seems to me as accepting, rather than rejecting, society’s limits on your behaviour and who you are allowed to be.
Sex should be as irrelevant as eye-colour in my feminist utopia. And if it pleases you I’ll gladly throw in that switching between sexes should be as easy as using different colour lenses.
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January 1st, 2006 at 6:59 am
>>For me transexualism is a strange route to go to be oneself, and maybe it depends on to what degree you have internalised the male-female dichotomy but it seems to me as accepting, rather than rejecting, society’s limits on your behaviour and who you are allowed to be.>>
Well, but the transpeople on this thread–and most transpeople out there, as well as the therapists who treat us and the theorists who observe us–have rejected this theory that we transition because we’ve internalized sexism because it’s demonstrably false. It doesn’t work to describe us or our lives. It doesn’t match up with how we describe ourselves and our lives.
Transpeople do not feel any more allegiance to gender roles than other people. Transpeople don’t adhere to gender roles in their post-transition gender. Transpeople do not transition so that they can do things they couldn’t do in their pre-transition gender. Transpeople do not “fit” better in terms of traditional gender roles in their post-transition gender than in their pre-transition gender. Some, yes. Enough to make this a working theory, definitely not.
Transition frequently does not make one more normal or more acceptable. It does not guarantee that you will make a passable transman or transwoman; for some people, it means becoming permanently, visibly gender-nonconforming. Furthermore, transpeople do not generally believe that transition will make them more normal or acceptable; quite the contrary, since it’s culturally defined as a kind of suicide. While transsexuality can certainly _fit into_ a binary picture of gender, it flies in the face of the one upon which _this society_ has decided.
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January 1st, 2006 at 7:34 am
But if you don’t believe in this division into male and female genders why decide that you are one and not the other? Is it all about body-shape?
I still believe that people in general feel it easier to relate to someone saying they are the wrong gender than someone completely disregarding all gender constructions. Still, neither position is anywhere near easy. Am reminded that in Iran sex-changes are seen as completely acceptable but homosexuality can lead to the death-penalty.
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January 1st, 2006 at 7:55 am
I have comments for this thread having to do with radical feminism, our view of the transgender/transsexual phenomenon, and the history of the politics between the trans movement and the feminist movement, and I may post them. But before I do, Amp, you designated this thread as being for feminists or pro-feminists only. Furrycatherder is a father’s rights person, a libertarian, a dedicated advocate of “covenant marriage” and a committed anti-feminist who has been trolling feminist venues for a long time now. I think comments from this person ought to be relegated to the threads for MRA’s, fathers’ rights, and anti-feminist people. I won’t post to this thread until the guidelines you’ve established are honored.
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 8:05 am
Here is an example of Furrycatherder’s views:
FurryCatHerder
Joined: 16 Jan 2005
Posts: 794
Location & Situation: Herder of Cats
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 9:55 am Post subject:
——————————————————————————–
Rah, the good news is that more and more states are creating an alternate marriage vehicle known as “Covenant Marriage”. Those marriages have more teeth than the existing “’til I get tired of you do you part.”
I also think that we’ve just got to move beyond the current “best interests of the child” model where a father who worked continually to facilitate having a family is suddenly torn from the children when most of us know that Dad’s become more involved as kids grow older and the initial financial (and physical) burdens of setting up house and bearing children become less of an issue. Going from less than 50/50 to 50/50, and allowing children to have more input in their visitation situation should be more automatic, and less expensive, than it currently is.
_________________
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
– Frederick Neitzsche (1844-1900).
http://www.dadsdivorce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13855&highlight=covenant+marriage
The phenomena of someone who identifies as a woman and has transitioned being simultaneously a fathers’ rights person, an anti-feminist and an advocate for covenant marriage may provide some insights into the issues which exist between advocates for transitioning and trans politics in general and feminists.
!
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 8:28 am
I’m 5′2″ but as a friend once said, “I talk tall” and a 6′5″ guy once told me “I was too intimidating”. These reactions are because, I think, in my mind’s image of myself I am tall and always have been. I’ve checked with my also short sisters and neither of them feel this way.
I have no idea why I feel tall and I doubt very seriously that there is anyone out there who could explain it either. I think that many people believe things to absolutely true about themselves that may appear to be at variance with reality. I don’t see why feeling that your body is the wrong gender type is any different from my sense that I am tall nor can I see why feeling that way has to mean that the person must also believe in gender essentialism.
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January 1st, 2006 at 8:57 am
i think part of the problem is the mistaken belief that the motivation for going through transition is rooted in some kind of “decision”. i didn’t wake up one day and “decide” i’m a woman, arrange for surgery and hormones, and walk down to the courthouse to change my name.
that’s not to say that at some point, i *did* in fact make the decisions for surgery, hormones, and name changes. but the original premise of those actions was not based on any decision on my part - at least not that i can tell.
and unlike many trans people who seem to be quite sure of their identity, i’m not so invested in making sure everyone knows i’m a woman. i’m not sure myself. what i am sure of is that the quality of my life improved vastly after transition, despite all of the loses i’ve endured.
further, for me, gender is not an “either/or” concept. there are many other “states” besides “male” and “female”. unfortunately, our society only recognizes the two, so for legal purposes, we really must choose one in order to function at some level in day to day life.
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January 1st, 2006 at 9:23 am
>>But if you don’t believe in this division into male and female genders why decide that you are one and not the other? Is it all about body-shape?>>
Believing in a division into male and female genders, or believing that some people feel comfortable in one rather than the other in a way unrelated to sexism, is not the same as believing in gender roles or adhering to them. Gender is different from gender role; that’s why a transwoman can feel infinitely more comfortable as a butch dyke than as a man.
>>I still believe that people in general feel it easier to relate to someone saying they are the wrong gender than someone completely disregarding all gender constructions. Still, neither position is anywhere near easy. Am reminded that in Iran sex-changes are seen as completely acceptable but homosexuality can lead to the death-penalty.>>
Iran /= here. And transsexuals in Iran /= the officials who mediate transsexuality. And yes, absolutely–that’s true, historically, of the way transsexuals are treated by the medical profession and by society at large. It is not, however, true of transsexuals, many of whom transition _and_ disregard gender constructions.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 9:32 am
The phenomena of someone who identifies as a woman and has transitioned being simultaneously a fathers’ rights person, an anti-feminist and an advocate for covenant marriage may provide some insights into the issues which exist between advocates for transitioning and trans politics in general and feminists.>>
A father’s rights advocate? You mean like Cathy Young? An anti-feminist? You mean like Ann Coulter? The fact that a transwoman, singular, happens to be an MRA, has sweet fuck-all to do with whether transpeople in general are anti-feminist or sexist (they’re not), or whether transition is itself anti-feminist. Your willingness to believe otherwise is your willingness to make bigoted assumptions in order to support your worldview. In this context, that is nothing but an attempt to smear all transpeople as operating from a stance of male privilege.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as “trans politics,” any more than there is one kind of feminism. Your language lumps together Leslie Feinberg, Riki Wilchins, Margaret O’Hartigan, Kate Bornstein, Patrick Califia, Max Valerio, Christine Jorgensen, Sandy Stone, Nick Kiddle, Jay Sennett, and all of the other incredibly different transpeople out there–most of whom, I’m sure, you’ve never bothered to read or investigate. That picture has nothing to do with reality.
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January 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am
And nothing piny has said there has anything to do with what I’ve posted Just for the record. It isn’t responsive or apropos or relevant to anything I’ve said here.
I will post some thoughts about the politics of transgender/transsexuality, but again, only if Amp’s stated intentions for this thread — that it be for feminists and pro-feminists only — are honored.
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 10:19 am
i very much hope for the opportunity to read your thoughts, especially since i am transsexual, and consider myself to be very much lacking in knowledge about “the politics of transgender/transsexuality”. to be brutally honest, other than what i’ve read on feminist message boards, i am unaware of any “politics” of “transgender/transsexuality”. perhaps i don’t understand your use of the word “politics”, but the fact that i’m transsexual had absolutely no political context that i can discern.
of course, the little i’ve read on the topic would lead me to believe otherwise, if i were not transsexual.
This comment was written by nexyjo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 11:33 am
A father’s rights advocate? You mean like Cathy Young? An anti-feminist? You mean like Ann Coulter? The fact that a transwoman, singular, happens to be an MRA, has sweet fuck-all to do with whether transpeople in general are anti-feminist or sexist (they’re not), or whether transition is itself anti-feminist.
Cheryl is trying to import a conflict between her and I which originated on the MichFest boards onto this board. The conflict between her and I was specific to that board, so I’m not even going to go there.
Calling me a “Men’s Rights” or “Father’s Rights” activist is simply absurd. I support the civil rights of people. Some happen to be men, some even happen to be fathers. Having this constantly raised by a woman (Cheryl) who was paid to tell women to be submissive to their husbands is just bad Internet drama.
This comment was written by furrycatherder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Am I the only one who has to go to a job today? Okay, probably I am.
And that’s fine. Reading through your posts on the Divorced Dads board, I think that you’re clearly a great deal smarter and more nuanced than a log of people out there supporting the civil rights of men and fathers.
Nonetheless, this thread is for feminists, which is a distinct (although non-contrary) position from supporting the civil rights of people, some of whom happen to be this or that sex. So although you’re welcome to post on “Alas,” until I say otherwise you are not welcome on this thread, or any other thread designated for feminists and pro-feminists. I hope you can see clear to respecting this decision, even if you disagree with it.
1) I am certainly well aware of Heart’s background. But it’s not relevant here. Heart’s dedication to feminism is beyond serious question.
2) I wish you had read the moderation policies more carefully. In particular, this bit: “attack arguments, rather than attacking other posters.” Bringing up Heart’s background in an attempt to discredit her views is a pure ad hom attack, and has greatly reduced the amount of sympathy I’m inclined to give your position.
(Heart, in contrast, brought up your background not to discredit your views, but to ask if you could rightfully post on a “feminist and pro-feminist” thread. Not the same thing.)
SHORT FORM - EVERYONE READ THIS BIT:
1) Furrycatherder is not to post on this or any other thread marked “feminist or pro-feminist” again. Further posts by Furrycatherder on those threads will be deleted by the moderator.
2) Since Furrycatherder cannot post on this thread, I would ask that no one use this thread to criticize Furrycatherder.
2) To avoid diverting this thread further, any further discussion related to the posting rules should be moved to this thread.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:04 pm
[Post deleted at author's request]
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:06 pm
We cross-posted. Amp, could you delete my last post?
Thanks.
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:11 pm
On ChivalryDec 30 by Lake DesireDec 29 by tekanjiDec 29 by Lake DesireTransphobia to the left of me, Anti-feminism to the right…Dec 29 byAlas, a blog » Blog Archive » Why Feminists Should Accept Transwomen as WomenNo, sir, that’s not made for meDec 27 by Darth Sidhe [IMG ]
This comment was written by Official Shrub.com Blog.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
With respect, Heart, I disagree. You argued that “the phenomena of someone who identifies as a woman and has transitioned being simultaneously a fathers’ rights person, an anti-feminist and an advocate for covenant marriage may provide some insights into the issues which exist between advocates for transitioning and trans politics in general and feminists.”
This is clearly arguing that the “phenomena” of one such individual can tell us something about the “issues which exist etc etc.” Piny’s argument equally clearly argued that it is incorrect to use the example of one individual to tell us about those issues. It’s hard to imagine how Piny’s argument could have been more directly responsive to the bit of your post Piny quoted.
You may not agree with Piny’s argument, but it clearly was relevant to what you said. Just saying “that’s not responsive,” without explaining why it’s not responsive, fails to refute Piny’s argument.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Amp: This is clearly arguing that the “phenomena” of one such individual can tell us something about the “issues which exist etc etc.”
Well, but look at what I said. I didn’t say it “can tell us something about the issues.” I said it offers us insights into the issues which exist. Which it does. And I think the distinction matters. I still don’t think piny’s post was responsive; in fact, I think it was over the top. I didn’t offer any refutation of the not-over-the-top parts of it because I was waiting to see whether the thread guidelines would be honored and enforced. I would like to post a few thoughts and, for sure, refutations of what has been posted here about feminists, but not where it is unsafe for me to do so, which is how it feels in here right now (though I appreciate your insisting that the thread guidelines be honored, Amp).
Well, again, we’ll see. If it keeps feeling like a shark feed waiting to happen, which is how it feels to me in here right now, I won’t be back. If it feels like productive discussion can take place, I will be back to offer a few thoughts.
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Riiiight. “Offering insights” is _completely_ different from “telling us something.” No similarities between providing useful information and providing useful information. No similarity between relevant and relevant. You’re not responding to my comment because you don’t want people calling you on your willingness to extrapolate from the actions and beliefs of one member of a group to most or all members of that group. You don’t want your self-serving thinking challenged. And you don’t want to interact with any transperson who doesn’t fit into your picture of what transpeople must be. I say that the actions of one transperson, in the context of a conversation attempting to describe transpeople in general, offer no insight. It is as illogical to use FCH as a standin for all transpeople or transpeople as a group as it is to use you to form opinions about Alsis.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 1:47 pm
I disagree with you, piny, and I think it’s wrong for you to mischaracterize what I’ve posted as you have or to tell me what my motives are. I haven’t done that in your direction and won’t. But neither will I be engaging anyone demonstrating your level of hostility. It is unwarranted and it is becoming ubiquitous. I asked for a thread reserved for radical feminists a week or so ago, and the first thing you did was pop in to say if that happened, you were leaving Alas. I would not call that “civil” and “courteous” dialog of the type Amp says he values here, I’d call that throwing down. I’d call it, and your posts here, attempts to silence feminist views which oppose your own.
If and when you and some others here chill out, I’ll be back to explain and to be precise about the insights I made reference to here. Otherwise, and until then, it’s been real.
Heart
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 2:42 pm
When a belief simply contradicts or ignores the experience of another group of people, how useful is it? How do you explain the existence of transpeople who are telling you that their experience of internal gender has nothing to do with feeling restricted within assigned gender roles or making a better personal choice, it has to do with something inherent?
I appreciate that you are seeking a solution to a problem, but you seem to make no distinction between gendered characteristics and gender stereotypes, seeing them all equally as socialized and automatically having a negative effect. The solution to the problem of nonconsensual gender conformity can’t be doing away with the notion that people have an internal gender, since the foundational assumption doesn’t conform to reality, i.e., other people’s lived experience.
There’s something else going on here that I hesitate to even name. I can’t help fearing that transpeople who refute the assumption underlying this particular feminist belief (not that all feminists subscribe to it, I’m not saying that) are going to be considered by some to be anti-feminist by virtue of their mere existence, and I can’t accept that.
For the record, I was a feminist before transition, and the experience has made me that much more of one because of the insights gained into what is constructed and what is not.
This comment was written by David.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 2:57 pm
De-lurking after a long time reading here. As always, the quality of discussion (for the most part) is inspiring (if a little daunting). I spose as it’s a first post I should say something about me - female, 31, lesbian, Australian - I think about covers it. While not remotely a theory guru, radical feminism has probably informed me the most from what I have read.
I’m also hoping I won’t get my head bitten off, but anyway, here goes.
I have found this thread and the one Ampersand linked to particularly compelling, because at the moment another altercation is well underway in Australia between a group of radical (probably separatist, but I can’t honestly say as I’m not part of the group) lesbians, and a transsexual advocacy group. Basically the latter has advertised by invitation and word of mouth a gathering for “women born women” and trans people who have enquired have been asked respectfully (on the basis of differing life experience) to please respect the space (I have seen the emails). The result has been that the Trans group is challenging the event under Australian anti-discrimination law, claiming it is a public event because it is to be held at a venue where you pay for the use of facilities & hence qualifies as a public event (and I presume because the invite list is larger than just a bunch of friends).
This event & the challenge, like similar ones in the past, is causing a furor in some sections of the lesbian community. What has happened in the past is that Trans groups have successfully challenged the events, and they have been cancelled. I would say there is a high likelihood that this current event under scrutiny will end in a similar way - which as far as I can see is a lose/lose.
So with that prescient situation in mind, here are a few thoughts that have been percolating for a while -
1) while freely acknowledging my limited reading of queer theory and discourse, it seems to me that a lot of the problem here goes back to who decided (as it were) that transsexual mtfs were ‘women’ - and historically as I understand it, it was essentially that bastion of patriarchy, the medical establishment. What then followed in the crudest sense was people who were perceived to still appear and behave at least to some degree as men turn up at women’s gatherings and claim to be women, and wave as proof the blessing of the male medical establishment. As there is an age-old history of the patriarchy dictating the definition of women, I find it both unsurprising and fundamental that women would fiercely reject such claims. To my mind, this perceived imposition of what it is to be female/woman lies at the heart of what is now commonly deemed (and probably rightly in most instances) as transphobia. It also seems to me to be a fundamentally unresolved issue.
How do we overcome it? I’m not sure. I think reading that many transsexuals are rejecting surgery is a very positive sign, especially given the ghastly history of making transsexuals perform and conform to gender stereotypes to be deemed the opposite sex (I would be really interested again to here what the programs and approaches to assessing transsexual candidates are overseas, because here in Australia, I know that in some clinics at least, it is very “traditional”).
However, I do wonder if that will raise a further issue. There’s plenty of evidence that women are inculcated to defer to men, and it’s still prevalent today. How to address then what may happen when a mtf transsexual who still (for want of a better word) signals male in appearance (say) unwittingly causes women to defer to them and their opinions (just as in the early days of feminism, black women finally formed their own groups because they found in mixed groups they struggled not to be unwittingly silenced by white women)? This is surely something that can be overcome, but I think I don’t think we can afford to overlook it as an issue.
2) When I look at events as described above in Australia, it strikes me that as a community (and I refer here primarily to the lesbian one), we are stuck in a negative feedback loop. Transsexuals want to be acknowledged as women/female (and personal experience has been that it really varies from person to person); some lesbians are very suspicious of this, and also want to hold women-born-women events. The latter have I think a longer currency than altercations with the Trans community, but certainly I would acknowledge that forms of transphobia/feeling threatened by perceived ‘male interlopers’ means that some women try harder for such events. Trans challenge them feeling they are being discriminated against and ostracised, often leading to the event’s demise. This reinforces the notion for those women that Trans bring male privilege and oppression to women with them (and probably become even more transphobic), and ’round it goes again.
I find it unbelievably frustrating, as it seems to only drive deeper divisions. I do wonder why Trans advocacy groups challenge them - remembering that they have the legal status as women in Australian society, can marry (unless they are gay), and overall on the global scale, are getting somewhere. I would understand if it was every lesbian event in Australia, but it’s quite patently not, nor are they the largest, most influential, coolest, whatever. If the women involved are outdated and phobic, depriving them of space to be together doesn’t seem to be improving that any. Similarly, it places Trans mtfs are intense scrutiny and feeling they have to defend themselves in the lesbian community, and the results are often ugly. It seems to devolve into a fight about who is less privileged and therefore gets to ask for space, and of course, who controls the definition of a woman. In the middle are women who feel that the experience of Trans growing up and transitioning is sufficiently different lived experience from growing up female/woman that they want them both to have separate spaces to share experiences, as well (I would hope - I certainly do) collective space together with the myriad of other women in the broader tent it is these days.
If anyone has thoughts to offer on how this has been dealt with in other places, I’d be glad to hear them.
3rd and finally, I still worry about the science underlying all of this. When I see articles from scientists claiming to have found differences between “women and men’s brains”, it troubles me deeply. At first you think it’s just the journalists’ reporting, but no, you go read the original article and it’s “women and men”, not male and female. My point being that the 2 sex= 2 gender model is so rigidly hardwired in our society, just as men = big hunter and women = timid child raiser became enshrined in paleoanthropology for however long before being debunked; - I worry that the male domination, the male gaze that still underlies much of science has not been fully addressed when it comes to transsexualism et al.
For example, the issue of intersex people, a couple of whom I know, who have simply gone through hell because some form of indeterminate sex (because it equals gender) is simply not tenable in our society, so they were, and intersex people are “fixed” in most cases still. Yet nature tells us that there are plenty of species where a small percentage of hermaphroditism of similar “blurring” is quite common - humans it seems are no different, except that we still seem to be hell-bent on forcing such people to have a gender (=sex) chosen for them. I sometimes wonder if we as a society had historically allowed and embraced intersex people, whether we would have only 2 genders and a lot of this whole discussion would be rather pointless (or even impossible). I don’t know. But the historical enforcement upon and through transexuals of gender stereotypes is not comforting, andthat same thinking still seems to inform some of the science looking at sex differences.
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Ps - I meant to say with regard to my point (1), with all due respect to Ampersand who I think is unquestioningly a feminist, it still galls me to see a man basically tell/argue call it what you will that women should accept xx definition of women. By all means recommend the thread Ampersand, but I’m not sure it was/is the right topic for you to be opining on.
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 1st, 2006 at 5:54 pm
for what it’s worth myriad, i fully support gatherings of wbw that exclude trans women. i belong to a local transgender (as opposed to transsexual) support group, and very much value that space. while we don’t exclude wbw, i don’t see those who do attend to diminish the safety of that space as far as i’m concerned. there have been times when men, who in my opinion had no business being there, have effected my feelings of safety (and i believe we use that term in the same way), and i suppose if our little group were larger, it might be decided to exclude both women and men, of the “born” type, simply to avoid those types of situations. personally, i’d support that decision. unfortunately, when one draws lines, those lines tend to cut right through some individuals, and it’s also unfortunate that i don’t see any other way.
i can see how wbw might perceive that “the trans community” is against the idea of separate space for wbw, because some trans women (and trans men for that matter) are quite vocal about their beliefs on this issue. but there are many of us who are not so vocal, mostly because by being vocal, we bring attention to ourselves, which as i’m sure you can imagine, can be unsafe in our society. many of us do support separate space however.
i can’t count the number of times that i’ve wanted to withdraw from “the trans community”, because so much of what’s perceived as “trans culture” and “community politics”, is not at all representative of what i believe, or part of my culture as a trans woman. for the record, there’s a lot about “trans advocacy groups” that i don’t agree with or approve of.
i don’t care if you believe that i’m a woman or not. i’m not looking for validation as a woman by anyone other than myself. well, i will admit that it’s nice that my husband sees me as a woman, though to be perfectly honest, it would be ok if he didn’t, as long as he respected me as a human being.
it’s important that i’m legally female however, simply because of the need for me (and anyone for that matter) to function in society. i could not function as male, for the same reasons you couldn’t.
regarding the troubling science, i totally agree with you. i don’t believe that men’s and women’s brains are different in any meaningful way, and i believe that any differences between men and women, besides the obvious reproductive aspects, are social in nature. i also agree with the idea that the polarized view of gender does a lot more harm than good.
i found the medical community to be quite cooperative by the time i transitioned. i never had to misrepresent any of my history, feelings or beliefs, never had to conform to any gender stereotypes, and was easily able to access medications and surgery. there’s no doubt that i was privileged - i had great medical insurance which covered much of the cost of hormones and therapy, and had the resources to finance my surgery and electrolysis. it’s my understanding that our respective countries both adhere to the same medical standards of care for trans people, though in america, there very well may be more therapists who see the standards of care more as guidelines - which it is pretty clearly stated they are - as opposed to rigid step-by-step procedures.
This comment was written by nexy jo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 1:46 am
I have recently made the decision not to plan to travel from Australia to Michigan for the women-born-women music festival (and left the michfest discussion forum) because I don’t wish to, even indirectly, support the feminist politics of some attendees that I believe de-humanise transeccsual (can’t get my ‘eccs’ to work again) women. I don’t thereby judge women who choose to go, who also don’t support those politics, (which I understand to be most of them). This is just my personal decision, and partially takes into account the degree of difficulty in logistics to my getting there. I’d need to feel 100% enthusiastic and have none of the ambivalence I do genuinely feel.
I am in the awkward position of feeling supportive of WBW space at times, (I am a WBW lesbian), while simulataneously being unable to accept the cost of such space to transeccual women, in the form of politics in defence of it that debate their political ‘right’ to even eggsist. I have seen some very nasty eccschanges at a deeply personal level in the course of this debate. In all honesty, after many years of division, I see no light at the end of this tunnel yet. Something has to give. I don’t know what that will be. I can only say that I am personally willing and happy to include transeccual women and men - any person who has ever or does now live as a woman or a girl - in any space I am in. I don’t feel this as any kind of sacrifice at all. I guess I’m not yet prepared to argue ‘against’ WBW space for other WBW who feel the need for it though, if this is not on the political grounds that transeccuality shouldn’t eggsist…or based on any form of transphobia, whatever its source.
I truly do wish that more feminists would be more willing to listen , and to validate the understanding of the transeccual eccsperience as stated by the people who are actually living it. It seems to me that they have to repeat themselves rather a lot, and often to the same people, who just never seem to hear them.I guess this is not so unusual about lots of issues, but still… ‘I don’t get it, so there must be something wrong with what you’re saying or claiming…I’m just not sure what it is…’ seems stubbornly meaningless and, even if uintentional, kind of self-serving to me.
This comment was written by cicely.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 1:52 am
>>I disagree with you, piny, and I think it’s wrong for you to mischaracterize what I’ve posted as you have or to tell me what my motives are. I haven’t done that in your direction and won’t. But neither will I be engaging anyone demonstrating your level of hostility. It is unwarranted and it is becoming ubiquitous. I asked for a thread reserved for radical feminists a week or so ago, and the first thing you did was pop in to say if that happened, you were leaving Alas. >>
First of all, that’s not true, and Amp and the posts I’ve made here can back me up. I have no problem whatsoever with radical-feminist-only threads, and am in fact happy to see them becoming a reality here. I said as much to Amp. I have a problem with establishing anti-trans space that transpeople can read but not respond to, where people can post hateful rhetoric and baldfaced lies about transpeople without any accountability to actual transpeople. That’s how you run The Margins, and that is what any space mediated by you would become. I did not tell Amp that I was leaving merely as an act of protest, either; I recognized that I would not be able to remain silent in the face of that dynamic and that it would be better to simply depart altogether. And all I said on that thread was, “See ya.” I didn’t come back to comment until I was sure I would be having constructive conversations with other people.
Nor is my hostility unwarranted. I know you and know what your viewpoints are, but even your conduct here on this board has been disrespectful. “I never said that! I said this [technically, trivially different thing],” is fake civility. Make some comment. When people respond to it, twist out of their entirely reasonable reads on some slight technicality. Do this over, and over, and over again. Never own anything you say. When people complain that trying to confirm your views on (for example) transpeople is like trying to knot smoke, when they complain about being told that their reasonable comments are so much word salad (which is faux-civil speak for, “LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA!”), then you’re being attacked, then it’s a feeding frenzy.
You don’t want to engage hostility? Don’t be transphobic. Don’t argue transphobic viewpoints. Don’t make lazy generalizations about transpeople. Don’t take umbrage at assertions that you know are true. You insisted that Amp had a moral duty to engage and respect feminist hostility, and to ignore complaints from anti-feminists that the language was a little too rough and the tone a little too acid. My first response to you was more respectful than you deserve. You were the one who responded with a passive-aggressive dodge.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 1:57 am
Thanks Nexy joe for such an informative reply. I deliberately didn’t start my post with “I believe / support blah blah blah” - because in my experience it as often signals disingenuity to people as opposed to sincerity.
Your comments on the “trans community” echoes my experience - I’ve met everything from a trans woman who used to lecture lesbians on how frumpily they dressed and why didn’t they want to look more feminine like her, to those like yourself. It’s also a good example of the difficulties with these discussions - an awful lot of what we are talking about comes down to individual, human interpretation and behaviour. On that basis, I apologise for making the trans community sound like such a monolithic bloc, because I know it isn’t anymore than there is a truly cohesive or collective lesbian community.
My honest answer to you I think, is that I really don’t know if you’re a woman/female or not, but I’m more than happy to take your word for it. It’s the honouring of separate experiences, and as you acutely pinpointed, the need to be able to function in society and basic recognition as a human being that I think is critical. FWIW I belong to a political party that wants to and works to grant full legal status, rights and healthcare to trans people, and I fully believe in and support that.
With regard to medical care & guidelines, thanks for that information. It’s pleasing to hear that at least some aspects of the system are much more reality-based.
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 2:01 am
PS Nexy joe - I forgot to say that I really like that you don’t care what I think. If you know what I mean. :-)
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 6:01 am
to be perfectly honest, i really don’t know if i’m a woman/female or not either. when someone comes up with the absolute definition of “woman” or “female”, perhaps i’ll be able to figure it out. until then, i’m pretty comfortable with just being “me”.
i suppose for me, it has a lot to do with context. from a biological standpoint, i’ve never produced eggs, and in fact, used to produce sperm, one of which resulted in another human life. i don’t think there can be any arguement about what that means with regard to what i am, or was.
on the other hand, i’m married, and my marriage license lists me as the “bride”. and all my other i.d. lists me as female. people call me “ma’am”. so from a social perspective, people seem to see me as female.
from inside my head, i like myself a lot better now, after transition, than i did before transition. though i don’t know how that fits in with who or what i am.
in a daily-life perspective, i’m a lot more invested in improving the quality of my life, and the lives of those with whom i share this planet, than i am trying to define my sex. or gender.
and yeah, i believe i do know what you mean :)
This comment was written by nexyjo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 9:15 am
You know, that’s enough, piny. That is more than enough. I do not appreciate being attacked here, called names, or lied about by you. I also find what you’ve posted scary and threatening. It is an open attempt to intimidate and silence me here. You “know” me? No, you most certainly do not. I have no idea who you are. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. I have never engaged you at all, to my knowledge, in real life or online, ever, until this thread. And you can be sure I will not be engaging you again, beyond this post.
I would invite anyone here who has any question at all about my politics or what I stand for, or who is tempted to take any of piny’s attacks seriously, to take a look for yourself:
Website: http://www.WomensSpace.org
Boards: http://www.gentlespirit.com/cgi-bin/margins/dcboard.cgi
You are also free to e-mail me at CherylLindseySeelhoff@gmail.com.
And I really hope, Amp, that you do not plan to stand by and allow what appears to be the beginning of open season here on radical feminists and our work. I have not attacked anyone here or anywhere, and I do not deserve to be attacked here. By anybody.
Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff (Heart)
This comment was written by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff.http://www.WomensSpace.org (The Margins)
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:26 am
the beginning?
This comment was written by anon y mouse.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 11:25 am
I find it really shocking that what piny wrote could be characterized by anyone as scary or threatening. I don’t see any name-calling, attacking, or lying about Cheryl or her politics. I read, but do not post, on the Margins and the michfest boards, and have seen Cheryl/Heart use this tactic of shutting down discussion or debate before. As feminists, we’re supposed to respect and protect women’s need to feel safe in political discussions and spaces, but as many women of colour and others have pointed out, this need for safety has been used by privileged women to shut down discussions when they have been challenged on their privilege because it makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. That’s what I see happening here, and I’m curious if others see it happening as well.
This comment was written by dorktastic.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 11:32 am
Open season ? Because you and piny disagree ? Odd, since piny and Qgrrl seem to be talking things out in an interesting and enlightening way, and Qgrrl is also a radical feminist. Maybe the problem isn’t radical feminism, Cheryl. Maybe the problem is your approach. Others here are struggling to speak in specifics, at least a little. You seem to be hell-bent on speaking solely in generalities and frankly, I don’t blame Piny for being annoyed at that. (”Attacked” seems more than a little overblown to me. Mere disagreement with you does not = An attack.) Most of us prefer to be adressed as individuals in these things and not as part of some (in your eyes) unsavory monolith.
Frankly, a lot of gender talk goes way over my head no matter what the person is advocating. I have to concentrate more intensely on these discussions than I do on some others, but I’m enjoying this round and see no reason why the whole thing should come grind to a halt because of one radical feminist’s thin skin.
Also, maybe there’s someone who can clear something up for me. As I understand, the primary objection of a great many radical feminists to MTF’s is that we each have a “core” gender, or nature, that no amount of surgery or time lived as somebody else can change. So MTFs, no matter how well-behaved, cannot participate in all-woman spaces because they can never, at the core, be women. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t this same concept serve to welcom FTM’s into all-woman space ? If our born-sex is also our essential gender, and immutable, than an FTM is a woman. How many hormones s/he has taken and how many years s/he has lived as a man shouldn’t matter.
Should it ?
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 11:35 am
dorktastic wrote:
I wrote while you were still posting. My answer would be “yes.” I’ve dealt with, shall we say, some difficult FTMs in such discussions before, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I think that Cheryl wants to conduct discussion here exactly as she would on the Margins, and that hasn’t happened. But there’s already a Margins. This space shouldn’t have to be an exact duplicate of it.
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 11:36 am
Sorry. I meant “MTF.” Really, writing both would have worked just as well. :o Need coffee now.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Heart and Piny, with all due respect - and I hope you both know I respect you each a lot - you both need to chill.
Piny, I think you’re right to say that Heart’s argument was a distinction without a difference (at the very least, if there is a difference, Heart has declined to explain what it is and why it matters).
Nonetheless, many of your comments addresseed Heart’s argumentive style (and doing so in a belligerant way, not a “constructive criticism” or “fair debate tactic” way), rather than Heart’s specific arguments made in this specific thread. Please, focus on specific arguments, not on the person you’re arguing with.
Heart, some of your comments have addressed Piny’s alleged motives (i.e., arguing that his intent is to silence feminists who disagree), rather than his arguments. Again, focus on the argument, not the person.
For both of you (in fact, for everyone here), please, no more discussion of Piny’s comment that he was leaving “Alas,” or of Heart’s moderation style on The Margins, or what either of them have written on the Mitchfest boards. Piny has every right to leave “Alas” if he decides that he can’t stand a proposed moderation change - and to let me know that in a comment. Heart has every right to run “The Margins” any way she wants.
This is a really, realy good thread so far. Please, let’s not blow it.
If either of you (or anyone else!) wants to discuss these matters further with me, please take it to email rather than further derailing this thread. Thanks.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Also, maybe there’s someone who can clear something up for me. As I understand, the primary objection of a great many radical feminists to MTF’s is that we each have a “core” gender, or nature, that no amount of surgery or time lived as somebody else can change. So MTFs, no matter how well-behaved, cannot participate in all-woman spaces because they can never, at the core, be women
i haven’t particpated in feminist boards enough to know that this is or isn’t the mindset of a great many radical feminists, but frankly this does seem very ignorant of biology and mtf experience. Has much thought been given to the idea that if there is such a ‘core identity’ at birth, these women were born with it and thus are, at core, women?
Take two examples (I’m taking extreme examples to show the point, but it holds for the continuum of conditions). Kleinfelter’s and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. The former is the karyotype XXy, the latter is Xy, and yet something large portion of the former (much larger than the general population) and almost all (something over 90%) of complete AIS individuals are raised and ‘feel’ female in spite of their male karyotype (i had a very fascinating discussion with an AIS individual raised in a small Mormon Utah town when I was 24, changed my perceptions forever), and a large portion of partial AIS individuals often ‘feel’ female though they were ‘assigned’ male at birth.
My point I guess is that to ask how do these feminists propose to determine what makes a ‘core’ woman, the superficial chromosomal makeup (superficial because mutations or changes can make the make up ‘moot’)? or something else like ‘appearance’, because I can tell you, they would never know a complete AIS woman was not a woman except for a chromosome test (in fact, they themselves often do not till later).
Sorry, it seems such a black and white view in a very grey world.
This comment was written by trey.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 1:44 pm
hmm, my comments go to moderation a lot :).. wonder what word I’m using :)
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January 2nd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Piny hon,
I just wanted to write and support your positions here. You have not only eloquantly, but also intelligently, argued and displaced considerable restraint. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in doctoral and post-doctoral discussions of queer and/or trans identities and I wish they could have been so well done. I only hope that Qgrrl comes back (healthy too!) so that you might continue that talk.
I identify as strongly feminist, and lesbian. I’ve been engaged in both feminist and queer theory and activism for a long time. And included within that is that I refuse to attend or patronise ANY women’s organisation or feminist group that excludes trans women. I refuse not just because it is against my personal feelings, but as it is also HIGHLY (and simply) un-feminist. There is such a diversity of women in terms of gender presentations and experiences that to exclude trans women feminists on the basis of an imagined ‘fundamental’ difference between them and women that have been born female cuts to the core of what feminism isn’t. I will not attend MWMF and some feminist spaces here in Chicago, etc, specifically for these reasons.
Myself being mildly intersex I always see such constructions as insane, given my own experiences with my biology and how it plays with gender. There are trans women I look at and think are a touch insane in terms of their gender presentations, just as I similarly feel about the Concerned Women of America *grin* But there are some trans women/girls I get along famously with. I have one friend who is almost completely stealth, and she mountain-bikes, gets covered in dirt, loves her muscles and is just as bad about shaving her legs during the winter-time as I am *smile* If someone gave her a doll she’d think they were disturbed, and has done so since she transitioned as a youth (the only reason I know that she is trans, though she doesn’t id as such). She’s not remotely butch, but very much a femme tomboy, and she rocks :)
You can see why we get along *grin*
I talk about her not because I think she is someone that we can extrapolate from, but rather merely as evidence that there is just as much variation of gender performance and identity in the trans community as there is outside of it. My friend doesn’t need to prove that she is a woman, nor did she transition in order to do things she supposedly couldn’t beforehand. She’s a chick, just like me, and transitioned in order to simply be who she is, that I got by birth, and to exclude her from events because of stereotyped and ignorant perceptions of how she ‘is’ is just beneath contempt in my opinion.
But, I am not really contributing anything constructive in terms of intellectual or theoretical discussion. I just wanted to pop on and give you my support and thanks Piny for rocking articulations. I am not back, because simply I cannot exist in a space where homophobic bigots are given just as much of a right to spread their hate as I am discourses of respect as though we are merely two sides of a coin. I experience enough homophobic hate as part of my everyday life that as much as I like and respect Amp that to have that in a space where I should feel safe to participate in discussion, is not something I am going to waste energy on. Hence why I haven’t been here in a long while.
But, just for this moment to say well done Piny, I’ll pop in for a sec :)
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 2:28 pm
lol, that should read “_displayed_ considerable restraint” in the first paragraph … ouch :)
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January 2nd, 2006 at 2:31 pm
cicely, unfortunately that’s how I feel about MWMF as well. (Okay, that and the people who got their knickers in a wad after Tribe 8’s concert.)
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Sure, Amp. And you’re right: I don’t want to see this discussion get derailed either. And before I shut up on the subject for good, I would like to second Heart’s suggestion that everyone go read the Margins boards and judge for themselves. My say-so shouldn’t be worth much.
And thanks, Sarah. I wondered why I hadn’t seen you around; I’m sorry you don’t feel comfortable commenting here yourself.
>>Also, maybe there’s someone who can clear something up for me. As I understand, the primary objection of a great many radical feminists to MTF’s is that we each have a “core” gender, or nature, that no amount of surgery or time lived as somebody else can change. So MTFs, no matter how well-behaved, cannot participate in all-woman spaces because they can never, at the core, be women. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t this same concept serve to welcom FTM’s into all-woman space ? If our born-sex is also our essential gender, and immutable, than an FTM is a woman. How many hormones s/he has taken and how many years s/he has lived as a man shouldn’t matter.>>
Many queer women’s spaces _are_ actually much more accepting of ftms than mtfs, and some anti-mtf-inclusion people have much less animus and towards ftms. This ticks a lot of ftms off, since it’s based on the belief, articulated or not, that ftms are really just women. Butch dykes with a little extra somethin’ special, IOW. I think the argument against including ftms into women’s spaces is that it’s WOMEN-born-women, that is, people who’ve been women, and only women, their entire lives. While ftms were brought up girls, they now live as men and experience male privilege. Being born into girlhood is necessary, but not sufficient.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I admit that it puzzles me - not on an intellectual level, you understand, but on the feeling level - that so many people are so invested as identifying as either male or female. I don’t quite see the point.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 4:29 pm
>>I admit that it puzzles me - not on an intellectual level, you understand, but on the feeling level - that so many people are so invested as identifying as either male or female. I don’t quite see the point.>>
Had I been born in a male body, I doubt I would have given it much thought either.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Interesting question, that, Piny. Do you think that people whose bodies are congruent with their gender identification never think about it? It certainly seems important to a lot of people - I’ve run into women, for instance, who can’t comprehend even the possibility of being male - it doesn’t make sense to them that they, whatever it is that makes them who they are, could exist in a male body. As for me I don’t care one way or the other - if I woke up tomorrow male, it might be socially and legally difficult, but I can’t imagine it would make a difference to who I am.
This comment was written by Ledasmom.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:04 pm
I really can’t say, but I very much doubt it’s true that all cisgendered people never think about gender identity, or hypothesize about being in another body. I also don’t think it makes sense to split humanity into “congruent” and “incongruent.” I think that comfort within one’s gendered body is much more of a spectrum than a dichotomy. I know many people who’ve struggled with some feelings of discomfort but decided that transition did not interest them. Judging from my experience, however, most transpeople would not have needed to think about their gender identity in such a conscious, personal way had they not been born in bodies that didn’t work for them. Personal comfort would not have been conducive to asking questions.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Piny wrote:
Well, yeah. Also, I think that at least one difference between myself as an adult feminist woman whose always had this body and someone who has transitioned (to one degree or another) is this: Somewhere in the questioning of “how comfortable am I” must also come the question of “If I am uncomfortable, whose fault is it ? My body ? Or the culture that gave my body its societal status.”
Just one little example: I take a walk up to a coffee shop on a busy street. I’m not wearing a bra because I hate bras and don’t have an employer to impress at the moment. My breasts move visibly, and some man standing outside the coffee shop stares at my chest as I walk inside. It’s obvious to me from his face that he doesn’t approve of my decision– either because he thinks that only “bad” women let their breasts move in public or because he thinks that breasts exist for his viewing pleasure, but that mine are past their supposed prime and thus unwelcome in his line of vision.
So, there you are. A brief but unmistakeable moment of discomfort borne of having a female body. One of millions starting in childhood and continuing on until my demise at (I hope) a ripe old age.
But where does that discomfort come from ? The body or the men who feel that they get to decide what it’s for and how it should look ?
How a feminist is inclined to answer the question of comfort is probably an important part of how she views trans as a political issue.
Oh, and thank you for your answers, Piny, and trey. Sarah ! Great to see ya’ !!
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Absolutely.
>>Somewhere in the questioning of “how comfortable am I” must also come the question of “If I am uncomfortable, whose fault is it ? My body ? Or the culture that gave my body its societal status.”>>
Well, a transwoman would have to ask that question in reverse: do I feel comfortable in this body and this presentation because of my own needs and desires, or am I reflecting the needs and desires of other people?
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Yeah.
Also, I agree that everyone has at least THOUGHT about life in another body from time to time, even if it was only at the age where we also routinely pretended to be ponies or teapots.
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:43 pm
>>Also, I agree that everyone has at least THOUGHT about life in another body from time to time, even if it was only at the age where we also routinely pretended to be ponies or teapots.>>
Totally–although I think that we have extra tendencies towards considering those bodies that are privileged or permitted in whatever way we’re not. Especially if our internal, embodied lives are defined as removed in some way from humanity’s experience as a whole. Wistful thinking about what it’d be like to, say, live without breasts in a culture that can’t stop staring at them is different from wistful thinking about being double-jointed. IIRC, that was the only stage prior to adulthood in which I was able to consider what it might be like to live as a boy: in the context of flying dreams and what animal you’d most like to become.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 6:18 pm
So the million dollar conundrum is: If I were the kind of woman who wanted to have her breasts done away with so as to avoid having them stared at by jerks, my main alternative would be joining the class of jerks that struts around like they have the right to do the staring. I’d be hopeful that I could change over without actually becoming a jerk, but that’s like saying that I’d still be a trusting, generous person around my friends if I won a million dollars. Until it happens, how can I be sure ?
[bangs head on desk]
:o
Well, we’ve definitely reached chicken-or-egg territory here, Piny. So I think that I’ll just go back to pondering some more. Thanks again.
This comment was written by alsis39.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 6:24 pm
As we are on the subject of thinking about living in a different body, I’d be interested to hear views on a controversial case in Aus. last year.
A girl named Alex (at the time 12) appeared in Family Court to petition it to let her change sex to male. The history of the case was that Alex came from an (undisclosed) cultural background, and had been brought up by her father as the parents were separated. In this culture, it is tradition if there is no son born to raise the youngest daughter as a boy, and Alex’s father had done this. The father then died, and Alex was returned to the care of her mother, which did not go well. The mother was completely unaccepting of Alex’s identification as a boy thanks to her father’s upbringing, thought she was possessed, there was evidence of child abuse from both the mother and father, resulting in Alex being taken into state care. Unsurprisingly, this did not solve much and with puberty hitting, Alex tried to suicide, and was threatening to continue to attempt to suicide unless able to begin transitioning sex.
Her petition was supported by 2 of her teachers and (from memory) another family member. Her mother remained very conflicted and there was little evidence she would accept Alex any better if she formally transitioned, but an Aunt had agreed to take Alex and that she could accept her situation.
the result of the case was that Alex was allowed to basically go on the pill to remove menstruation, as it was obviously highly distressing; and would be allowed to start with non-reversable transitioning treatment at 16, surgery being still nontheless unavailable until legal adulthood (18).
I found the case overall extremely troubling, and the decision appalling, with the exception of the treatment to stop menstruation. Basically it seemed from how the case was reported and debated in the Australian press that there was significant evidence that Alex’s gender dysphoria was entirely generated by first her father’s upbringing and then her mother’s fierce rejection. There was nothing to suggest inherent dysphoria, only evidence to suggest basically child-abuse induced trauma.
Further, I can’t think of a single other case where a person of any age so distressed and ill as to be seeking suicide would be unequivocally granted their wishes - ie we don’t normally as a society treat people so emotionally distressed as the ones who should be making such huge decisions, let alone if they are minors. As one bio-ethicist put it (paraphrasing)- if Alex had been brought up to think she was a horse and threatened suicide unless granted the steps towards becoming a horse, would the court have responded in the same way?
While removing the immediate distress was absolutely vital, it seemed incredible to me that the court went so far as to lay a concrete path for Alex, without any allowance that with time, counselling, a safe home environment and less pressure from puberty, she might actually change her mind. It seemed to basically confirm Alex’s very troubled world view, that there were only 2 choices.
Obviously I’ve made my views here pretty plain, and I’ve done my best to remember all aspects of the case for others to comment on. I’d like to emphasise again that there were at least 3 adults supporting Alex’s request, but I can’t help but point out that 2 were teachers who apart from no doubt knowing Alex well and her day to day levels of distress and needs, were nonetheless unqualified to be used as a basis for this decision.
Overall, what I thought was most striking about this case was that Alex’s situation derived entirely from a culturally-induced upbringing; yet despite the fact that most arguments for transexxualism are (to my knowledge and experience) science-based, this seemed to be turned on its head in this case.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 6:47 pm
>>I found the case overall extremely troubling, and the decision appalling, with the exception of the treatment to stop menstruation. Basically it seemed from how the case was reported and debated in the Australian press that there was significant evidence that Alex’s gender dysphoria was entirely generated by first her father’s upbringing and then her mother’s fierce rejection. There was nothing to suggest inherent dysphoria, only evidence to suggest basically child-abuse induced trauma.>>
It’s proper to use the preferred pronoun when referring to any person, whatever their birth gender, whatever their politics, and whatever their rationale. Alex prefers male pronouns, and therefore deserves them.
How does Alex’s father’s decision to bring Alex up as a boy differ in effect from our parents’ decision to bring us up in one particular gender based on our genitals? Why is my brother’s male identity more valid than Alex’s? Why is Alex’s upbringing as male child abuse if it is not child abuse to bring up any male child as male? Why should Alex not be able to transition into the gendered body in which he feels most comfortable? And what is evidence of gender dysphoria besides a rejection of one’s assigned gender?
>>Further, I can’t think of a single other case where a person of any age so distressed and ill as to be seeking suicide would be unequivocally granted their wishes - ie we don’t normally as a society treat people so emotionally distressed as the ones who should be making such huge decisions, let alone if they are minors. As one bio-ethicist put it (paraphrasing)- if Alex had been brought up to think she was a horse and threatened suicide unless granted the steps towards becoming a horse, would the court have responded in the same way?>>
Transpeople are so treated; in fact, until some very important reforms took place, pain at the level of suicidal ideation was a requirement for some psychiatrists. Emotional distress does not prevent people from thinking clearly about the source of that distress, and believing otherwise would tend to create a pretty lethal double-bind for distressed people. The problem with the “horse” argument is that it’s used to support the position that the differences between men and women are definitely not on the same level as the differences between people and horses.
>>Overall, what I thought was most striking about this case was that Alex’s situation derived entirely from a culturally-induced upbringing; yet despite the fact that most arguments for transexxualism are (to my knowledge and experience) science-based, this seemed to be turned on its head in this case.>>
Arguments about transsexuality–the responsible ones, anyway–are made from a position of ignorance. We really don’t know why we exist. We’ve come up with a lot of hypotheses that don’t seem to work for one reason or another, and some that haven’t yet been demolished, but none that we can yet approve. Arguments for transition are made with that in mind, and are autonomy-based, not science-based or culture-based. The gist is that, in the absence of much evidence to support any overriding theory of transsexuality, and in the face of evidence to support the efficacy of transition, transpeople should be able to make their own decisions.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 7:01 pm
To answer your questions, Piny, wouldn’t it be necessary first to say what we mean by bringing up a child as a girl or a boy? Is it only referring to the child as such - as male or female? It seems to me that, in accepting the reality of a person’s subjective determination of his/her sex, it’s not necessary to lose the objective definition of sex (generally, but not exclusively, by what genitals the person possesses) - which is really the only useable definition when you’re talking about someone, like a baby, who can’t yet speak for her/himself. Of course, all this might be completely irrelevant, for example if it were possible to raise a child without exposing it to any gendered terms at all, assuming that this did the child no harm (I have no reason to think it would; just trying to cover all bases).
This comment was written by Ledasmom.If anyone has a link about this case, I’d be fascinated to know exactly what, in this case, constituted raising Alex “as a boy”, and when Alex’s father started doing so - not from birth, I would assume from the summary above, but I could be wrong about that.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 7:11 pm
>>To answer your questions, Piny, wouldn’t it be necessary first to say what we mean by bringing up a child as a girl or a boy?Is it only referring to the child as such - as male or female? It seems to me that, in accepting the reality of a person’s subjective determination of his/her sex, it’s not necessary to lose the objective definition of sex (generally, but not exclusively, by what genitals the person possesses) - which is really the only useable definition when you’re talking about someone, like a baby, who can’t yet speak for her/himself.>>
Bringing up a child as a boy means referring to him as such and treating him as such in a world where being a boy means that people interact with you in very different ways than they would if you were determined to be a girl for whatever reason. Alex’s father presumably treated him as he would any other boy; if Alex’s father is like most people, he treated Alex far differently than any girl–and caused other people around Alex to do the same.
Alex was treated as male all his life, while he happened to live in a body that supported that life. Then he was effectively forced to transition against his will: to accept a female body and live a female life. Because Alex’s mother’s decision to sex and gender him as female as based on the criteria we recognize, Alex’s unwillingness to go along with this program is read in a much different way than would any other boy’s. Contrast his treatment with the treatment of David Reimer, another person gendered as a girl who insisted on being a boy.
While the “objective definition of sex” is–in Australia, anyway–based on genitalia and assigned at birth, _gender_ and _gender identity_ are very different things. There is no single definition of how anyone’s gender should be determined, and no recognizable circumstance that leads anyone to identify as one gender rather than another. To sex someone is to gender them, but their gender identity will not necessarily correspond to their assigned sex.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Interesting discussion! I’d never heard of the Australian case before reading your post, Myriad, but from what I’ve googled, it sounds like Alex will be receiving counselling and support before and during his treatment, and since it will be a few years before he’s allowed to begin any irreversible treatments, I would think that he will have ample opportunity to change his mind, or to choose to delay the treatments.
Additionally, it looks to me like a psychiatric assessment was the basis for the judgment; I have obviously no way of knowing whether it was a good assessment - and I don’t know if there is any really good way of assessing gender dysphoria - but at least presumably it was done by someone with more qualifications than a teacher. (Link)
The fact that Alex is a minor is a sticky point, I agree, but given that he’s old enough to give his own input into his feelings (unlike, for example, David Reimer), and he was assessed by several psychiatrists as far as I can tell, and there’s going to be ongoing support, and it sounds like he was greatly distressed by his female body, I think it sounds like a reasonable decision.
This comment was written by mangala.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Hi Piny,
I apologise if my referral to Alex as “she” offends you - I’m quite aware of the norms here, but think my slips indicate my level of confusion over this case - to the point that this is the one instance I know of where I do slip.
>>How does Alex’s father’s decision to bring Alex up as a boy differ in effect from our parents’ decision to bring us up in one particular gender based on our genitals?
Aside from the fact that in the first instance Alex imposed a gender on a child with the opposite sex, thus creating a situation of almost certain trauma in one form or another? While fully supportive of the fact that it is undeniable that some children brought up in one sex/gender find it does not conform to their sex/gender later on, it still remains a small percentage, ie if you’re a good parent and all other things being equal, calling a female child “she” and a male child “he” have a low probability of causing distress. What Alex’s father did was create a situation that had an incredibly high chance of causing Alex distress. I’d call that at best, highly misguided and selfish, and more accurately, highly misguideded and selfish child abuse.
I wish I could find the link to the case background (what was publicly released, as obviously huge amounts were suppressed to protect a minor), because from memory it was evident that Alex was also extremely distressed by his father’s death, combined with rejection by his mother. This seems such an obvious, well-understood phenomenon, and one quite likley to reinforce Alex ascribing more fiercely and hard to the father in all aspects, including gender. I can’t help but wonder how time will play that out.
>>Why is my brother’s male identity more valid than Alex’s?
Assuming you brother is identifies male/man, the difference would be that Alex’s identity was utterly and deliberately contrived and imposed.
>>Why is Alex’s upbringing as male child abuse if it is not child abuse to bring up any male child as male?
see above.
>>Why should Alex not be able to transition into the gendered body in which he feels most comfortable? And what is evidence of gender dysphoria besides a rejection of one’s assigned gender?
I’m not arguing that Alex should never be allowed to transition; I’m arguing that a child is 1) physiologically incapable of making any decisions and understanding the consequences of them before their brain matures, and 12 unequivocally isn’t that point for either sex; and 2) that a highly traumatised child of all children is not in the best position to know what will make them ultimately more comfortable in life. I reiterate my support for Alex being provided with whatever non-reversible means to make life bearable and provide space for growing up and working out who ‘Alex’ is.
>>Transpeople are so treated; in fact, until some very important reforms took place, pain at the level of suicidal ideation was a requirement for some psychiatrists. Emotional distress does not prevent people from thinking clearly about the source of that distress, and believing otherwise would tend to create a pretty lethal double-bind for distressed people.
While agreeing entirely on the double-bind, and this being extremely difficult and delicate territory to navigate, firstly I see a very large difference between a suicidal adult and a suicidal child; and secondly I find it very difficult to agree with your assertion that being in severe emotional distress doesn’t preclude being able to identify the source of the distress. Perhaps the key I would suggest is the ability to make decisions. Severe emotional distress usually means that suicide is far beyond a decision and close approaching a compulsion - which leaves me more than a little worried about this as a frame of mind in which to seek other decisions and solutions.
Ledasmom, if you do a google keyword search, you’ll come across plenty of press articles covering the case in brief. What I can’t find, and I suspect it’s because it’s now archived or subscription-only, was an expert opinion piece which had the most detail I ever found at any rate, on Alex’s background.
I’ll keep searching around and see what I can find.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Ps - the one other part of the judge’s statement I agreed with entirely was his exhortation for Australian states to stop making sex reassignment surgery a necessity for a legal identity change.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Now THAT I completely agree with. My friend who I described above, is a pre-op as she hasn’t been able to afford the surgery since she is a grad student and her parents have disowned her. So, legally, she is male (as her home state requires surgery for such changes if I am remembering correctly), even though it’s blatantly obvious to anyone that she is a woman. If for some reason she were arrested, she’d end up in prison.
And thanks Piny and Alsis (hey babe!! *kiss*) for the ‘welcome back’. I do miss the wonderful theoretical discussions here, but not enough to outweigh the homophobia and make my return permanent.
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 8:03 pm
crud, I am having a bad evening … “If for some reason she were arrested, she’d end up in a MALE prison”
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 8:16 pm
I checked the “horse” reference. It didn’t come from Leon Kass, as I suspected at first. The quote comes from someone at the Southern Cross Bioethics institute. Let’s see what they have to say about abortion, shall we? (PDF) Their survey says,
Never trust a bio-ethicist. I’m kidding, but I’m kidding on the square.
This comment was written by hf.Report this comment to the moderators
January 2nd, 2006 at 8:17 pm
But what evidence is there that the father’s decision to raise Alex as a boy actually influenced his gender identification at all? It was apparently quite clear to the courts that he was adamant about being a boy, to the point of wearing diapers rather than use the girl’s bathroom at school. In addition, if his identification is male, how much does it matter how it got that way?
This comment was written by Ledasmom.It seems to me, however, that the difference between raising a child that is physically a girl as a boy and one that is physically a boy as a boy is that, unless you assume a very great fluidity in gender at an early age, the assumed gender is more likely to be congruent with the actual (subjective?) gender of the child in the latter case. If there is hard evidence on the subject, I’d love to see it.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 8:19 pm
Found this article, that links to the original (publicly available) court finding - which is a bit of a trawl, but obviously a good thing to have. I’m pleased to see (embarrassment @ my memory aside) that there were a number of experts involved, which wasn’t reported well in the press.
I hope I’ve made the link work right.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Let’s try the link again
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January 2nd, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Sorry hf, cultural difference, I don’t know what “kidding on the square” means! :o
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January 2nd, 2006 at 8:43 pm
I know it seems like a long shot coincidence that Alex was both raised as a boy and also identifies as a boy, because both of those conditions are at variance with his apparent morphologic sex. But it’s also hard to believe that there wouldn’t be some sign of it if he identified as a girl and was in conflict with the way he was raised. Such a coincidence may be statistically unlikely, but has to be considered in light of the other evidence. Also, how do we know that the father’s adoption of this cultural tradition wasn’t in part a response to his knowledge of his own child?
If it were possible to determine a child’s gender by how they are raised, I would think precious few transpeople would exist. The David Reimer case showed how misguided that idea was. He knew he was a boy in spite of every effort to coerce him on the part of his parents and the professionals under the direction of Dr. Money.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:08 pm
I think (from the article I linked to) this is the heart of it for me too -
“What seems to have gone amiss in the case is how much did Alex’s exposure to masculinity, coupled with limited exposure to and growing resentment of, femininity born out of his mother’s apathy towards him, affect his ultimate gender identity? There is some doubt raised when you consider that Alex told a doctor in 2001 that “[he] ‘knows [he] is a girl but would like to be a boy’.”[19]”
My other major concerns still remain Alex’s age and level of development, and from reviewing again the Court info, the lack of dissenting expert testimony.
To respond to Ledasmom -
>>”It was apparently quite clear to the courts that he was adamant about being a boy, to the point of wearing diapers rather than use the girl’s bathroom at school.”
Agreed, but traumatised children are known to undertake all sorts of extraordinary behaviours that don’t necessarily at all get reinforced by adult recognition or approval, but rather are treated as symptoms of underlying problems. But it seems that the behaviours of children with gender dysphoria are treated differently, and while I never want to see a child’s life endangered and so support intervention to help Alex, I think it’s important to robustly critique this.
>>”In addition, if his identification is male, how much does it matter how it got that way?”
If Alex had been socialised to be a child soldier, and identifies as a child soldier, how much does it matter how it got that way? I just find this more than a little troubling. I find it more than odd, as David mentioned above, that in the David Reimer case people were absolutely appalled at the forced imposition of gender on Reimer, but somehow it becomes acceptable simply because Alex conforms to it.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:23 pm
I got the phrase “kidding on the square” from Al Franken. It means something like “ha ha, only serious”.
We’ve gotten into philosophical issues now. In the unlikely event that someone wants to know how I approach the issue, see here. Particularly the second-to-last paragraph. On a practical note, didn’t you say they won’t give Alex hormones for some years yet? And while hormone therapy may have irreversible consequences, so could failing to get hormone therapy early enough. This seems like a reasonable compromise.
If it were possible to determine a child’s gender by how they are raised, I would think precious few transpeople would exist.
This comment was written by hf.Devil’s Advocate: Well, actually…
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:34 pm
I don’t think that socialization to be a child soldier and gender socialization can really be equated; the former is obviously harmful, but I don’t think that it’s at all clear how much socialization contributes to gender identity. It may be quite a coincidence that Alex happens to have been raised as a boy and identifies as a boy, but I don’t think it’s impossible. The David Reimer case definitely suggests that there can be an inherent gender identity that may differ from how one is socialized.
People weren’t enraged that David Reimer was raised as a girl; they were enraged by the imposition of a gender that clearly didn’t fit how David Reimer felt about himself. If Alex feels that he is male, and doesn’t feel that masculine identification has been imposed on him, then I really don’t see why we shouldn’t accept that.
This is a roundabout way for me to say that as far as I’m concerned, if you’re living as a woman or a man and identify as one or the other, you ought to qualify.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Gah! “Qualify” as in “qualify as whatever gender you’re living as” - I didn’t mean anything about qualifying for surgery.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Alex will receive hormone treatment at 16 that will have some irreversible effects (hair growth, deepening voice etc.). I note that there’s ongoing assessment of Alex, which is good, except that as with the assessment of the case, as far as I can see it remains in the hands of experts who are already convinced that transition is the only way to go for Alex.
It’s also as I understand it an issue of some debate as to when hormone treatment should start in adolescents, as it will obviously affect their normal development. Given the complex interaction between brain chemistry, and in crude shorthand, who we are & how we perceive the world, I am again left questioning whether the path Alex has been set upon will end up self-fulfilling, but whether that in itself will definitely mean happiness.
It also seems from, for eg, other posts by Piny on other threads, that the more (for want of a better descriptor) traditional practice of physical alterations to affect a gender/sex (the bit where I get confused as it seems to vary so much from person to person) is dminishing, I’m left wondering why it’s being encouraged for a child.
I think the best reponse I can give re: bioethicists is that there are bioethicists, and then there are bioethicists. : /
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January 2nd, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Actually hf, when I think about what you quoted, you quoted a survey carried out by the institute, and that quote you gave was some of their findings of surveyed Australian attitudes towards abortion. I think it’s an awful long bow to draw to imply that 1) this is therefore the view of the institute that did the surveying and 2) it has any relevance to one of the institute’s members comments.
that being said, I really hope Piny has time to come back and I meant to say, I’d really appreciate a better unpacking of your comment Piny, re: the horse.
cheers
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January 2nd, 2006 at 10:44 pm
All right, if you doubt my view of the Institute, let’s take a look at their opinion pieces.
From a piece bearing the title, Post-Coital Intervention Over the Counter:
A review of the book From Darwin to Hitler starts with a “Social Darwinist” quote, and describes the quote’s author thusly:
Never. Trust. A. Bioethicist.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:00 pm
>>While fully supportive of the fact that it is undeniable that some children brought up in one sex/gender find it does not conform to their sex/gender later on, it still remains a small percentage, ie if you’re a good parent and all other things being equal, calling a female child “she” and a male child “he” have a low probability of causing distress. What Alex’s father did was create a situation that had an incredibly high chance of causing Alex distress.>>
But it didn’t cause Alex distress. By this logic, the mother’s the abusive one, even setting all her other behavior aside. And there’s no saying whether all or most people would feel distress were they raised as the gender opposite their assigned sex, since that almost never happens.
myriad: >>Assuming you brother is identifies male/man, the difference would be that Alex’s identity was utterly and deliberately contrived and imposed.>>
And this is exactly what I’m saying. How is Alex’s identity more “contrived and imposed” than my brother’s? Why is my brother’s maleness more authentic than Alex’s? Why does the fact that my brother’s imposed gender–and necessarily gendered role–more natural and less traumatic merely because it happens to correspond to how we as a society define the condition and role concurrent with my brother’s genitals? Why is my brother’s comfort in his gender–or the comfort of any given boy–not as suspicious as Alex’s?
David:>>If it were possible to determine a child’s gender by how they are raised, I would think precious few transpeople would exist. >>
It may well be possible to determine the gender of _some_ children by how they’re raised. There are precious few transpeople, remember? We contradict the assertion that gender is _all_ nurture, or nurture in every case, not that it may be defining for many.
myriad again:>>I find it more than odd, as David mentioned above, that in the David Reimer case people were absolutely appalled at the forced imposition of gender on Reimer, but somehow it becomes acceptable simply because Alex conforms to it.>>
The point I was making by bringing up David Reimer is that people see his male gender, and insistence on it, as more authentic because he was biologically male, that is, assigned male at birth. Assigning him female and taking medical steps to maintain a feminized body was unconscionable intervention, but saying, “Oh, okay, I guess we were wrong to do that, since you’re so unhappy,” and subsequent medical measures to change his body further, is merely restoration of his rightful gender. No one said to David Reimer, “Why do you have to mutilate your body? Why can’t you just be a woman who does unconventional things?”
There’s also the question of what is seen as forced. Why is Alex’s mother not seen as forcibly imposing gender on Alex? Say a hypothetical David Reimer were the focus of a similar custody dispute: mutilated in a circumcision accident and subsequently raised by his father, who fell in with John Money and decided that David would be much happier as a girl. David is unwittingly reassigned, and lives most of his formative years as a girl, Dawn. In his pre-teens, Dawn’s custody passes to his mother. She disagrees with Dawn’s father, and decides that Dawn has to become David again. Unlike the real David, Dawn doesn’t want to. Is Dawn’s mother’s decision a forced imposition of gender on Dawn? Is it contrived? What if Dawn neither objected nor communicated discontent with living as a girl?
>>I am again left questioning whether the path Alex has been set upon will end up self-fulfilling, but whether that in itself will definitely mean happiness.>>
If it is self-fulfilling–that is, if he eventually sees his gender identity as corresponding to his masculinized body, and his masculinized body as comfortable–how might he be unhappy in the context of his gender?
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Hi Mangala,
I find it pretty hard to believe that had David Reimer happily accepted his socialisation, there still wouldn’t be a significant amount of controversey over his case. Nobody knew how David Reimer felt about himself when the gender was imposed, as he was a baby. It seems pretty clear that Alex was too. I’m still at a loss as to why the imposition of a gender changes from appalling to fine based on how the child responds. Both instances involve a child in the most formative years; and in Alex’s case we can discern that he was getting only positive masculine reinforcement from his father, and
rejection and absolutely negative reinforcement from his mother. Why and how does this this huge factor somehow become irrelevant?
While the child soldier analogy was admittedly a tad extreme, I think you are overlooking well-known impacts on Alex’s health from taking hormones -eg liver damage. It’s not like this decision has no ramifications for Alex’s physical health; it clearly does. And while it can be fairly argued that at the time there was no doubt that some sort of intervention was required for Alex’s mental health, I still think the decision went way too far in confirming virtually only one decision for Alex to make him happy for his whole life. Yet this child at the time was 12 (turned 13 as the case was heard I’m guessing, as I’ve seen both ages given). So I’d argue that the jury (as it were) is still very much out in terms of whether this will play well for Alex’s long-term mental health.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:11 pm
It also seems from, for eg, other posts by Piny on other threads, that the more (for want of a better descriptor) traditional practice of physical alterations to affect a gender/sex (the bit where I get confused as it seems to vary so much from person to person) is dminishing, I’m left wondering why it’s being encouraged for a child.>>
It’s not diminishing at all. Transition is becoming more widespread, because being transsexual is less likely to get you fired, evicted, assaulted, raped, killed, etc. At the same time, transition is becoming more personalized: transpeople are allowed to make up their own minds as to what procedures they want to undergo, what doses of hormones they want to take. A desperate need to get rid of your original genitalia is no longer seen as a necessary condition for a transsexual diagnosis.
An increasing number of transsexuals, but by no means all, are deciding that they prefer to keep their genitals the way they are. Some transpeople have no problem with their genitals as originally configured. Some are just doing cost/benefit analyses of some pretty flawed options. Rejecting current options for genital surgery, or opting out of the enormous expense, is not the same as unqualified comfort in one’s original body or a lack of desire for SRS as it might eventually be performed.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:13 pm
I’m still at a loss as to why the imposition of a gender changes from appalling to fine based on how the child responds.>>
You tell me. You don’t seem to have any problem with imposing gender on a child as long as it corresponds to birth sex.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:20 pm
>>I think you are overlooking well-known impacts on Alex’s health from taking hormones -eg liver damage.>>
Liver damage is an occasional side-effect of masculinizing hormones. It doesn’t happen often, and it has become far less common over the past few decades. Transpeople are monitored with regular, frequent blood tests to make sure that their livers are healthy. Problems don’t usually crop up after years of healthy life on testosterone, and they’re yet more unlikely in a healthy, fit person. In the rare event of a problem, the transman in question stops taking testosterone and ceases to have an unhealthy liver. There are side effects so common as to be general, but they mostly involve assuming a physically male body, with the attendant male risks.
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January 2nd, 2006 at 11:27 pm
>>I think you are overlooking well-known impacts on Alex’s health from taking hormones -eg liver damage.>>
It’s also worth pointing out that transpeople in general receive criminally negligent medical care. Any statistics on liver damage, cancer risks (especially anything related to the reproductive system), or any other health problem need to take into account that the population in question has good reason to avoid seeing a doctor or going to a hospital. The health risks associated with transition are far more social than physical.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 1:37 am
i was born and raised jewish, though i no longer practice the religion. that said, in judaism, when a “child” reaches 13, he is considered an adult, with all the responsibilities that adults have. of course in today’s society, that really doesn’t happen until one is 18. or is that 21?
oh, and it’s age 12 for females.
i very much remember my life when i was 12 or 13. i have some of my most vivid memories from that period of time. it was during that time that i came to know that i was very different than the other boys, and what that meant as far as how my life might go.
in those days, the 60’s, in suburbs of new york, sex changes were unheard of, at least by me. i realized pretty early on in my journey that i would have to come to terms with the fact that i’d be living my life as a man. i did not have an easy time of it.
i won’t go into the details.
my point is that by the time i was 12 or 13, i knew how i wanted to live my life. the way i felt then, is the way i feel now, and the way i’ve felt my entire “adult” life, assuming we use the jewish definition of “adulthood”.
i can’t say how my life would have played out had i somehow managed to transition at that age. there’s no way for me to know, though i’ll admit i spend way too much time thinking about that very issue. my therapist attributes that to my ocd.
further, i can totally understand why people are very much uncomfortable with the idea of putting such a young person on life-changing medical programs.
but from my own perspective, i knew at age 12, as clearly and strongly as i know now, who i am and how i wanted to live my life. the jury is still out on whether i’d be better off now had i transitioned back then. though i like to imagine that my long-term mental health would have been in much better shape.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 2:02 am
i’m totally with bean on this. david was 22 months old when he was “reassigned”, well past the time when children begin to know themselves and the world around them. frankly, i believe that process begins the moment we are born. i think the only thing this case proves, is the incompetence of the doctors who treated him, all of whom i believe should be held responsible for his death.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 2:03 am
mythago,
I’m sure there are many of us in this position. I’ve given it so much thought that my brain hurts because I actually want to have a ‘clear’ position, based on principles of humanity and fairness and not just politics. (Well, if my politics don’t include these things, what the hell are they about?) I support WBW space at all only on the grounds that, say in the case of michfest, the organisers have a right to determine ‘which’ shared eccsperiences (no ‘eccs’ yet, sorry) make up the festival commonality. Being socialised female from birth is generally a negative and disempowering eccsperience, and has this about it, or all through it, no matter how ‘well’ a woman might ‘do’ or how ‘happy’ she may become in life, and I think that’s the main commonality that underpins the festival. The acknowledgement of this, the sharing of it, the whole of it, and then that of the ability to become empowered and overcome it. The joy and positive affirmation of that. That the festival is built from the ground up and in every facet by women who were raised as girls to believe there wasn’t a whole lot they could do, outside ‘traditional’ female occupations. That’s why some women believe female to male transeccsuals should perhaps be more welcome than male to female transeccsuals. Also, as has been mentioned in this thread, male socialisation is what it is, set against all things that might carry ‘girl germs’. MTF transeccuals therefore have a different growing up eccsperience, whether or not they were ever fully embraced or ‘rewarded’ as males. How did they ’see’ themselves, neccst to girls and women? Does a kind of ‘dominant’ or ‘I am central’ idea of self survive transition, and will it impact on a WBW gathering? These seem like awful, personal questions to be asking, but they are the ones being asked. Women are saying - ‘can’t we just be together for one week in the woods a year, without these complications? Is that too much to ask?’ (I haven’t even touched on the fact that most women there are lesbians as well, which is a whole other commonality…) It doesn’t seem to me that it should be, and yet…
As I’ve said earlier, the ‘anti-trans’ politics used to defend WBW space, by some, are utterly offensive to me. Bio-women (??) ‘are’ doing more in the world, and I’d like to see any ‘need’ or desire for WBW space diminish correspondingly, rather than eccspand, which is not the same goal as anti-trans feminists, who would prefer that transeccsuals didn’t eggsist at all. So, if I support WBW space, and ask others to support it too, am I contributing to a radfem anti-trans agenda that I find abhorrent? I can’t do that.
Then I’m thinking about numbers. Transeccsual women are never going to outnumber ‘born’ women at any womens gathering.Born women aren’t going to be ‘disappeared’. If we’re all honest and open about our own individual life paths, we all have someting to bring to feminism from our own unique as well as our shared eccsperiences. This is the way I see it. I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise in fact.
I’m on the fence re michfest and other WBW events because I can’t demand of WBW who are ‘not’ coming from any kind of transphobia or prejudice that they make an accomodation they don’t wish to make, when that is such a ‘feature’ of the overall female eccsperience that they are releasing themselves from.
I guess the slow path to resolution is if transeccsuals stop asking to enter WBW space, as many alredy have, if they’ve ever asked, and WBW be clear about what the space actually means to them, for as long as it means anything. And for those WBW who don’t have or agree with an anti-trans political platform or agenda, to state this loud and clear, to not ever just be silent when those views are being eccspressed.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 2:29 am
a big part of the problem, at least as i see it, is that there is no language with which to explain what being transsexual means. we use analogy as a big part of articulating ourselves and our feelings, as an integral part of our very language, though when it comes to being trans, there is nothing, no other experience, that even comes close.
i find the use of animal analogies to be offensive, though i try my best to see those usages in a generous light. i can understand the use of the animal analogy by a person who is not trans because both are so far outside their own personal experience. but i can tell you that is the only thing they have in common; that for a non-trans person, both conditions are unknowable.
i have also seen people use race or religion in analogies as well. while i can’t speak to the race comparison, as i’ve never wanted to live my life as a person of another race, i can say that transition was nothing like converting from judaism to wicca. sex and gender simply operate on a totally different level than any other human experience. there simply are no analogies that work, at least none that i have found.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 2:59 am
This struck a raw nerve with me, because I heard something very similar growing up. I was raised by my dad and “abandoned” by my mum (absent mothers get a harsh deal, but that’s not the subject of this thread) and people queued up to ascribe my gender dysphoria to that. The best suggestion was that my mother’s having two sons by her second husband made me think she would value me more if I was a boy.
I wonder how much Alex’s parents’ attitudes towards him provided a handy excuse for people who couldn’t accept his male identity?
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January 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 am
I was kinda wondering that myself, Nick. Since Alex is a minor, we really don’t know the details of his home life and so forth (and I’m still wondering about that bit from Myriad’s original post on the subject: what culture is it in which the youngest child is raised as a boy if there’s no boys born? It sounds like Alex was raised as a boy pretty much from the start; how often could you be that certain of no boys ever being born? And if this is cultural, and rearing a genetic girl as a boy did lead to a greater tendency to self-identify as male, wouldn’t there be a larger percentage of transgender people in this particular culture? I’m trying to remember the details of something I saw on TV ages ago; I believe the country in question was in eastern Europe, and it was accepted for a girl or woman, presumably unmarried, to choose to live socially as a man - often for the purposes of inheritance and having a “male figure” in the family, but one would presume sometimes for other reasons as well), but I do suspect that in a case of this sort someone could come up with an argument from environment for pretty much any home environment. No father, mother very feminine? Overcompensation! Normal two-parent family? Uh, excessive influence from a beloved male teacher? No falsifiability, no provability when you’re dealing with a single case.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 6:12 am
Bean said:
I hope that I wasn’t being unclear in my comment regarding David Reimer - I don’t think this case can “prove” anything - but I think it suggests the possibility of an inherent sense of gender (at least in some cases) apart from socialization (even if David Reimer wasn’t raised exactly like a girl of that time period, I think it’s clear that he wasn’t treated exactly like a boy of the time either).
Myriad said:
I’m not sure how well that represents the actual treatment that Alex will receive, Myriad. The treatment is graduated, so Alex will have time to change his mind, and the first part of the treatment isn’t harmful. In my view, this buys Alex time and space while assuring him that in the future, if he wants it, he will be allowed to undergo more treatments, and from what I could find out, he’ll be receiving psychiatric support and assessment in the interim.
Maybe I have too much faith in psychologists - but I would hope that they, along with Alex’s aunt, would be in a position to recognize signs that he is changing his mind, or evidence that he is not yet competent to make irrevocable decisions about his treatments, and in that case would act to delay the treatments.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 8:23 am
I don’t mean to be obtuse, or humorless either :), but I’m not sure of what you are trying to say here. Of all the transpeople I know, none of them was raised with that outcome in mind, and in many cases their parents made tremendous effort to do the opposite, to raise them in the gender of assignment. I think that’s the norm, was my only point.
We can’t prove a negative - we can’t show that Alex *doesn’t* have an inherent male identity that corresponds to the way he was raised, and we also can’t show that there is causation in one direction, if at all. What we can do is look at the evidence that there are people who defy the entire weight of their family and culture to live as the gender that they internally feel themselves to be.
In spite of the best efforts of parents to raise their children to be a certain gender, if the child isn’t that gender it won’t work. I am saying that the preponderance of the evidence supports that conclusion, and not the conclusion that a parent can impose a gender on their child, whether it is concordant with their apparent sex or not.
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January 3rd, 2006 at 9:55 am
All gender identity is deliberately contrived and imposed. Gender is not innate. All parents are complicit in establishing gender in their children — and I would argue that those who force a barbie doll femininity on *anyone* are the most abusive. Raising a female “as a boy” is not abusive unless you feel that the rigid gender norms of man and woman (in the adult variant) are socially healthy — a point which many feminists argue in the first place.
I am a female, born to parents who were more or less control freaks and abusive. The one thing they could not fully control was my “gender presentation” — even though they did enough to establish a fundamental belief in the differences between boys and girls. I cannot claim a totality of being raised as a boy, but for all intents and purposes, I was. Most adults thought I was a boy, and a good many of my peers did too, despite my name being Sue. The running joke in the neighborhood when I was 3 or 4 was that I should have been born the boy and my brother should have been born the girl (he is homosexual too). When I was six I was riding my bike shirtless and an older bully boy stopped me and grilled me as to whether I was a boy or a girl…. knowing that “girl” would get my six year old ass beaten to a pulp, I answered “boy.” I was not troubled by this, or confused by this; I lived with the repurcusions of this answer until I was in high school. The same boy called me “man-girl” all through junior high and spit on my bicycle seat every-fucking-day for two years. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s and started seriously reading feminism that I had any inkling of what “woman” meant in relationship to me and my lived experience. Up until then, I was just Sue. I did not think of myself as boy or girl, man or woman. Just Sue. And that worked for me. Still does actually. As an adult I have gone through my butch phase, b/c that gave me the greatest sense of strength and courage. Now I’m folding back more towards androgyny and slight, but dorky, femininity.
I say all this just so that those who claim that transsexuals or transgenders are abherrent might realize that gender and identitiy aren’t necessarily *supposed* to mesh. But, even so, reading Piny’s words, it should be clear that this isn’t what transsexuality or transgenderism is about in the first place.
Piny, thanks for keeping your cool in this thread and for being so eloquent. You say in post #57:
I think this keeps getting buried, and I’d love to explore this some more. It makes a lot of sense to me and seems to also speak to a highly nuanced interpretation that I can’t quite wrap my mind around. I’m thinking in terms of my not having problems when I was younger in passing as male. I accepted my ability to do so as just part of me; part of the activities I was engaged in — playing football, getting in fist fights (and winning), having crushes on girls. :) Puberty was, of course, the dark lining on that cloud — not only socially, but physically with the onset of breasts and menses (breasts b/c of sports and menses b/c I have a very short 21 day cycle and heavy cramps). Socially sucked b/c all my male friends dropped me and I hadn’t yet established female friends. The girls all looked at me as suspect b/c I refused to wear a bra, grow my hair, or stop playing football. I had a choice at this point, to either bow down to social pressure to pick a gender or to be an outcast. I chose gender. Or rather, I was coerced into making a clear choice.
So what all does this have to do with the topic at hand…. hmmmm. I’m not sure. But somehow I think it is relevant — not just anecdotally, but also politically.
Thoughts anyone?
:)
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January 3rd, 2006 at 10:04 am
um, help Amp.
[Fixed! And thanks for pointing it out - problems like this aren't visible on all browsers, so if you don't tell me, I might not see it. --Amp]
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:15 am
Sure, Bean. Sorry if it’s confusing. I agree with what you’ve said about David Reimer; I would argue that he’s good proof that raising him the way his parents did did not make him a girl. However, because he was only one person and because we really don’t understand what causes what, we can’t really use him to establish a causative relationship.
And everything Qgrrl said.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 am
…Well, sorta. All I know about the potential biological bases for gender is that nothing is known about the potential biological bases for gender. We’ve got a small population of people who’ve been fitted for a great many failed explanations, a far larger group of people who don’t seem to fit into any encompassing paradigm, and a few exceptional cases that can’t inform about the whole.
If gender is socially constructed, and if gender-identity is therefore the result of social influence, they still don’t seem to correspond to how society sees gender. It’s not like you plug social pressure x into any given person and get outcome y. We deal with a multitude of influences, all of which weave into each other, and we negotiate them in very individual ways. So while gender may not be consensual, or natural, it’s not…impersonal.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 am
Damn it, Q-grrl, get your chocolate out of my peanut butter.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:48 am
Well, piny, we could get into a whole side track of the social utility of gender and its transparency. :)
I agree though, that one cannot say it isn’t impersonal, as per my anecdotal childhood. I only argue that individuals don’t necessarily get to choose the medium or the concepts. But, then again, we really don’t get to do that with anything, once we’re socialized. Damn public schooling and all that.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:54 am
(Sorry, that’s Q Grrl’s post at 146. Urph.
But, hey, it worked …)
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:56 am
Piny said:
One function of that belief seems to be to neutralise the transgressive aspects of transition- if one person can perform both male and female identities at a socially acceptable and effective level then that raises questions about how exactly the whole binary gender system operates. The separate spheres assumptions of gender effectively require that people can’t switch. After all if someone was really a man\woman all along, and was really no good in their pre-transition gender, then it’s much less troubling that they’ve chosen to change; in other words, there aren’t any ramifications for Mr or Ms Normative.
Similarly, that understanding of trans identity is also likely to understand transition as the discovery of another (correct) identity underneath the previously misperceived one. If you see trans identity as ‘discovered’ (hence the man\woman in a man\woman’s body) then rather than seeing trans identity as potentially transgressive or destabilising of gender norms it simply becomes an instance of a misinterpretation of a fundamentally correct principle.
Q Grrl said:
Traditionally the approach applied by the gender industry embodied this kind of defusal approach- in order to qualify for treatment trans people were required to conform to the stereotypes of the gender they were transitioning to. The treatment model was set up to confirm a conservative understanding of trans identity- the gatekeeping system ensured that the only people who could transition were those who were at least purportedly conforming to a trans narrative that confirms the gender binary and didn’t divert from traditional gender norms. The result of those restrictions was a system whereby trans people memorized the requisite narrative and served it up to the professionals. The system as it existed, and as it’s still applied in some places, was essentially institutionalised gender coercion.
The problem I have with much of the feminist analysis of trans people was that it-exemplified by Janice Raymond- conflated the institutional forces driving coercive practices and generating the dominant narratives about who and what trans people and gender identity disorder are with the authentic desires and lived experience of trans people themselves. The dominance of the medical narrative of transition has also filtered through to the social narratives that were presented in trans memoirs, television programs on trans people and so forth. Until relatively recently the overwhelming majority of the trans narratives produced cleaved to the medical narrative, because that’s what society said trans people are like and trying to play against that is really hard. The women’s health movement and women’s attempts to re-define health and normality against medical and patriarchally enforced norms are a pretty good analogy for the hurdles trans people have faced in trying to re-define our own experiences and subjectivity.
This comment was written by Tarn.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 11:16 am
Everything Tarn said, too.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:11 pm
I want to say thanks to the thoughtful and reasoned responses I have received, particularly from Piny and Nexyjoe. I would like to thank you in particular for not conflating my self-confessed confusion over this case with any rejection of Alex’s very real distress, or validity in identifying male. It’s my sincere hope that Alex is exactly right and will be happy male. I can’t think of anything worse quite frankly at this point than Alex changing his mind. My apologies also Nexyjoe for the horse paraphrase -thank you for explaining your response to it; this in particular struck me:
That certainly explains well how I feel, and yes, I do find myself groping for analogies.
Qgrrl said
Yes, I know. Although I would argue that your regular parents don’t deliberately impose it - they just live out the paradigm, and I see that as a critical distinction with Alex’s case. His father did quite deliberately choose to enact part of his cultural background that put Alex firstly totally at odds with his mother, and secondly totally at odds with society. Those are the two bits that really strike me - and yes, I think the mother was abusive as well, just in a much more straightforward manner. I think Alex was put in a very polarising position from day one - and I think the distinction that needs to be made is between raising Alex like a boy and raising Alex as a boy.
To the last point, obviously. I’d argue that what children need is not to have any gender norms imposed upon them as much as humanly possible.
What I do find troubling in what you wrote is that you seem to be saying that raising a female as a boy is not abusive - - because boys have more freedom, respect, safety etc? I hope I’m reading you wrong, because that suggests to me you are saying that it’s more desirable to raise a female as a boy because it’s all too hard to raise a female as a girl with an understanding of their freedom, respect etc.?
And while I’d agree that barbie-doll femininity is very damaging, I’ve know girls who were equally damaged by their parents determined trying to force them to reject ’stereotypical’ femininity when - much as I might squirm at it as a feminist - it clearly made them happy, and makes them happy to this day - I guess I could patronise the shit out them by explaining why their happiness is this terrible thing built upon a profoundly damaging stereotype, but I happen to know they are intelligent women and to say that they didn’t choose would be extremely rude. So I don’t really agree with their choice, but I can’t deny they made one.
Tarn said
Yes, exactly, to all that you wrote, but in particular this. And colour me still a little unconvinced that this may be at work still in Alex’s case.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:14 pm
dammit! Sorry lost last bit to Tarn; the reason for that is I am not convinced the impact of Alex’s family situation was fully taken into account; and I find statements in the case such as “Alex could beat all the boys at arm wrestling” such a load of hooey as to be really troubling. I am 5′ 3″ and could beat all the boys in virtually any physical sport until I was about 13 - because after that the boys all hit puberty and started putting on muscle etc. So presenting as “evidence” that a pre-pubescent female could beat pre-pubescent males in strength competitions is completely irrelevant. Basic physiological development teaches this.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 4:02 pm
I–who am not Q grrl–would argue that it’s damaging, and therefore arguably abusive, to raise children with gendered norms. Alex’s mother, for example, would have been and is giving into society’s mandate that she injure her child by making her child a girl. While it’s true that girls suffer more because their position in that dichotomy is the lower one, boys are also hurt.
But this is contradicted by your argument about why Alex’s father’s conduct constitutes abuse:
Had Q-grrl’s parents decided to raise Q-grrl as a strong, brave, active, independent, girl-crushing, shirtless-in-summer kid, they would have been putting her completely at odds with society, and probably damaging her ability to interact with society on its terms. On that level, there really is no difference between raising a child _like_ the opposite sex and raising a child _as_ the opposite sex; both turn your kid into a little freak who will encounter a great deal of prejudice and violence in his or her life. Nor would there be much distinction between Alex the little baby butch and Alex the boy in the eyes of any tormentors. In fact, Alex the boy is currently on a path that in some ways is much safer and much more socially acceptable than butch womanhood.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 4:13 pm
All of this is interesting, very interesting….I have a lot of questions in my head and areas I want to explore but for right now, since this is my first post and I didn’t find a place to sign in/up, I’m just experimenting to see if I can just jump in like this.
Hello to everyone!!
This comment was written by RedNova.Report this comment to the moderators
January 3rd, 2006 at 5:28 pm
membership because they aren’t ‘orthodox’ enough. I wonder if there is a genetic basis for having to insist on orthodoxy in some people? :). Anyway, the discussion was enlightening and lead to a new moderation policy there, feminist-only threads andthis entry on why feminists should accept transwomen. I had always assumed that male-to-female transgendered women who wished to align themselves with feminism would be welcomed with open arms. But apparently that is not the case. Anyway, that discussion thread (one of the first feminist or friendly-only
This comment was written by Daddy, Papa and Me.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
While I don’t know if this applies to Alex (none of the links I clicked on had his ethnic background), this happens in Samoa, in both directions (a boy-less family will raise a younger girl as a boy, and a girl-less family will raise a younger boy as a girl.) Of boys raised as girls, a substantial number go on to live in a roughly trans-like role, being socially treated as women. For some reason, the reverse doesn’t seem to happen — while I knew girls who were raised as boys, I didn’t know any who continued to live as men when they reached adulthood.
This comment was written by LizardBreath.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Thanks for all the interesting posts and interesting links - this has been a high-quality thread, full of thought.
This comment was written by NancyP.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Hi Piny,
I am either having a particularly obtuse day, or perhaps you missed a word out or something, because I’m finding it really hard to see how me saying:
1) an ideal world would see kids raised without gendered norms impossed
and
2) Alex’s father’s very deliberate, conscious choice to impose a gender norm opposite to that which would normally fit within the paradigm is at best selfish and misguided, and at worst, abuse.
constitutes me contadicting myself. Help!?
Except with the former, there’s a much higher probability that you are not going to grow up loathing your biological body; in the latter, there’s a much higher probability you are.
Again, I think this is the crux for me - I feel that it’s hard enough that some people grow up utterly distressed & alienated by their body; I feel the actions of both Alex’s parents, but particularly the father, significantly increased the likelihood of that happening -and it did.
I think we’ve well and truly established that you and I disagree here (?)
I also find these statements of yours -
my open question - so where does this place a case like Alex?
1, I think there’s an inherent contradiction there - ie we know little or nothing about transsexual health, they get criminally negligent care, but the risks of transitioning are far more social than physical??? and 2, I think it rather starkly contradicts your last point in your last post -
SoI’m wondering if a lot of the unresolved stuff I see above comes down to - so far we’ve talked nigh-on exclusively about the ‘nurture’ bit. I ask this honestly, with no attempt at a ‘gotcha’ moment - what’s your take on the “nature” bit?
cheers
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Ps- my honest take on the “nature” side is I have no idea, and while am open to us one day finding good evidence, I’m not sure we’re there yet.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
I think there’s an inherent contradiction there - ie we know little or nothing about transsexual health, they get criminally negligent care, but the risks of transitioning are far more social than physical?
Doesn’t seem like a contradiction when you realize that a doctor who doesn’t want to treat transsexuals might pick any specialization except sexual reassignment surgery.
This comment was written by hf.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
It’s the part where his actions are somehow worse because he’s imposing a gendered norm that happens to be opposite from the paradigm, or worse because he’s bringing his child up to be an outsider. What if he’d raised Alex as an unfeminine girl? Would that have been better somehow? It would have been an “opposite” upbringing, to be sure.
Why do you think that it would be more likely to cause distress in one’s body? Butch dykes express alienation from their bodies all the time.
In a different position from that of most people undertaking transition. Other than that, I’m not sure. Do you think Alex’s desire to transition is based solely on his lack of training as a girl? I don’t know if that’s true.
That’s not what I said at all. There’s plenty of evidence that transition is not physically harmful–to wit, the transpeople who aren’t dying or suffering liver damage. Care providers who specialize in treating transpeople are very knowledgeable. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that transpeople are not receiving good medical care, and that they _are_ suffering injury because of that. Take Robert Eads, for example. It’s unfortunately true that a lot of people uncritically believe alarmist ideas about trans health that don’t control for quality of care–that’s where the “liver damage” meme generally comes from.
And by “far more social than physical,” I meant that it’s transphobia that kills us, not testosterone. On the terms you seem to understand me, of course transition carries physical risks: murder is most definitely physical. But masculinizing hormones are not that risky.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 4th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
My gut feel is yes. Because although I agree that some butch dykes express alienation from their body, it’s not to the extreme that requires radical physical intervention. Ie while this damn culture of ours makes it hard, it’s bearable. I worry that Alex’s upbringing, and the subsequent confirmation by the court of the effects (ie total biological body alienation) essentially denied him the possibility to find a level of comfort with his body.
I honestly don’t know, can only say from what I read I felt far more strongly than I ever have from reading trans case studies that there was a much higher likelihood that culture /nurture was the sole reason for Alex’s distress, and so it concerned me that ‘nature’ might reassert down the track when it was all too late.
Which brings me back to the nature question, and I found nothing in the reportage or the court doco that really convinced me there - but I’m also aware that this is a big grey area.
re: health - perhaps it’s because I’m an environmental scientist, and thus the precautionary principle is pretty much ingrained, but I find it hard to conceive that switching hormone balances may not have unexpected and potentially serious health consequences, and it the lack of research here in relation to transsexuals is really concerning.
Hormones - one of the most complex, still-yet-to-be-fully-understood areas of medical science. And of course it’s very hard not to think for eg, of the ‘oopsy’ moments with regards to the blithe prescribing of HRT to post-menopausal women, and the belated significant negative side-effects that has, once we bothered to look into it.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 5:26 am
I think there’s an inherent contradiction there - ie we know little or nothing about transsexual health, they get criminally negligent care, but the risks of transitioning are far more social than physical?
Doesn’t seem like a contradiction when you realize that a doctor who doesn’t want to treat transsexuals might pick any specialization except sexual reassignment surgery.
Transsexual health goes beyond transition. Pre- and post-op, they need primary care physicians, regular checkups, maybe specialists depending what does on. They may need emergency room services at times…
Maybe doctors who don’t want to treat men can go into gynecology (I don’t know if there are any comparable specialties for doctors who don’t want to treat women) but the notion that someone can totally avoid a certain class of patients seems dangerously ignorant. [Dangerous for the patients, I mean.]
This comment was written by Lis Riba.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 5:51 am
i’d agree with this except for the fact that close to 12 million people had “radical” cosmetic surgery in 2004, and i have to believe that virtually none of them were trans.
This comment was written by nexy jo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 7:01 am
Thank you, Nexy! You don’t have to raise a girl as a boy to make her consider radical physical intervention.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Exactly, just raise her as a girl and she can undergo labial or vaginal surgery just to keep up with the Jones.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Again, I disagree that transsexuality and a desire for breast implants arise from the same cause. But if you’re working from “body-modification bad,” and you want to raise a hypothetical child in a gendered culture without any desire to modify his, her, or hir body….There may not be a way to ensure that. Remember, too, that Alex is a kid in a class of his own. We don’t really know whether other kids in his situation or similar situations would begin to feel body dysphoria as they hit puberty such that they would need to transition physically.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Here are a couple of abstracts on long-term health and morbidity in mtfs and ftms; the second is an update of the first. The study unfortunately tracked fewer ftms than mtfs.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=2528051&query_hl=5&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9373456&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
I’m curious about the 10% weight-gain thing; I don’t know many transmen who didn’t gain weight during transition, but it meant filling out and gaining muscle. Acne I can definitely vouch for, but…that’s puberty for you.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Hi Nexy,
I personally consider ( with the exception of for eg, breast reduction when lumbered withdisproportionally large and painful breasts) the vast majority of cosmetic surgery to be a sign of the increasing pressure, alienation and fetishisation many people particularly in western culture express towards their bodies.
The increasing rate of people feeling compelled by society to radically alter their body to fit some mythical and impossible perception of cloned physical perfection is not a benchmark to encourage or embrace - especially if we step outside the transsexual narrative here for a minute, and consider how what we are talking about here forms a fundamental feminist narrative critiquing the effects of hetero-normative- patriarchal -consumer-capitalist- society (breathe!) on women, and men.
This comment was written by myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:58 am
myriad,
I have no dispute with the fact that the capitalist/consumer society drives the cosmetic industry, but with regard to feminism I wonder what you make of the dramatic rise in male participation? When both seccses are being coerced/seduced into and/or choosing to pay closer attention to their appearance, (queer eye for the straight guy; the dramatic increase in male participation in fashion and skincare all across Asia; Richard Gere and David Beckham cosmetic co. contracts etc, etc…), when does it stop being a feminist issue?
Humans have always adorned and beautified themselves in one way or another, but the burden of doing so has historically fallen heavily onto women under patriarchy. Maybe as personal power and agency between the secces equalises men will have to work harder at attracting partners. Could this represent a feminist triumph rather than the reverse - or am I getting carried away….:). Just a thought.
This comment was written by cicely.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 4:25 am
Triumph, reverse - I don’t know; it all sounds like the Red Queen’s race to me, but then I speak as someone who’s never even tried makeup. Pretty much all standardized beauty rituals seem like so much effort just to be unremarkable, whether it’s eye-liner or a butt-lift. If anything, it sounds like an increase in the base level of pointless exertion in the world, which is never a good thing.
This comment was written by Ledasmom.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 11:46 am
I’m not sure I accept the idea of the extremity and increasing invasiveness of body alteration as caused by increased alienation rather than advanced technology. A hundred years ago, breast implants and liposuction simply weren’t available, and cosmetic surgery didn’t exist; instead, women stuffed and wore girdles. History is full of nasty and painful beauty treatments–some of their ill effects, admittedly, unknown to the consumers at the time. During that same period, there was no medical transition to speak of; people who wanted to cross-live had to cross-dress. That doesn’t mean that they were any happier with what they had, merely that there were no alternatives.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Just a quick comment since I’m really enjoying this conversation and I’m interested to see where it goes…
piny - I think there is substantial evidence that the pressure to live up to an impossible standard of perfection is relatively recent. While there have always been culturally-specific ideals of beauty, these pressures would have been mild before most people had access to the kind of communications technology necessary to perpetuate these standards (magazines, print advertisements, radio, television). In The Body Project, Joan Jacob Brumberg has some really interesting historical documentation of the rise of these kinds of pressures on young American over the 20th century.
This comment was written by dorktastic.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Dorktastic -
While I do agree with you that the pressures to live up to an unrealistic standard of beauty are much more widespread now than they were in the past, (thank you, mass media) I’m not sure that the westernized ideal of beauty is actually more unattainable or unrealistic than it’s been in the past. That is, I see the problem now as one of width, not depth.
As evidence, I would cite waist-reduction corsetry (as an unhealthily impossible historical western beauty standard), footbinding (as an unhealthily impossible historical asian beauty standard), and female circumcision (as an unhealthily impossible historical/modern african/middle eastern beauty standard). I’m just not sure we have beauty standards now that can compete with these for sheer insanity or cruelty to women.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
oh - one other quick comment
This comment was written by dorktastic.I am a non-trans woman who recently had breast reduction surgery. Although my breasts were disproportionately large, they did not cause any significant pain. My major reason for choosing to go through with the surgery was intense discomfort with my body after many years of dealing with years of unwanted sexual attention beginning at a very young age (11), not being able to buy clothes that fit, and having my breasts be the first thing people noticed about me. This is something that I have trouble admitting to fellow feminists IRL because I don’t want to face the judgement that goes along with having this kind of surgery for largely cosmetic reasons.
Having the surgery is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I think it’s really unfortunate that my choice to have this procedure is subject to such intense criticism with no recogntion that living in a body that is not seen as normal or acceptable is a very emotionally painful and damaging experience. Of course these personal narratives should be understood in the context of a misogynist and body-negative culture, and be subject to feminist critique, but it needs to be a more nuanced discussion than cosmetic surgery = mutilation except in extreme cases.
Oops - I guess that neither of these comments were actually quick ones!
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January 6th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Myca
This comment was written by dorktastic.I think that contemporary beauty standards do meet the standards of corsets and foot-binding for insantiy and cruelty.
Extremely high rates of eating disorders, that can lead to death (anorexia has a mortality rate of between 5-20%), dangerous weight-loss surgeries that can lead to a lifetime of malnutrition, people who inject botulism into their faces to get rid of wrinkles, skin bleaching creams, and high heels that lead to permanent damage to joints and tendons are a few examples. Of course, there’s also the widespread practice of episiotomy (slicing open the perenium during labour in order to widen the birth canal), which is also used by doctor’s to retain vaginal tightness for the pleasure of sexual partners even when it is not medically necessary and there is a lot of evidence that the resulting scars can be very painful and diminish a woman’s ability to experience sexual pleasure.
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January 6th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Hrm. Good points, all.
I’m still not convinced that things are actually worse now, and a number of the things you cite have historical analogies as well, which are often worse. Would you rather have your feet bound, or wear high heels? Would you rather use botox, or arsenic face powder? Episiotomy or female circumcision?
On the other hand, anorexia does seem to be a solidly modern malady, and some of the other things you cite seem to be either modern or exacerbated by the modern world. I’m happy (happy? oy.) to concede that things are just as bad, barbaric, and awful now as they’ve ever been, though now they’re often cloaked in the veil of modern medicine.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Modern like the telegraph, not modern like botox, although it is definitely increasing. It existed at least as far back as the Victorian era.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
*nod*
But wasn’t the Victorian era sort of the beginning of our national love affair with sickly, pale, wan looking women?
The whole “oh, she’s got tuberculosis! She’s so dreamy . . .” thing.
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Well, sure. But it predates the plastic age by many years. And, IIRC, the Victorian age was before the cut-off The Body Project loosely uses for when the body-obsessive tide began to turn and little girls switched from, “Must become more generous person,” to, “Must fit into bikini.”
This thought is only half-baked, but…I’m bothered by an apparent reading of surgery/corsetry/foot-torture as special cases or a special trend or even a special focus on the body. All they are, assuming they are new or newly extreme for cultural rather than technological reasons, is a decision on the part of the patriarchy to put women’s bodies to different uses. It doesn’t mean that women are less embodied or body-obsessed, merely that–again, assuming–they’re ordered to control other parts of their bodies. Is an eighteenth-century woman who feels compelled to have children until her body gives out less mutilated than a woman with breast implants? Are the effects of those demands more natural or less extreme?
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
And I guess what I should be asking is, is a woman taught to see her body as a baby-making machine less alienated from that body?
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
I think that there’s absolutely some truth to that, but I don’t think it really encompasses the issues I was pointing to.
I tend to think that there are a few issues of injustice here. First, and most all-pervasive, is the injustice you’re referring to . . . the idea that a woman’s body isn’t her own, and that she is to be compelled to use it in certain ways for the good/amusement/asthetic appreciation of others. This is a real problem, and a big one.
The issue I was looking at was more the specific ways in which she is compelled to use her body, and whether there are more or less extremely horrible ways that womens bodies have been used. Discussion and recognition of one doesn’t preclude discussion and recognition of the other.
Think of it this way: A 19th century housewife, kept in the absolute lap of luxury, waited on by her servants, and very much in love with her husband is still expected to have his children whether she wants to or not. In this specific case she may want to, and in this specific case her loss of freedom may not be as onerous as it would be for, say, an enslaved prostitute who is beaten and burned when she rebels against her pimp.
There’s still a loss of freedom for both of them. In one way, their situation is the same. Both of them are having their freedom curtailed and their bodily autonomy stolen by the patriarchy. I think it’s important to recognize that commonality.
At the same time, it’s also important to recognize that in other, concrete ways, their situations are utterly different. The houswife wouldn’t choose to swap lives with the prostitute, and the prostitute likely dreams of a life as comfortable as the housewife’s. Without recognizing this difference, I find that the whole discussion ends up lacking credibility.
It’s the whole “We’re both sisters in oppression!” “No we’re not. You’ve got a good life and mine sucks ass.” argument.
—Myca
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January 6th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
And I happen to agree with that. I’m talking about something else, namely, how this kind of demand is seen as newly physical/body-related, or newly invasive, or newly alienating.
The maybe-not-really borders I was pointing to were different ones and ones which can be controlled for class–say, between an upper-middle-class eighteenth-century woman who has children because she believes she should and an upper-middle-class twenty-first-century woman who gets breast implants in her mid-twenties because she believes she should.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Hi Cicely,
I think you have to remember we are talking about the patriarchy, ie the rule of white older elite men; it’s easy to forget this and think that patriarchy = all men. Not at all. The quote that always reminds me of this critical difference is Churchill’s saying something like “war is a gentleman’s agreement between countries to kill each other’s young men”.
“Young men” (in this sense, men who are not members of the elite) are kept in support of the patriarchy because of course they are rewarded more by it, and because they have the carrot of one day joining the elite dangled in front of them continuously. For this, they fight and kill each other, and compete in every sphere.
But that doesn’t preclude or negate the fact that ‘young men’ are also fodder for patriarchy - to fight their wars, and drive their consumer-capitalist economy, just as women are. Previously the divide between the use of men and women has been more stark; the critical change I think is consumer-capitalism. It is a beast that must always be fed to keep achieving “growth” (ie wealth accumulation for a relative few aka the patriarchy); and thus it simply cannot afford to be based solely on women as consumers. Thus we see pressures that have traditionally predominantly fallen on women spreading to men - in this day and age, cosmetic surgery and the whoe ‘metrosexual’ meme are good examples.
IOW, I’m saying that men are victims of the patriarchy too. Not to the same extent as women, but they are nevertheless in the majority, grist for the mill one way or another.
So no, I don’t see this remotely as a feminist triumph. :/
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
PS Piny et al., I’ll come back to other responses in a bit. It’s the weekend here, and I owe my girl some serious quality time. :-)
This comment was written by Myriad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I feel terribly conflicted over this one.
As a caring and empathetic person I would dearly love to welcome trans folk as whatever gender is most comfortable for them.
On the other hand it bothers me that the definition of ‘masculine’ in our culture is so narrow that men who don’t fit it feel that the only way they can be accepted, or accept themselves, is to become a woman.
Then there’s the problem that the term ‘woman’ is being used as a kind of default for anyone who doesn’t fit the prevailing definition of ‘masculinity’.
I think that maybe the long term solution is probably to change the expectations of ‘masculinity’, rather than have people endure the pain and trauma of medication and surgery that would enable them to live as women.
This comment was written by seranvali.Report this comment to the moderators
January 7th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
I know some butch dyke transwomen–and some high femme transguys–who would love to talk to you.
Look, read the thread. IIRC, there are several transpeople on it who dispel the oft-repeated myth that transpeople transition because they don’t fit into conventional ideas about masculine men and feminine women. Might be hard to believe, but I was feminine. I made an awesome woman. I’m currently a C-minus at masculinity. I’m not sure where the second part of your “problem” is coming from, but I assure you that no one’s trying to make “woman” the default catch-all for everything not-man. Okay, maybe the patriarchy. If you have more time, you might want to check out, ftmichael.tashari.org for resources, or read Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein for a meditation on gender role and identity.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 6:13 am
Might be hard to believe, but I was feminine. I made an awesome woman. I’m currently a C-minus at masculinity.
I’ve got to post one of the pictures of me in hospital looking femme enough to have my trans card permanently cancelled. Everyone who’s seen it thinks I look beautiful, but I just think it makes me look like a stranger.
This comment was written by Nick Kiddle.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 7:15 am
ummm, yeah. maybe i just don’t understand what the words “masculine” and “feminine” actually mean. i wore a dress twice in 2005, once for a friend’s wedding, and the other when i got married. and both times, i couldn’t wait to get back home and put back on my jeans and t-shirt, the types of clothes i’ve been wearing my whole life.
my husband’s truck door handle wouldn’t make the door open again a few weeks back, so i grabbed my tools, pulled off the door panel, and readjusted the door latch actuator. is that feminine or masculine? should i care?
i think a big part of the problem is that there is no language that accurately (or even inaccurately) defines what it is that drives people to transition, and that folks who are not trans can’t help but to understand the need to transition in the context of gender roles, and how one “fits” (or doesn’t “fit”) into them.
This comment was written by nexyjo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 8th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
I hear you, Myriad. I have to give more thought to the connection between capitalism/consumerism and patriarchy. I’ve always also understood capitalism to be kind of like a cancer in that it has to keep growing to survive… which is scary. I’m no economist though, and I’m not a full on socialist either. (because I treasure individual thought, I think. Wholly socialist governments have been frighteningly oppressive from my observation). I favour democratic socialism as practised in Scandanavia - where the intrinsic value and dignity of all of the people is more important than the accumulation of individual personal wealth, but it’s still a capitalist economy.
It seems that the essentialist versus the social constructivist viewpoints are a major sticking point in this question of whether feminism should accept transeccuals as women. Transeccsuals are struggling to make yourselves understood or believed about your motivation to transition, and that it has nothing to do with ‘gender roles’, no matter how often this is repeated. (well, people are always hearing it for the first time too, I get that…) That may not come down to a belief in essentialism for all transeccsuals (no ‘eccs’ on keyboard), I know it doesn’t in fact, but I wonder, as I’ve seen it written elsewhere - would essentialism be the problem it is if it wasn’t ‘in bed with’ political oppression?
If it happens to be so that some things, like transecsuality or homosesuality ‘are’ innate or hardwired for a percentage of people, this will be a never ending debate until ’something’ is irrefutably proven. I wonder why we can’t move forward politically by allowing for both possibilities since neither is ‘provable’, on its own. Because I believe in the innateness of some things, it doesn’t follow in my mind that feminism is doomed.
This comment was written by cicely.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
cicely, here’s hoping iour keiboard gets healthi soon.
dorktastic, non-trans reduction mammoplasty is often done for reasons such as yours - to become less noticeable. It is a little different from getting breast augmentation, and more like getting sticking-out ears pinned back. Other people might do non-surgical strategies, such as changing clothing style or hair style. I considered reduction once because I was self-conscious, but found that a little clothing change and a little weight loss and a little “piss off” attitude towards leerers made me feel less out-of-norm. I had a real aversion to general anesthesia for cosmetic reasons, knowing that there is a small but real risk.
This comment was written by NancyP.Report this comment to the moderators
August 24th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
[...] I also wanted to highlight this comment by Piny, which he left on “Alas” last year: I read that chapter, and have read some of the book. I agree with her central premise–that sexualization is not sexual autonomy, and that some people seem confused on this point–and understand that ftms and bois make up a brief chapter in a book that’s about, y’know, women. Still, for fuck’s sake. [...]
This comment was written by Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Two Critiques Of Ariel Levy’s Writing About Bois.Report this comment to the moderators
September 14th, 2006 at 9:10 am
I am pissed off I missed this conversation while it was going on, but glad I got to read it anyway.
I was recently informed by a FTM that my comments would be deleted if I continued asking radical feminist questions on his blog. Some of those questions have been addressed very well here, but not entirely. (I was referred to Piny, and lo and behold, here is Piny. Where can we talk further?)
I am in fundamental disagreement with most of what you say, but at least you reply in provocative and interesting ways. :)
This comment was written by Florene.Report this comment to the moderators
September 15th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
I am pissed off I missed this conversation while it was going on, but glad I got to read it anyway.
I was recently informed by a FTM that my comments would be deleted if I continued asking radical feminist questions on his blog. Some of those questions have been addressed very well here, but not entirely. (I was referred to Piny, and lo and behold, here is Piny. Where can we talk further?)
I am in fundamental disagreement with most of what you say, but at least you reply in provocative and interesting ways. :)
Who was this? Did he actually say, “You may not make radical-feminist comments on my blog,” or did he take issue with particular things you were saying because he found them offensive?
I recently put up a post on feministe (feministe.us/blog) saying that I’d take good-faith questions on feminism; that seems like the most appropriate place. I’m in rather a tired mood right now, but I should have time within the next few days. Shoot.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
September 20th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Hi, everybody…I just read this thread, well as much of it as I could in two hours, And I had a question:
Is anybody here trans or intersex?
I’d love to know where these interesting viewpoints are coming from culturally.
This comment was written by lyssa.Report this comment to the moderators
September 21st, 2006 at 12:10 am
I just read the ENTIRE thread. Ignore the last post.
nexyjo, come back soon…
This comment was written by lyssa.Report this comment to the moderators
September 21st, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Lyssa - and anyone else who may be interested - in viewing/participating in a current dialog regarding this subject go to
This comment was written by Eva.http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/episode-495
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