Me and My Vagina, Special Anniversary Edition: Part II of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Today is the anniversary of my surgery. In fact, as I type this now, I am about a year removed from my first full day of having a vagina--Thailand being twelve hours ahead of my local time, and the six or more hours of my surgery having started at noon Bangkok time. (I don't remember how long the surgery lasted, as I slept through it and for a long time afterwards, only waking up for a brief moment to say goodnight to my significant other of variable and often fabulous gender.)

In fact, there's almost a week of time that I have very little recollection of--the five days I had to stay immobile in bed, according to my surgeon's regimen. Not everyone does this; had I gone to the Canadian surgeon I first considered, I'd have been up and walking around after about a day or so. Everybody does things differently. But I'm somewhat glad for being immobile; during that five days I only moved once, and that was because I'd thrown up on myself the first day after my surgery--juice boxes and opiates don't agree all that well. The only way to get me clean sheets was to move me to an entirely new bed. Which meant I had to crab walk over to it. Now, even under normal circumstances, that would be both uncomfortable and ungraceful; but I had to not only contend with the pain from my brand-new down there, with the attendant catheter and surgical drains, but since I'd also opted to have my boobs done at the same time, I could barely move my arms; the surgeon went in under my armpits, and to be honest that pain was more omnipresent and inconveniencing than the other.

But other than that, and my SOOVAOFG saying goodbye to me to fly home--we'd spent ten days together bumping around India and Cambodia prior to my surgery, and vacation time is precious nowadays--I really don't remember much. I slept a lot; I was too out of it to even watch TV. Every so often, they'd bring me a thick creamy soup and some juice boxes to eat and drink. I rarely ate the soup, but I drank the juice. (As an aside, Thai sweets of all kinds tend to be sweeter than American sweets--probably because they use real sugar.) I've come to realize that it wasn't so much that I was drugged out of my head--Thais don't practice American pain management, and I didn't even have a morphine drip--but because nothing changed. There was me; my bed; my room with the blinds drawn; and the occasional ministrations of kind Thai nurses who spoke little English. (My Thai was suspect at its best and no match for my pain and grogginess.)

But eventually they packed me up and sent me home, after giving me a huge, cumbersome, old-fashioned bra. It was trimmed with lace and looked like something from the "18-hour bra" commercials I'd seen as a kid. And then I was dumped back in my hotel room, just me and my catheter bag--they didn't take the catheter out until the next day, which was a little scary and gross. On the other hand, it was pretty convenient for lying in bed and drinking stuff, which was about all I was up for.

But it's surprising how quickly you can heal. I was moving around the hotel room that, night, had enough energy to make breakfast the next day, and even hosted a pizza party for some of the other patients of my surgeon a day or so after that. (We had a couple of these affairs. They were interesting; we'd have a great time for about an hour, and then everyone would be in too much pain to continue. But they were fun while they lasted.)

That was all a year ago.

Things have changed. For one thing, I now only have to dilate once a day for about 30 minutes. That will mean I can actually get up at the same time but still get to work earlier, which will help me have more time and energy to write in the evening. I've had sex, by which I mean--this being America and all--PIV sex, so now I know how much I've been missing. My recovery has been remarkably hassle free, even with the UTI I developed a month after getting home.

There's more, of course, much more. But how can I put it all in words? There are days when I forget that I never had a vagina, and there are days when I forget for a second that I do. There are many days when I am astonished by the miracle of it all, and many more days when I simply take it for granted. And most of all, I feel like what I am supposed to be. I feel like a woman.

And I felt that way before. I am not going to play pussy politics with you and engage in zero-sum games about the proper anatomy a woman needs. It's reductive, and cruel, and ignores the economic reality of far too many trans women.

But there's no question that I like myself better this way, that I feel a peace with my body I never felt before. That I had to wound myself to heal.

Not that I'm completely healed. None of us, I suppose, ever really can be--and I'm not just talking about trans people. If we measure lives by ideals, then we're all a little broken, all in need of some kind of healing. And I've come so very far.

But there are still times when I resent that passage; when I resent all the things that were taken from me, all the things that I never had--even the bad things, even the things that in a sense I was fortunate enough to miss: if I feel the omnipresent judgment of every damn TV commercial on how I should look, act, think, and feel simply because of my gender, can I really long to have had that drummed into my head from the moment it poked into our world? Do I really feel sorry for myself for not having spent three and a half decades as a victim of sexism?

No. Not really. But I do regret the necessity of it all, the long slow struggle to find out who I am, the summoning up of awful reserves of energy just to survive each day, and then the ultimate effort to make myself into the person I desperately needed to be. And so I regret that passage; but I am grateful, oh so very grateful, to have survived it.

And you could say, maybe, that my vagina is a symbol of that: a physical manifestation of not just my womanhood, but my struggle to achieve that womanhood, a signpost showing how far I've come and how much I had to undergo to reach it. I suppose that would be fine; I'd hardly be the first woman to eulogize my vagina, and I doubt I'll be the last, cis or trans.

But I don't really do that much. Because most of the time it's just a vagina. And believe me, that is more than enough. In fact, it's perfect.

The Dilemma Of Having a Long Tail

Now, ducks, before you think that I mean that my surgeon had some, er, interesting ideas about anatomy, by a long tail I just mean: I have a past. It was not particularly unaccomplished, although--duh--it wasn't exactly fulfilled. But I did some cool things, was on (syndicated) TV a few times, got married, got divorced, wrote a couple dozen books, learned to speak French, even learned a little aikido.

Oh, the books? Yeah, you might have guessed that's what I wanted to talk about.

Now, before you search the ISBN catalog (and begin speculation that I am actually John Irving, finally over his castration issues), let me hasten to say: as writing goes, this was pretty assembly-line stuff. I wrote, mostly as work-for-hire, not-quite-textbooks. For 8th graders.

I say not-quite textbooks because they weren't text books: that is, you wouldn't teach a class using them. Instead, these were the books you'd read to do a book report on, say, Gold. (I didn't write one on gold, but I kinda wish I had--it was more interesting than some of the stuff I did write about.)

Now, I'm telling you all this because a few months ago I got something from my publisher. I was rather astonished--it couldn't be a royalty check, those dried up years ago. But I was even more surprised when I read what was inside:

Fan mail.

It seems that a young boy had read my book about a famous sports figure of the previous century, and written me a letter.

Well, not me exactly.

Me, just before. The other me. The...aw, you get the picture.

So, I've been trying to figure out what to do with this: it was a nice letter, though it asks some interesting questions (did I play football as a boy, for example), and rather charmingly lets me know how cool it would be for an author to write back to him.

But--and this is the dilemma of me and my tail--how on earth do I go about this? Write back using my old name? No offense, but I hate having to do that; I still have a few accounts under my old name and I never call their customer service anymore, because I'd have to....it's too gruesome to contemplate.

Or do I write back and say that Old Name was a pseudonym (not exactly a lie) and I'd be happy to correspond but I am, you know, a girl. Not super honest, but maybe more palatable.

Or do I do evangelism? Say, hey kid, here's an update about me: and maybe open his mind up to queer and other possibilities? Is that too heavy to dump on a kid? Sheesh, I don't even know how old he is!

(Hmm, maybe I could write to his parents. Hadn't thought of that.)

Anyway, I've been going back and forth about this; I've kept the letter pegged to my apartment door, so I see it every time I leave. And it was a nice letter, and maybe deserves a response.

Then I realized: hey, I have a smart readership. Small, but smart: you guys are like the elite core of my future dominance of a tiny little corner of the trans internet! So, I thought I'd ask you all to weigh in, ducks: I put it up as a poll at the upper right. Or answer in the comments. Or ignore the question--trust me, I sympathize.

A Room of One's Own: ID Required For Admission

Well, ducks! It's been a week since I did my little UK stomp and kicked over a fair-sized, even by Guardian standards, ant hill! Such fun!

Let me be serious. For a change. A surprise! A first! C.L. serious on her own blog!

I want to talk about one of those very tricky things that come up when trans folks, and most especially trans women, get talked about. Pretty universally, I should hasten to add, when cis folks talk about trans folks; but then I said people, and don't we all know that people means cis people? Silly ducks.

The bugbear in the room is, of course, "women-only spaces." In its most extreme form, this resolves to the old "bathroom libel": the idea that, say, allowing trans people to use the rest rooms that match their gender presentation will open a flood of rapists donning drag in order to rape unsuspecting women. That no trans person has ever done this, and that women get raped in women's rooms by men not wearing dresses, never seems to make a dent in this argument; but then it's held by only the most set in their way anti-trans folks.

Sadly, this includes a large number of otherwise noteworthy feminists. Google it; I'll wait.

A less extreme version of the "women's spaces exclusion" doesn't have a problem with trans folk in the ladies', (perhaps because being booted from your stall for looking too masculine can happen to cis women too), but still make an exception for other spaces: women's spiritual circles, social groups, and, most--notoriously isn't the right word, but bear with me for a second--rape crisis centers.

Yes, that's right--I'm bringing Kimberley Nixon into this again.

For those of you who don't know, a precis: Ms. Nixon is a trans woman who lived in Vancouver. She applied for a volunteer counseling position at Vancouver Rape Relief, and passed their initial phone interview. When she showed up for training, however, she was read as trans and told that she could not be a counselor because of VRR's woman-only policy. Ms. Nixon eventually sued the center, won one trial, but the decision was overturned on appeal.

That's the basics. VRR claimed that the legal fees put them in danger of closing. Julie Bindel and many other trans-exclusionary feminists castigated Ms. Nixon.

But when you go deeper, it gets a whole lot more complicated.

For starters, Ms. Nixon herself had been raped and battered by her male partner. After receiving help from a different group for battered women, she entered their counseling training course, and did very well; she would later be described as a "superior" counselor. But the first group wanted her to wait a year to heal before she became a counselor, which led her to VRR.

Now hearken with me to the little lower layer. Above, I linked to an article about a butch cis woman who was unceremoniously tossed from a restaurant bathroom for looking too masculine. This is precisely what happened to Ms. Nixon. Yet Ms. Farmer would be allowed to counsel for VRR, and Ms. Nixon wouldn't. Even though they both looked "masculine."

Ponder that one in light of feminist principles, if you will.

Dig even deeper: it is a misconception that Ms. Nixon was demanding a spot as a counselor for VRR; what she wanted was the chance to prove herself on her own merits, and not be judged by her appearance. Furthermore, VRR claimed that her presence might traumatize other women, who might harbor fear or resentment or hatred towards men. Fair enough, I suppose, though one would think that this could apply to very butch cis women as well. But the thing is, we'll never know if Ms. Nixon would traumatize people; we'll never know if she could have fit in, if she could have provided healing services to women. We'll never know, because she never got the chance.

And neither did any of the women who might use the shelter; VRR made the decision for them.

I don't think there's any way to slice this that doesn't come up as prejudice. They could have done any number of things; had her help in the office and get training from the counselors, so that even if she didn't work out there, she would gain experience; have her act as a liaison to the trans community (one would assume that VRR would also turn away trans women who were the victims of rape as well); any number of things.

But instead they said, you look like a man. You are a man. You cannot come here.

Now, it may surprise you to know that I am ambivalent--very--about these situations. I can see many sides to these issues, and they're always tricky. And I do not dispute for a second that there is a very real difference in the background of trans and cis women, especially trans women who transition after, say, their twenties (present company included.) We, I, don't have the experience of growing up female; we don't have the same bodily experiences as the majority of cis women. (This is why I will never be teaching a class on Your Period and You.)

But--and this is so important that in needs to be said, again and again--the question remains: is that condition unredemediable? Is it so impossible to think that a trans woman who has spent 25 years living as a woman might have insight into women's lives approaching that of a 25-year old cis woman? Think on this: you could transition as soon as you were of age, have been on hormone blockers so you never experienced male puberty, spent your teens and twenties living as a woman, majored in women's studies, gone on to become a social worker specializing in the problems of battered women and rape victims, worked for ten years in public health--and you will be less qualified, in the eyes of VRR, than a high school drop out who happens to be cis.

That is to say, that not judging a person on her merits is discriminatory. Unless, of course, you're trans. Then it's totes feminist.

Next: I'll take this to Tiger Beatdown and do some feminism and gender analysis.

In Unexpected Delights

Hey, the takedown of that London Times article I did over at Tiger Beatdown got included in the 13th Carnival of Feminists! Drop by to read the other stuff, you know it's good!

And in other unexpected pleasures, I haven't been flayed to pieces in the comments section at the Guardian. And Julie Bindel replied to me! And I replied back! Wow!

And Other Stories in Transphobia (Yawn)

Hey, I haven't said anything about David Letterman yet!

I mean, not that there's often much to say about David Letterman, besides he's mostly a jerk. It's, you know, what he's famous for.

But I guess you might have heard about this...



Yeah. OK. Wow, a show hosted by a known jerk (of the douchey, cheating on his wife with interns in a bedroom he had built at the studio just for that purpose kind of way) engages in some cheap-shot transphobia. Yawn. Hand me the remote...

But what's that you say? Speak up, Straw-Reader-I-am-making-up-for-this-piece! Are you saying that Dave at least sort of respectable towards Ms. Sampson? And that the joke is really on sidekick douchebag Kalter? That I should not, you know, get my panties all in a twist about things, you hysterical trann--sorry, you like to be called a transgenderdamajig now, right?

Sorry, Straw Reader, you're wrong! A transgendamajig is a drink, not a gender identity, one of the many fascinating cocktails I dreamed up while vacationing on painkillers in Thailand! But you're also wrong about the joke.

Sure, true to his straightdouche persona, Dave didn't say anything spiteful about Ms. Sanders. (He also called her a transgendered person, not woman. Asshole.) But the joke wasn't on Kalter--it was decidedly on Ms. Sampson.

Because, you see, at heart this was a gay joke. (Amazing! Letterman homophobic too? Whodathunkit?) Kalter is upset because he slept with a "man," not a transgendered woman. At heart, this bit was calling Ms. Sanders a man.

Which is pretty much the definition of transphobia.

I of course, don't watch any of the talk shows myself--I really could care less about the latest vapid anecdote or stupid plug a celebrity comes on to talk about. (And even The Daily Show is wearing thin on me these days.) Instead, when not reading Russian novels in French or French movies in Russian, I watch Monty Python reruns. Because our world is so surreal nowadays that they seem positively normal.

WTF, Bilerico?

I really like the Bilerico project--it's a great place for queer and trans folks and their allies to meet and discuss things. And it's never shied away from controversy.

Bilerico recently added a new contributor, Ronald Gold, and reading his biography he's just the kind of person you want to have there--a long time gay activist, one of the founders of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a man who was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from the DSM.

So it's an enormous disappointment to read his first post, officially titled "'No' to the notion of transgender" but if you look at the url it must have been called "Transgender: a disease that doesn't exist" at some point. And, well, let's see if you, Gentle Reader, can understand why I was shocked to see it on Bilerico:

What is transgender? Well, there are two sorts who seem to be covered by the name, the drag kings and queens so good at portraying cartoon imitations of straight people, and transsexuals, the folks who report that from an early age they've felt themselves trapped in the wrong bodies. Despite the equipment they were born with that belies their assertions, they say they are really men or really women.

 Holy fuck. Did I just read that at a queer site? Seriously? Please tell me this is some kind of horrid fundamentalist satire...

I recall reading something by Jan Morris in which it seemed that he thought he needed a sex change because he wanted men to hold doors open for him and kiss him goodbye at train stations. For starters, I'd have told him that I've had these nice things happen to me and I've still got my pecker.

Oh ye ghods.

Oh, but he isn't prejudiced against trans folk! See, this is how he ends the piece:

Perhaps it isn't needless to say that a No to the notion of transgender does not excuse discrimination against cross-dressers or post-op "transsexuals" in employment, housing and public accommodation; and I strongly support legislation that would forbid it. I would, however, get after the doctors - the psychiatrists who use a phony medical model to invent a disease that doesn't exist, and the surgeons who use such spurious diagnoses to mutilate the bodies of the deluded.

 See? I just think you're deluded, C.L.--but that's no reason for people to be cruel to you. That is, for levels of cruelty beyond calling you a man and a "transsexual."

If I was to be charitable (I am reliably informed that for some reason December is a month we're supposed to do so, here in Merka; the media says so), I guess I could scratch out some kind of "hmm, he's really against gender essentialism, which I'm down with so...win?" Except, oddly enough, as I write this he's sharing the front page with Autumn Sandeen, the transgender barista from Pam's House Blend, and whom I'm sure enjoys having her identity crumpled up in front of her eyes and tossed away.

I just...can't understand why this of all things should be the first post this guy makes at Bilerico. Didn't somebody tell him there are actual trans people who visit? Or even, you know, write stuff there? Holy cow.

Grumble...gotta write that "how to take an ally to task" post that everybody is writing nowadays...sheesh.

The Times, They Are A-Draggin'

Several years ago, back when I was still a crossdresser myself (and working as a man), I came across a picture on an old hard drive of my boss. Wearing tight leather pants, a low-cut blouse, and makeup. And written in a pink script on the picture was a feminine name that shared his first initial.

I was caught somewhere between completely weirded out and strangely relieved to know I wasn't the only trans person in the office.

Which leads me to events in East Cleveland, Ohio, where mayor Eric Brewer was recently defeated in a primary election. Unremarkable, right?

Well...except for the fact that like me and my boss, somebody found pictures that seem to look like the ex-mayor on his computer hard drive. Wearing lingerie.

I'm not going to reprint the photos here--you can find them easy enough, ducks--except to say that they do look like the mayor, and that they "vibe" crossdresser for me. (When you've been around as long as I have, you've seen this sort of thing before.)

And speaking of seeing this thing before, it reminds me of another crossdressing pol who was outed before an election: Sam Walls, a conservative Republican in Texas who lost a runoff election for the state House in 2004. Now, in Walls' case, you just have to wonder how he didn't think this would happen: not only (as the pics showed) had he been out and about while crossdressed, but for Pete's sake he seems to have been the treasurer of the local chapter of Tri-Ess, the national crossdressers' organization.

Cases like Walls' and Brewer's show some of the disturbing inequities of life under the transgendered umbrella. One may point out that people like Walls or Brewer retained substantial privilege and did not face everyday transphobia--something that MtF transsexuals often have to deal with every day. But. Even in Oklahoma, a trans woman can run for office and be open about her history, whereas neither of the crossdressing politicians felt comfortable doing that.

And that shows the relatively large gap in both visibility and acceptance between transsexuals and crossdressers. Television shows, news reports, books--all concentrate on transsexuals, not on crossdressers; and the leadership of many trans organizations is dominated by transsexuals. Now, again, some of this is because there is a greater incentive for transsexuals, especially trans women, to push for their rights. There is too what helen boyd once called the "fear of queer": crossdressers can look "normal" in their everyday presentation and can fear (or feel no need) to lose that part of their gender identity in service to activism.

But that obscures--just as crossdressers themselves are obscured; no one is really sure how many there are, since so many are relatively closeted--the very real pain and angst of being a crossdresser, of not having the comforting narrative of transition--a story that seems, at least, to have a beginning, middle and end. If people now seem to understand, if not accept all the time, the transsexual narrative--"you're a woman on the inside" or "born wrong" or whatever the current popular meme is--but how do you explain that you only need to be a woman part of the time? That you only seek temporary solutions? That you live in the shadow of, as helen has also said, the other shoe never dropping?

A crossdresser I used to know wrote about this once*:

[...]my transness will always be subordinate to other people's experience of either womanhood or transhood. Women can look down at me because I'm a "part-time" woman, who dresses in costume and "doesn't know what a real woman's life is like"; transwomen can throw the same criticism at me, with the added vector that my transness can't be serious because it doesn't manifest itself constantly or as urgently as it does for a transsexual.

But it isn't true; I'm trans all the time, and there are a lot of times that I feel trapped in an endless cycle of oscillation between femininity and masculinity with no way to end the cycle.

Sure, compared to transitioning, my problems are the difference between jumping off of a cliff and riding the kiddie roller coaster. But who the hell wants to ride on the kiddie coaster for the rest of their lives?

But let's not stay all doom and gloom...courtesy of Joe My God, here's Donna Sachet performing the national anthem before a Giants game in San Francisco--the first drag performer to ever do so! Rock on, Ms. Sachet!



*She later transitioned, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it's a good sentiment.

Pepper

Ducks, I beat up on the NY Times sometimes. OK, quite a bit! Sometimes not even on my own blog! But today I found something I actually liked there. (Besides Paul Krugman. Thank you, Paul, just for being you.)

It's from their photo/multimedia series, One in Eight Million, about interesting New Yorkers. Today's spot, The Night Keeper, is about a transgendered woman living in Brooklyn:

For nearly 30 years, Pepper has lived in the same building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She used to hustle and shiplift, snagging designer clothing to flaunt at drag balls. "I can be very dangerous," she explained, "it depends on how far you push me." Once, a man hit her in the face with a beer bottle, breaking her nose and cutting her cheek. "That devastated me for a long time," she said. Pepper stopped taking hormones four years ago because they were making her sick; now she spends nights cooking, cleaning, talking to her mother on the telephone and "looking out for her building."

It's a fascinating piece, evocatively photographed by Todd Heisler, especially as Pepper is a living link to New York's more frentic drag heyday, when the lines between transgender and gay, drag and transitioning, were much blurrier.

And it's fantastic to have a piece on a transgendered person who isn't white, middle-class, and post-operative for once.

There are criticisms I suppose I could make, like how an element of the "sad life" meme creeps into the story (poor Pepper is all alone because she is trans), but in my opinion they are drowned out by her remarkable strength and will to survive and go on, head high.

So go read it...if for no other reason than ghu knows how long it will be before I send you back to the Times.

Adventures in Transition: Faster, Evil Space Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill!

I am a child of the video game era.

Like most white, middle-class kids of my era, we owned an Atari 2600 (the real thing, not the cheesy Sears version.) And while we enjoyed the hell out of the system, we also knew...it sucked.

Plate 1: This was once considered cool!

Like I said, we lived in the golden age of video games, and arcade games--with their superior graphics and gameplay--were all around us. Things weren't helped by how poorly most arcade games were ported over to the 2600--the infamous Pac-Man port is widely credited as causing the North American video game market crash of 1983.

Plate 2: You've heard the legends, but I actually played it--and it was really that horrible.

I didn't care that much for video games.

You probably think that it was because I was some high-falutin' intellectual, with my nose in a book all the time and too much of a nerd to be any good at sports. But that wasn't the reason...well, it wasn't the only reason.

The reason was that I generally stank at them. I have a rather low eye-hand coordination, so most of that generation of video games were full of FAIL for me--I didn't have the reflexes to be any good at them, or rather, I just got too frustrated to actually learn how to play through my difficulties.

So I watched a lot of other people play video games--hell, I just hung out for weeks while a buddy of mine played Ultima IV, which is about as interesting as watching people play D&D...in a language you don't speak.

Once I got to college and had a computer of my very own, however, I got interested in games again. There were actual genres that didn't require me to have the fast-twitch reflexes of a chihuahua who'd drunk too much coffee, and I played those--SimCity, Civilization (I racked up insane hours conquering various planets), baseball games where you only had to "manage," and even less-athletic, more strategic games like Sid Meier's Pirates.

So when I was finally out of college, and got a "real" computer (well, a Packard-Bell--26% new parts!), I made sure to pick up a few games to go with it. One was Doom, which I had played in multi-player mode and enjoyed. (I didn't get too far in that one: have I mentioned my reflexes?) The other was Wing Commander IV. And that one hooked me.

I'd heard about the Wing Commander series for years, but never owned a machine powerful enough to run them--the closest I'd come was playing on a friend's Nintendo once. But the third and fourth versions of the game were really different--they used movies to forward a plot line between missions, and you could actually make choices in how to respond during some of the movie sequences. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book! (Yes, I am a child of the '80s.)

It certainly didn't hurt that Mark Effin' Hamill played your character.

Plate 3: Hey, isn't that the guy from Star Wars?

While I understand while this kind of video game (usually called Full-Motion Video or FMV) didn't catch on (costs were high, graphics got good enough to do all the stuff inside the game itself), it was extraordinarily compelling for the time--they really managed to come close to the state objective of making it an interactive movie. I ploughed through WCIV in about a month, and for my birthday my girlfriend gave me a boxed set with the first three games. Which I slogged through as well, even though the first two were more standard video games--no movies, but there was an overarching storyline for both. I started playing WCIII, the climax of the series...and stopped.

I was changing computers, I had a girlfriend, I was taking aikido--I had a bunch of reasons. So I never finished the third game, never got past the third mission. And I mostly stopped playing anything resembling shoot-em-ups; I had the occasional game of Civ going on, but for the most part I didn't have any time to play videogames. I did reload Wing Commander I on my machine a few months after my wife and I separated, played it all the way through again, but didn't bother to play the next game.

And then I transitioned.

Now, obviously, video games are a huge minefield of misogynistic crap. (Just check out the ongoing saga of Fat Princess over at Shakesville.) Most games are marketed for men, often in the crudest, most sexist way possible--and then you play the game, and it just gets worse when you see how women are depicted inside the games themselves. Plus so many video games are filled with non-stop, wall-to-wall violence, domination, and macho posturing.

So it makes sense for me to avoid video games, and for the most part I've had no interest--not even in my beloved Civ. Until recently.

Because on a whim I dug out my copy of Wing Commander III, and after wrestling with Windows for a few days, have been flying missions again. And loving it.

This is full of irony for me. First, aren't I the person railing on about kyriarchy and how we need a culture freed from the evils of domination? Aren't I generally opposed to violence of almost any kind? And don't I love cats? Hell, don't people call me Cat?

So why in the hell am I zipping around space blowing up evil space cats and following a plotline that ultimately ends with a shocking act of genocide?

Plate 4: I'm sure with a big enough lap to cuddle up in, he'd stop trying to DESTROY ALL HUMANS.

I have no idea. I'm sucked in, again, by the storyline, and the gameplay remains challenging but not impossible even for a slow-fingered person like myself. There are even female characters in the game, and they're not decoration--two are highly competent fighter pilots, and one is the ship's chief mechanic. (Of course, one set of choices leads you to have a relationship with one of them, which is a bit squicky, but on the other hand it is remarkable to have a video game that was a combat sim even mention the word love.)

I've noticed a few things different this time around. I'm not any better or worse a pilot than I used to be--I always played the game the way I thought my character really would fly, so I don't try to run up my score if the mission can be finished otherwise. My adrenaline reactions are...different nowadays, though. After a long session at the game, I can get a bit twitchy, and somewhat spatially disoriented, like I keep expecting the constant motion the 3D sim provides. I don't recall that stuff happening the first time around, and I wonder how much my current endocrinology has to do with that.

Of course, playing a video game--playing a violent, combat-oriented video game--brings up all sorts of gender crap for me. (But then, getting the paper in the morning has the potential to do that.) Mostly it's societal stuff that I, of all people, should know better than to listen too--women aren't violent, women don't play video games, women should sit down and watch the damn Lifetime Movie Network and keep careful notes of the cleaning products they must buy next trip to the store. Like I said, mostly crap.

But on the other hand, I haven't talked much about this with other women I know. Maybe because I fear that the women who know about my history will view this as one more way I'm not like them--and the women who don't know about my history might get ideas.

Silly. But there you have it.

In any case, I'm close to the end, and I'll drop The Big Bomb on Kilrah and win the game pretty soon now. Maybe with more qualms than the designers might have expected their players to have--they may be evil space kitties, but that doesn't make me happy to blow up their home planet, for goodness sake. And then maybe I'll head over to Women Gamers; I'll be needing a new fix soon.

Womyn Born Better...Than You

Over on Below The Belt there's this piece about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.

If you're trans, the festival is fairly notorious. This is because of its "womyn-born-womyn" policy: only those people born female are allowed to participate; trans women need not apply.

Now, I'm all for safe spaces for women, and I can even see having places and services that might deal with the stresses of having grown up female. But I'm not sure that a music festival has much to do with it, at least not everywhere, at all times during it.

What makes it even more fun is that, much like Lu's Pharmacy in Vancouver, the festival has historically included trans men. So the "born womyn" thing obviously trumps the "womyn" thing.

Like I say, biology equals destiny is such a feminist point.

Supposedly the festival now allows trans women to attend, although still (in the words of organizer Lisa Vogel) "If a transwoman purchased a ticket, it represents nothing more than that woman choosing to disrespect the stated intention of this Festival."

Nice.

While I believe in community spaces, and even in community leadership for groups that advocate for a community even if the group doesn't restrict its membership (for example, I think a male president of NOW would be...disturbing somehow), I'm not a fan of separatists of any stripe--not even trans separatists. (For a taste of how that looks, check out this thread of fail at Bilerico.) Too often, in my experience, separatism and division only leads to each group acting out a shadow play of their own oppression against other groups--like they were building sandcastles instead of tearing down real castles.

Of course, I won't attend MWMF. But that's not about politics; I just hate camping.

Lies the Internet Told Me

Sady at Tiger Beatdown, who is having an awesome week, wrote an amazing post about the (false) rumors that Lady Gaga is intersex:

So, yeah. It will always puzzle me when cisgendered people don't see how the marginalization and oppression of trans people affects them. Because the fact is that there are a ton of trans people in the world, and you don't necessarily know who they are, and they're not required to tell you. But when people get a case of the Deceptive Tranny Fever, nothing - not decency, not tolerance, not basic fact-checking, not even Google - will get in their way.

So true. The whole "deceptive tranny" thing is the old double-bind in action as well, ergo: if you're trans, and you don't tell the whole wide world, aaaand you sleep with some cisgendered dude or lady, aaaand they find out, then you are a deceiver and deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out; but if you're trans, aaand you tell the whole world, then people call you a thing or refuse to use your correct gender, aaaand you deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out.

That is, you get it both ways: you're punished for both telling and not telling, because the culture punishes "deception" without rewarding "honesty."

Go read the post, because like most things Sady, it is awesome.

A Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities

I've been thinking about privilege lately. Not exactly a surprise, there.

One thing I've been pondering is this idea: that privilege is rights without responsibilities.

That's not completely accurate: another important definition of privilege--at least , you know, the oppressive kind--is that it is unearned. But they both point to important features of privilege.

That is, to accept something as given without any responsibility to pay for it is a privilege.

You can see this in action in one of the more pervasive defences of white privilege: "I'm not a racist, I never owned slaves, I didn't vote for Jim Crow laws, so why should I have to accept affirmative action/learn about African-American culture/give up one iota of what I have?"

The answer is, because you were robbed.

You were robbed, because your ancestors stole from other people and passed the bill along to you. You were robbed, because they got to have something without paying for it, and now the bill is come due. And you'll keep getting robbed, as long as people like Pat Buchanan still insist that great American experiment involved only hard-working, superior white folks--as if the very temple of democracy in this country itself, the U.S. Capitol, wasn't built with slave labor.

My post today at Shakesville has me thinking about another side of this question: when does a person have the right to claim membership in a group? Or more specifically, just who's a woman, anyway?

For me, the answer is simple: if you claim to be a woman, I'll respect that claim. It's not because I believe in some mystical gender essentialism and can recognize a "spiritual sister" because of my super-special Trannyvision^TM. I believe that there are about 6.75 billion genders in the world: that is, each of us has a gender unique to ourselves. That doesn't mean there aren't classifications that can be made, anymore than believing in human individuality means there aren't Buddhists or Frenchpeople or...women.

Rather, my feeling is that if someone wants to claim the title of "woman," I'm perfectly happy to agree. But then it is my feeling that I will apply to them the same standards I apply to other women (and myself.) Is she a feminist? Does she help break down oppression, or support it? Does she support other women, does she support sexist stereotypes, is she, in short, helping?

Just as I would never question the gender of a woman whose politics and personality I loathe--say, Sarah Palin--I wouldn't question the gender of a trans person. (That is, I wouldn't use bad woman to mean bad at being a woman. Heck, I wouldn't use bad woman at all, I think.) Or to put it another way, judge my claim for a right on how well I live up to its responsibilities: look at what I do and what I believe, what I fight against and what I stand for. And I'll do the same.

It's the only human thing to do.

Adventures in Transition: Everybody Cut Footloose Edition

Greetings, ducks! Yesterday I decided to drag myself out of the cave also known as my apartment and force myself to have some of that dreaded "social interaction" people are always on about--specifically, I decided to jerk myself around to a syncopated rhythm while obeying patriarchal orders and occasionally crashing into people.

Yes, I went dancing.

Here in the Metropolis, there is a series of Sunday dances down on a pier during the summer. I used to go to these things long ago, long before my transition--hell, long before my brief metrosexual days. I enjoyed going--I had been one of those people who never thought she could dance, until my then-girlfriend convinced me to take some lessons, and I discovered I could do it, after a fashion. And that I liked to do it.

This time, however, would be different.

This time I was going to be there as a woman.

I managed to miss the free lesson they give before the dance, which was a shame, because not only was I rusty, I haven't danced that much swing as the follower, and I had to sort out which leg went where. That was one worry.

The other worry was whether or not anyone would actually want to dance with me.

As I've mentioned before, I tend to get anxious around highly gendered spaces--and you don't get more highly gendered than a partnered dance. (To be fair, I did see some women dancing together, but I have no idea if they were queer or just straight people without partners; I know for a fact I didn't see any men dancing with each other.) So I had my usual uncomfortable thoughts: what if people read me? am I too tall for anyone to want to dance with? am I not pretty enough for people to want to dance with me? will I suck? (that last one wasn't all that gendered, but an anxiety is an anxiety.)

Fortunately for me, plenty of people did end up dancing with me, some good, some bad. It was interesting to see the various styles of leading--having been a leader, I know how hard it can be to do well. One guy I danced with was maybe the best lead I've ever danced with--I always knew exactly what he wanted me to do--but the experience left me a little cold because I felt like I never got to do anything creative; I like to do some of my own moves when in open position, for example.

It was an interesting counterpoint to when I had first started to go out to dances as a man, and had to overcome decades of painful shyness and ask people to dance with me. I'm not sure which is easier, to be honest, to ask or wait to be asked.

I also ran into my ex-wife and her fiance. Which was a little weird; we're on good terms, but it was definitely an odd interaction. Even weirder is that we met at this very same dance all those years ago (we met movie-cute.) I suppose I cold have upped the ante and danced with her, but I think we both felt that would have pushed the awkwardness skyward.

My anxieties then were mostly for naught. More than that: at one point I stood watching the sunset behind the bandstand, listening to the music and feeling the breezes blow on me, and I was just so damn happy--because this is how I wanted it to go, to finally feel at peace with myself and my body and who I wanted to be, to bask in the same beautiful weather I had enjoyed all those years ago when I went to my first dance, except this time it was so much better, so much deeper, so much more right.

Normal

I have an abnormal relationship with--normal.

For most of my life, I looked normal, but never felt normal. Sure, I moved around the world as a (sorta) guy, even acted like one--ok, hell, sometimes even felt like one; but I was always aware of this thing about me that made me not feel normal: this awkwardness, this discomfort, this constant wondering if I was the wrong gender, and if so, should I do something about it.

Nowadays, I feel much more normal, but to large chunks of my world I don't look normal: the friends, family and coworkers who knew me before transition now have to look at me a different way, and who knows what they think? And even beyond them, I'm tall for a woman, broad-shouldered...well, you get the picture.

But inside? Inside I feel right as rain.

I bring this up because of the recent controversy surrounding a very short word: cis. This word has apparently caused the Internet to catch fire and burn down. Well, at least my part of the internet--sure, it may only be a studio apartment with a kitchenette, but when there's a fire it's still quite alarming.

It all started with this post on Pam's House Blend, and specifically this comment:

There has always been a certain amount of animosity between the L's the G's the B's and the T's. We all know this. When I start to tune out of a debate is when someone describes a whole group of our community as "cisgendered, transbigoted, privileged assholes". Cisgendered is not even a word that gay men identify with but one created by people to single them out in a way that I personally find offensive and derogatory especially when used in this context. Not all white gay men are privileged, nor are they transphobic, lumping them in this category serves no purpose to a greater dialogue.

That's how it started, but it didn't end there. There was a huge pile-on in that thread about the use of cisgendered, followed by this thread at PHB (including this now-infamous comment) and then another follow-up at Questioning Transphobia and then the next thing you know cis isn't allowed to be spoken at PHB but then it is (along with a--sorry, Autumn--"we need to struggle against the real oppressors" derail.) But by then it was all over the internet and even our old friend Carolyn-Ann had to check in.

All over a rather obscure Latin prefix. Color me impressed, I guessed: I mean, even the real c-word has four letters.

By now perhaps you are shaking your head: most likely in confusion. What is this cis you might wonder, and how may I get some? Or, maybe I should get rid of it? What, C.L., is the dish with cis?

It's actually very simple. Cis- means not-trans.

That's it.

Would, of course, that it would be so simple.

It comes from Latin, likely via biochemistry, where cis- and trans- are used to distinguish isomers from each other based on where the molecular bonds fall: on the same side, then cis (meaning within or on the same side), on opposite sides then trans (meaning across or on the other side.) The term has been kicking around for about two decades, but gained prominence thanks to Julia Serrano's extensive use of cissexual in Whipping Girl, her groundbreaking work about transfeminism.

Julia does a much better job than me at talking about why cisgender/cissexual isn't a pejorative word, so I'll just quote her quoting Emi Koyama

I learned the words "cissexual," "cissexist," and "cisgender," from trans activists who wanted to turn the table and define the words that describe non-transsexuals and non-transgenders rather than always being defined and described by them. By using the term "cissexual" and "cisgender," they de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the "norm" against which trans people are defined. I don't expect the word to come into common usage anytime soon, but I felt it was an interesting concept - a feminist one, in fact - which is why I am using it.

Yet as the brouhaha above shows, a lot of people--cis people, natch--seem to somehow feel that somehow it is pejorative. That somehow trans people are forcing an identity onto non-trans folk. That somehow it lumps them in with all the other bigots out there--racists, homophobes, chauvinists.

To which I say: you bet your ass it does. That's the point.

By which I mean not that all cis people are bigots, but rather that they belong to a bigoted power structure. So do I. So do we all--we are all caught in the trap of kyriarchy, and pretending not to see the chains that bind us doesn't make them not exist.

The thing is, there are privileges to being not trans--I doubt much that anyone is going to fight about that. I'm just going to refuse to agree that one of them is the right to be normal.

Because that's what it comes down to. I'd have no problem ditching the term cis in favor of another term for people who aren't trans; I'm just not going to concede that we don't need one. Because every time I write not-trans instead of cis, I'm calling attention to myself; I'm pointing out that I'm the weird one, the one with a problem, the one that needs to be differentiated. And fuck it, I'm just not going to put up with that forever.

It does not invalidate other axes of oppression to demonstrate that another one exists. Kyriarchy is complicated; it is devilishly difficult to sort out. But that does not refute it's existence--quite the contrary.

Now, it may well be true that cis is a unique term in one respect: it is being used by a disprivileged minority as a term for a privileged majority--some would say, forced upon a majority. This seems pretty different from some of the other terms that have evolved out of usage, like homosexual or heterosexual--in both of those cases, they were conceived by the privileged majority as decentering terms. But again, I say: good. Because we should celebrate the fact that so many people of privilege (cissexist privilege, that is) are willing to decenter themselves based on the suggestion of a disprivileged group. That's not tyranny: it's progress.

Telling other people what normal should be is where the tyranny begins.

How Not To Have A Conversation

Greetings, ducks! In today's Adventures in Google Reader, we have some examples of Talkin' About Teh Tranz! (Wait, Cat, isn't this supposed to be Back To Feminism Week at TSA? To which I reply: hold yer horses, ducks! Wait 'n see!)

First, let us visit Feministe. Now, you may not realize this, but Feministe is indirectly responsible for the very existence of The Second Awakening. That's because back during my recovery from surgery, when I was beginning to actively avoid trans stuff in favor of reading feminist blogs, I came across this sh*tstorm there. (If you follow the link, you can also see the stuff I was reading at Feministing at the same time--plus BitchPhD's stupid joke. It was a grand old time to be a trans feminist.)

Feministe has taken that time seriously, much to their credit, and they've recently had the fabulous Queen Emily of Questioning Transphobia (one of the best of the trans blogs out there.) Q.E. did her usual bang up job. The comments thread, sadly, was a big ol' bundle of FAIL:

If there was a pill a person could take that would “cure” transexuality, would trans people take it (even without social pressure to do so)?

Is it transphobic if a cis person will not date a trans?

I’m a college student currently taking a Gender in Humanities course and have been assigned a project to find websites that discuss controversial topics, with which I can comment and converse with lots of people.

So nice to see that a blog post that was specifically requested in order to combat a recent history of people cluelessly mystifying trans people in comments threads...we had people cluelessly mystifying and othering trans people. Sigh. Or to quote bell hooks:

I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not
expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhoods, attended our schools, or worked in our homes.

(Theres going to be a big bell hooks-loving post one of these days, soon.)

At least we didn't get into the "cis" discussion, the great hobgoblin of mainline feminist blogs' comments threads. ("Cis" is used as the opposite of "trans", i.e. a cisgendered person is someone who doesn't feel the persistent discomfort with their gender a trans person feels--but it's not exactly hard to find that out.) I don't use the word cisgendered here a lot--sorry, I just don't think the Latin is all that well used in this case--but it's without a doubt very useful for trans people who are trying not to be perpetual others. Well, most trans people:

"Cis" is not an attempt to "decentralize the dominant group". It is an
attempt, a blatant attempt, at redefining an entire conversation so that it can't stray into areas that might be uncomfortable. It's being able to cry about "cis privilege"; it is not about leveling the linguistic playing field.

Any civil rights cause needs articulate, reasoned argument. It needs impassioned speech, and it demands a proper feeling of being oppressed. It doesn't need people saying that they are "oppressed" because women talk about some exclusively feminine issue, and they, as a trans woman, don't, can't, have that same experience. The debate about trans discrimination does not need the unwanted, unwarranted, imposition of a prefix onto those who are not transgender.

(Disclaimer: I used to know C-A personally, although I don't remember him--he prefers male pronouns--as being such a transphobic wanker back then.)

Well, now. I suppose if I don't mind being perpetually othered--if I don't mind perpetually having to to put my history on display--if I don't think that there might be some, oh, I don't know, privilege attached to the idea that one gender history doesn't need a prefix and one does, I might agree with Carolyn Ann. (And seriously: WTF is this about "exclusively feminine" things? In the comments, it turns out that this is--wait for it--periods! If you've ever felt "not so fresh," then you qualify for a "Get out of cisgender FOR FREE" card!)

C-A provides a great example of how to talk past people, play fast and loose with your own definitions (using "Orwellian" to describe how people try to recast language to avoid their own oppression is pretty....Orwellian), and in general, not check your privilege. I've come to expect this sort of thing from the allmighty Google Reader--but then, comes something like this incredibly reasoned exchange, where sharply divergent points of view about the use of "Cis" manage to remain mostly respectful:

(Sungold--pro:)

I don’t describe myself as being “cisgendered” every day, but I realize that the term describes what I am and so I’m happy to claim it. I was born with female organs, I’m comfortable with being called a woman, I appear reasonably feminine despite my incompetence with nail polish, and so I don’t experience any dissonance between my anatomy, my gender presentation, and the way the world views me. That’s a big ole privilege.

(redmegaera--anti:)

My rejection of the adjective “cisgendered” stems from a belief that sex/gender is socially constructed. I don’t identify with the cis/trans binary because it reifies “gender” (masculinity/femininity) and transforms it into a biological property rather than a political construct. If you can explain to me why such a position is “transphobic”, I’d be very much obliged.

So of course I had to jump in (yes, ducks! A double post-within-a-post!):


I’m not exactly sure how rejecting “cis” isn’t in fact an excercise in privilege–that is, it allows the continual “othering” of trans people, i.e. “non-trans” is normal, “trans” is different. (Redmegaera quotes de Beauvoir, but the whole theme of “Le deuxième sexe” was how “man” is constructed as normal, default, and “woman” as permanent and irredeemably “Other.” So I’m not sure how you can use de Beauvoir to justify othering someone.)

Nor does it necessarily destroy other axes of oppression/privilege to acknowledge that another one exists.

As for the biological/social construction of gender: surely nowadays we can agree that this is not an either/or issue? The tragic case of David Reimer would seem to strongly argue that neither nature nor nurture completely explains internal gender identification. (A precis: Only a few days old, David’s penis was accidentally destroyed while undergoing circumcision. Following the advice of John Money, one of the leading advocates of “gender as social construct” theories, David was raised as a girl, Brenda. However, despite the positive reports Money published, “Brenda” never felt comfortable as a girl and continually rejected his imposed gender–even though his parents never told him about the accident, even though to teachers, friends, twin brother, etc., he was always and only a girl. After years of being suicidal and maladjusted, “Brenda” became David after his parents finally told him about the accident.)

This is why I and other trans people find construction of our transitions as cosmetic” (or a “harmful social practice”) so frustrating, and, well, insulting. It silences our voices, it implies that what we do to our bodies is somehow wrong
(isn’t control of your own body a feminist issue?) and it in general enforces heirarchical constructs based on dualisms that non-trans people would reject
having imposed upon themselves. If I am to fight against slut-shaming, abortion-shaming, body-image shaming (as I do) because I believe these are egregious impositions upon a person’s dignity by heirarchical society, why am I supposed to sit in the corner and be quiet when people do the same to me as a trans woman?

It’s the same when people use the language of trans/any oppressed group to describe a form of their own oppression; it creates the very false equivalency that Redmegaera opposes. For example, I’ve suffered both gender dysphoria and body-shaming for being female; and while they both feed similar anxieties, they are not same, do not stem from the same causes, and are experienced in quite different ways by myself. (I’ll hasten to add that I would also not claim that my own experience of having my body shamed is the same as a woman who was raised female and thus had those ideas inflicted upon her at a younger age.) Colonization of other people’s experiences is not liberation.

I’m all for discussions of privilege. I acknowledge freely the privilege I accumulated before I transitioned; I talk about it all the time on my blog, as do many of the trans feminists I know. Often we use it as a way to open up examinations of the invisible privileges that bind us all inside the insiduous system of kyriarchy. Hell, my own feminism would approach radicalism, if it weren’t for the fact that most radical feminists won’t have anything to do with me.

It does not dimish the reality of sexism and male oppression of women to note that other forms of oppression exist, or even to note that sometimes the other forms of oppression are more oppressive and urgent; but that’s what radical reduction of all issues into a sexist template does. As bell hooks says,

Sexist oppression of is primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited. It is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist. This does not mean that eradicating sexist oppression would eliminate other forms of oppression. Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.

Othering isn’t liberation. Silencing isn’t liberation. Imposing your own description on people isn’t liberation. Normalizing your own condition isn’t liberation.

Or more pragmatically, why is it, when so many trans feminists are working against the same issues cis feminists work against, that we get left out in the cold so often by those same cis people?

(I did mention I'm really loving bell hooks, right? In fact, I'm off to read more of her stuff. Keep it classy til I get back!)

Erasure

(warning: any links from the New York Post should automatically be considered triggery.)

I was married once.

It was a rather ordinary marriage, except that we both got unnecessary blood tests; our information about New Jersey law was out of date.

In case you're wondering, I was the groom. As if you needed to.

That was the easy one. If I ever get married again--to a man or a woman--things will be likely more difficult, depending on whether the state I'm in recognizes a) legal sex change and b) gay marriage (just in case, either way.) It's one of those nebulous things about being trans--for example, as Jenny Boylan notes, had I stayed married and gotten all my paperwork done, my (ex-)wife and I would have had a legal, lesbian marriage. Except that it didn't start that way.

Now, most progressive places don't have any trouble sorting this out, while a few (Ohio! I'm looking at you! Let people change their birth certificate gender, for pete's sake) have more--difficulty. But even in the heart of the most progressive regions, you can get something like this, from the New York Post:

Wedding Crashers

I dupe, I dupe!

While political arguments rage, New York City has certified its first gay marriage -- of two men who fooled the City Clerk's Office into letting them tie the knot.

Hakim Nelson and Jason Stenson married on May 26 with nary a raised eyebrow among the oblivious city bureaucrats who not only OK'd the marriage license, but conducted the ceremony, despite gay marriage being illegal in the state.

The plucky couple filled out their marriage application online at the Apple Store on 14th Street in May. A few days later, they went to the City Clerk's Office on Worth Street to complete the form and get their marriage license.

Nelson -- who goes by the name "Kimah" and hopes to one day have surgery to become a "full female" -- wore an orange dress and white leggings, his straight, brown hair falling to his shoulders.

The gullible clerk didn't seem to notice that both Nelson, 18, and Stenson, 21, have male first names.

They both had to present identification to obtain the license. Stenson used his state ID card, and Nelson gave a state Benefit Card, which he uses to collect food stamps.

By a fluke, Nelson's ID card has an "F" for female on it, because the official who issued it in April assumed from his appearance that he was a woman.

Good morning, transphobia, how are you going to fuck up peoples' lives today?

It's almost pointless where to start here--that it wasn't a same-sex marriage because trans women aren't men, that "duping" is an insanely insensitive thing to say to trans people (it's what the people who commit violence against us use as their defense), that it's not a "fluke" that Kimah's ID had an F on it--you only need a letter from a therapist to change your gender on your driver's license in New York State--and for fuck's sake, enough with the Pronoun Fail.

I won't quote further from the Post--I feel all icky inside already--but here are the headlines of their follow-up stories; that should give you a feel for things:

Unwed Dudes A Happy Couple

Marriage License Of 2 Nyc Men Revoked

N.Y. Unwittingly Marries "Same-Sex" Couple

Oh wait! That last one isn't from the Post, it's from The Advocate.

I can't say I'm surprised.

The erasure of the "T" from LGBT is not exactly a new phenomenon. Whether it's ignoring Sylvia Rivera (who was one of the instigators of the Stonewall riots but was later given the cold shoulder by the gay movement) or deciding trans people don't deserve equal rights yet, there has been a long history within the gay rights movement of ignoring or denigrating trans issues.

And while I understand that often there are very different issues involved--for example, the marriage issue is more or less resolved for heterosexual trans people in most of the country--that still doesn't mean there isn't a convergance of issues. Removing the gender-identity provisions in ENDA didn't just throw trans people under the bus--it said to the femmy gay guys and butch lesbians that they didn't deserve rights either; that the protections that ENDA promised--most of all, the right to live your life the way you want to live it without worrying about losing your job or not finding a home--only applied to "normal"-looking queers.

That eraser gets a pretty good workout.

But hey, if the Advocate wants to be on the same page as the Post, who am I to complain?

After all, I'm naturally deceptive, don't you know.

The Second Awakening: Special Retro-Mobile Edition!

Sgniteerg Skcud! I mean, greetings, ducks! I'm on my way home again and blogging at 50 mph, after spending a weekend teaching myself to play the theme from Love Story, listening to my niece read to me, and finally catching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu. Which, along with my return homewards, has me in a retrospective mood.

I didn't watch Buffy back when it was on TV--oddly enough, I had seen (and even liked) the movie, and maybe that kept me away at first; I remembered the film as harmless fluff. By the time I heard that Joss Whedon had taken it in a very different, darker, and (as usual) beautifully-characterized direction, it was too late to catch up on things and I didn't want to try to come in late. So I missed it, until now.

I'm not one of those trans peeps who regrets not having a girlhood, per se; I know how lousy my adolescence was, and I really don't think having been female would have helped much. (Or would it? I've become such a different--and better--person since I transitioned, maybe it would have worked out...) But that doesn't keep me from occasionally getting blue about--about the tremendous waste involved with my early life, the years of being strangled with doubt and confusion, the horrific amount of mental baggage I carried around. And then too there is the consciousness of not having had a girlhood, of not having had to deal with being a teen ager, of all the ways my history separates me from other women.

Which isn't to say there aren't compensations; I was raised to believe that all things were possible for me, whereas sadly far too many women I know were raised to believe that they could be only those things that were proper. I might have been drowning in dysphoria, but I was never stifled by sexism, never silenced by society. I might have struggled with my assigned role, but it was a lot easier role to deal with than being an adolescent female.

On the other hand, though, try being the boy in sixth grade with a stuffed animal collection that covers his bed. That hill ain't so fun to climb either.

I adore Buffy so far. I love how the show manages to have empowered female characters, to show the human side of everyone, all without denying the ordinary pressures of adolescent society: Buffy might be a superhuman being with an awesome responsibility, but she worries about being popular; Xander's sly self-deprecation reminds me of someone I used to know (Ahem. It was one way to deal with always being picked on.) And I love Willow, even if she hasn't become a witch yet.

Plus, Joss Whedon's pitch statement--"high school as a horror movie"--pretty much sums up my recollection of those days.

Even so, watching it can't but help stir the pot of my memories--if part of my tranisition has been learning about how unhappy I used to be (without even knowing it), then high school was me at my most miserable--tormented by my strangeness, my awkwardness, and the horrible feelings I had that I feared were at the root of everything. Watching Buffy can lead me to those "if only" moments--if only I knew that I could be a woman, if only I knew how happy it would make me--if only I could have just been born female and avoided all of this pain.

I can't change that. I'm not even sure I would if I could; the person I am today was forged on the anvil of my transness, and I would be a very different person indeed without it. And I like that person, more and more every day.

So I shouldn't regret the past. If only I could.

Crossroads

Intersectionality, ducks! It's all the rage! Everyone talks about it because--everyone lives it!

Take, for example, this story over at Pam's House Blend. It seems that there was a topless coffee shop up in Maine, one that a (deranged, angry, spiteful) local resident decided it was OK to burn to the ground. Nobody was hurt, but they could have been--the owner and his wife and children were sleeping inside. In addition to the destruction of his uninsured building, the owner lost the lobster pots and carpenter's equipment he used to make a living.

Why am I bringing this up? Because of the dizzying intersections of forces, privileges and theories in this one case. When I first read the story, my thinking went something like this:

1. A topless coffee shop? That's got to be some sexist exploitation going on.


2. Didn't deserve to burn down, though. That's not right.


3. Wait, they had a topless waiter too?


4. The family nearly died?


5. Still, I think a topless anything is probably exploitative.


6. The townsfolk didn't like the place.


7. But they didn't like it, it seems, because they thought it was sexist: they didn't like it because they thought it was "dirty."


8. Well, sex isn't dirty. I like sex. People, such as me, should have more sex and feel less guilty about it.


9. Wait, one of the waitresses was using the money to put herself through college?


10. But it's still exploitative, right?


11. Sure, because it's sexist that being a topless waitress was the best way for her to make money. Whew. I almost had to think for a second.


12. My head hurts. I can't figure out if I should write a post condemning the place, or write them a check. Or both.

And that's a relatively benign example. Things can get far more complicated than that.

For example, there's me.

Being trans opens you up to a wonderful world of intersecting under- and overprivileging. On the one hand, I'm a woman--I identify as one, I look like one, I am in general treated like one, with all that entails. Moreover, I'm a trans woman, which means that if/when people find out/are told/Google me that their attitudes about me will very likely change. Some will stop thinking of me as a woman. Some will think of me as a woman with an asterisk. Sometimes I'll be expected to be the mystical tranny, here to tell everyone about what it's like to be trans. (And, of course, almost everyone will want to know what my genitals look like, something not an ordinary area of discourse, at least not at lunch.) Not to mention that there are people who will react violently towards me, who will single me out, who will make me a special target--that over and beyond the targeted/othered status I bear as a woman, as a trans woman I'm at risk for even greater degrees of violence.

But wait. There's also no denying that I have and have had privileges simply not available to most women. As a very, very simple example: it is highly unlikely that a woman who had my editorial assistant job 14 years ago would have been given the license to teach herself how to program computers that I received. (Especially not at that company--the boss was a right old chauvinist.) In fact, just about everything about my career in IT, which is my bread and butter, was aided by being male at the time. I had instant credibility; it was considered proper for me to be in the field; and I never had to vouchsafe my identity as a programmer the way many women in IT have to. (Though many women don't have to vouchsafe their gender the way I often have to; like I said, it gets dizzying.)

And of course I'm white, not overweight, college-educated, not disabled. A ton of privileges. Do my underprivileged characteristics--not cisgendered, not straight, not chromosomally female--outweigh my privileges?

It depends.

One of the reasons I began writing this blog was the gradual awakening I had about the iniquities of privilege. It's the passion that drives me, even as I struggle to understand and expose my own privileges. It's why I am an opponent of kyriarchy, why I so staunchly oppose all the various petty divisions within the different communities of underprivilege.

But as it turns out, checking your privilege is very hard to do.

Which leads me to Shakesville. I've only been a recent reader there, but the community there had a profound influence on me; indeed, Shakesville and Tiger Beatdown are the two sites that inspired me to start blogging again after a four-year hiatus.

I'm mentioning Shakesville because--as you may have noticed in my little blogroll widget--the site is in stasis right now. You can read about it at Shakesville, but what it breaks down to is: Melissa McEwan, the founder and webmistress of the site, had to take a break from posting. On her own blog. Because people wouldn't listen to her when she said that a lot of the comments were bothering her, and that people needed to be more civil.

I'll repeat that. She stopped posting. To her own blog.

Even though I've only been a recent Shaker, the safe space that Liss has created and worked so hard to maintain is something I cherish. And even as I get mad that things came to this head, I feel bad for my own failings, sins of commission and omission, there.

The idea that Shakesville has reached a crossroads, that there could really not be a Shakesville anymore, is chilling.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown as usual is all over this, far better than I can add with my poor powers. But I will say: this is an issue of privilege, of flaunting it and most of all of not examining your own privilege. But just so we all understand:

When somebody tells you something you said hurt them, and you don't take it
seriously, that's privilege.

When somebody tells you your conduct is against the simple rules she created
for her own space, that's privilege.

When you repeatedly ignore complaints except to occasionally apologize and
then go right back to doing what you were doing, that's privilege.

If you think that somebody is supposed to do something for you, something
that you value and treasure, and you don't listen to what they say, you in fact
act like you were owed something--you better believe that's
privilege with a capital-fuckin' P.

And when somebody writes an incensed blog post about privilege, you can bet she has some privilege too. We all do. So what are you going to do about that?

Satire or Wince--You Make the Call

I'm in a bad mood right now, ducks, so I find myself not in a position to judge on the humor of this piece--I get what they're doing, but I'm surprisingly humorless about this subject.

But judge for yourselves:


Conservatives Warn Quick Sex Change Only Barrier Between Gays, Marriage

(h/t helen boyd at (en)gender)

Me, I'm off to hide under the covers against the moment when somebody takes me to task for using a sports reference in the title of this post--it's only been a few hours since someone tried to revoke my womanhood, and I need to recharge.

Except I Am

Reasons I Am Told I Cannot Be A Feminist
Culled from Books, Message Boards, Web Pages and Conversations by, for, and against feminists

1. Because I shave my legs.
2. Because I color my hair.
3. Because I wear skirts.
4. Because I wear dresses.
5. Because I wear high heels.
6. Because I had plastic surgery.
7. Because I had breast implants.
8. Because I had vaginoplasty.
9. Because I am attracted to men.
10. Because I still am attracted to women.
11. Because I've read a few books on feminism.
12. Because I've only read a few books on feminism.
13. Because I have a vagina--now.
14. Because I didn't have a vagina--then.
15. Because I don't have a cervix.
16. Because I had a penis.
17. Because I had male privilege.
18. Because I had white, male, middle-class privilege.
19. Because I still have white, middle-class privilege.
20. Because I wasn't raised as a girl.
21. Because I look like a dude.
22. Because I look like a woman.
23. Because of who I was.
24. Because of who I am.
25. Because I dare call myself a woman.