=AtG=
So-called “bathroom bills” are all the rage these days, legislation that attempts to regulate what washrooms trans people are “supposed” to use. They often feature rhetoric about predators claiming to be trans women to access women’s facilities, or how women would be uncomfortable around “people with biologically male [sic] characteristics.” This prompted bathroom selfie protests wherein trans folk took pictures of themselves in facilities where they clearly don’t fit in, a move praised by Joe Sands on our own network.
However, this is not the strategy I can endorse to protest these absurd attempts to police washroom access by trans folk.
The bathroom selfie campaign only works because the people participating in it “pass” as cisgender. I don’t mean to say that gender conformity is bad per se, but those of us trans folk who get by on our day-to-day without getting clocked are not and were never the targets of transphobic bathroom bills–not until someone somewhere is Orwellian enough to literally require genital inspections prior to entry to a washroom. We can shock on-the-fencers into seeing, correctly so, that men would be required to use the women’s washroom and vice versa, because those same ignorant on-the-fencers overlooked the rather obvious fact that some trans folk are binarist conformers who are trying to blend in, not stick out.
But the strategy doesn’t work if the person participating either: 1) chooses not to “pass,” i.e. is a gender nonconformist voluntarily; 2) is unable to pass because of intensity or quantity of features that are commonly coded as a gender contrary to the person’s identity.
By only featuring trans folk who are accepted in their identities because their performance conforms enough, we are accepting the cissexist assumption that there is a correct way to “do” gender; conversely, that anyone who doesn’t conform enough is now a valid target for exclusion. The transphobes pushing these bathroom bills, when they’re not talking about predators smokescreening as trans (I hear this has a staggering success rate of 0% for getting someone off the hook), are riding on tired old tropes of the “dude in the dress” causing distress–not for actually harassing anyone–but merely for existing with features they decide should not coexist in a single individual. This was covered by The Orbit’s Zinnia Jones on her gender analysis blog. It’s a good read. (And yes, even in that example, the mother of the kid in question tries to refute the transphobia by pointing out that her daughter is unquestionably female, because of the way she expresses her gender)
Here’s the basic truth: Not every person can or will conform to gender expectations. That doesn’t mean they forfeit their right to access public washrooms and changerooms.
Legislation or not, those trans folk who are clocked are already being harassed, assaulted, and murdered. And while it is absolutely necessary for us to protest these laws which codify and legitimize trans discrimination, it is a pill too bitter for me to swallow to do so in a way that would require throwing gender nonconformists under the bus, simply because they don’t meet cis folk’s arbitrary criteria of what makes a person a person. As someone who hasn’t been clocked in years, who everyone assumes is cis, I am not the poster girl for this witch hunt–and neither are the conformist participants of this bathroom bill selfie protest who perpetuate the notion that a trans person’s respect is contingent on cis standards.
In my next article, I’ll discuss how I think we should be addressing this issue.
Stay sexy and ideally not cissexist, lovelies.
-Shiv
An excellent point, and one that unfortunately needs to be driven home again and again and again. Privilege is so sneaky, and can undercut you at any moment, making you a less than ideal ally. I thank you for making this point, because it’s something I probably would have missed as it sailed way over my head.
This reminds me of the bad ol’ days, when gay men did everything possible to come across as a “regular guy”, with absolutely no sissy behaviour, so they could successfully pass. It seems that every person who is not the standard straight cis norm goes through this crucible before actual and complete acceptance can be achieved – if you can impress the standard straight cis norm peoples, they might decide you are okay.
Humans are so fucked up.
I care a lot about non-passing trans folks, think they are often left out of consideration in trans rights discussions. Huzzah for bringing it up! On the subject more broadly, the fact all these bills hit the fence at the same time makes it really obvious this is part of a nationwide campaign devised by either A) the republican party itself or B) some very powerful and creepy think tank they’re bowing to.
Who organized this hate campaign? That’s what the fuck I wanna know. When people sought answer in Uganda, it was very useful information to have. I mean, it got Scott Lively’s scumbagging ass in a courtroom.
Great American Satan, I found this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-behind-the-new-lgbt-bathroom-laws/
Sorry I don’t know the tags… Anyway, basically, a hate group.
Where would you stand on an inverse strategy?
Say a cis-gendered male such as myself began
1) Carrying my birth certificate with me and pointedly showing it to other men in the men’s room
2) Asking to see their birth certificate “cuz you know, you can never be too sure about those post-operative transgender folk”
3) Take their [near-certain] angry refusal to do so as a sign that they must have something to hide. Maintain that having one’s birth certificate on hand is the most natural thing in the world, in this day-and-age.
4) Contact authorities and report them as a probable-transgender-individual “stalking” the wrong restroom.
I’ll note that the idea has one gaping problem: there’s the potential (statistically unlikely, but not impossible) risk of inadvertently catching an actually-transgender man attempting to use the men’s room. [Wow, what a disgust it is that the last half of that sentence would ever have to be written].
Why am I not remotely surprised that the conversion “therapy” promoting extremist conservative Christian group whose clients include Kim Davis and Scott Lively, who has volunteered to defend HB2 in NC, is responsible for drafting and pushing the legislation to being with.
@ #4 Kevin Kirkpatrick:
While it made me chuckle, it has the downside of involving strangers. At least the bathroom selfies could be (and mostly were) staged with consenting cis folk featured in the background–while your idea does get the point across, it still involves roping someone in to a debacle they didn’t necessarily want. Which, I mean, yeah, that’s basically what transphobic policymakers are doing to trans folk, but I don’t really want to wish invasive questioning on anyone–particularly anyone with a full bladder. I’ve got a lot on my plate this weekend so I will be doing a post about better protests to make, it just might not come out until Monday ish.
Incidentally, I do carry my birth certificate with me. I also live in a jurisdiction where it is possible for me to amend it just by asking nicely (no really, I’m serious), so it has my current legal name and “F” for a gender marker. I keep it because I never know when I need to access a bureaucratic agency that hasn’t updated their records of me (and of course, no government department talks to other government departments, so you have to do it like 30 times). That said, yeah, I would totally tell you to stuff it if you asked to see it, unless you were an employee for one of the aforementioned agencies and I was accessing those services. 😛
I’m thinking you could probably make the point at no one’s expense by covering up the pencil men and pencil men-with-skirts labelling washroom entrances with images of human karyotypes instead. But that’s a joke with a bit of inside knowledge which enough people might not have for it to work…
Edit: i speel gud
Okay, I’m with you on the fact that this is complex. But your title doesn’t communicate that. Your title made it absolutely clear to me – until I read the blog post and found out the opposite was true – that non-trans* persons were the ones taking these selfies.
This criticism:
is astute, appropriate, and necessary.
But your work does the same thing, doesn’t it? By saying these selfies operate at the “expense of trans folk” you can be read as necessarily excluding the people who are taking the pictures from “trans folk”.
Now, “at the expense of trans* folk” doesn’t have to mean “at the expense of each and every single trans* person. As long as it is at the expense of some trans* folk, the sentence can be read as perfectly true.
But the charitable way of reading you as not excluding the folk taking selfies from “trans folk” is exactly what you’re denying to the people taking the selfies – by taking pictures of themselves, you say, they have provided evidence that they are excluding other trans* folk.
I don’t believe you mean to exclude other trans* folk, and I don’t believe that the person taking the selfie is responsible for others’ actions that make those trans* persons “representative” of all trans* folk. That’s a burden that the privileged place on the oppressed. It is not the same as horizontal oppression.
Now, I said earlier I agree with the identification of a real problem when you say,
…but this is undercut by your statement
I’m not a binarist, and a relatively small percentage of trans* folk are such. Even when an individual trans* person identifies with one of the two major gender identities in their home society, that simply cannot be taken to be evidence that the person is binarist. The fact that I frequently choose to be known to others as a woman does not, on its own, tell you my opinion on gender liberation.
The shocking thing is that ***even if it did***, there are so many more non-trans* binarists than trans* binarists that the obvious focus on trans* binarists in various discussions and writings only goes to show how thoroughly scapegoated trans* folk are for the gender system that they neither invented nor wanted, but are simply trying to survive within.
If you want to critique trans* binarists, I think you should do a much better job than you do here. This article makes it seem as if those who pass as cisgender do so because they are binarists, and that therefore passing is evidence of binarism. You do mention people who don’t pass despite not making a choice to violate gendered expectations. But this only proves that some binarists may fail to pass even though they are binarists. It doesn’t acknowledge that many, many people who pass as cisgender – indeed, many people who are in fact cisgender – are themselves not binarists.
Discussion of the rates of trans* binarism (which, strictly speaking, you didn’t do here) or discussion of how trans* binarists engage in X behavior not performed by (at least some) non-binarists (which you did do here) should always be accompanied by a discussion of the reasons trans* people pass despite not being binarists. Otherwise, you leave the impression, as you have done here, that if only people were not binarists, they would obviously make choices that would lead to a failure to pass as cisgender.
This simply isn’t true, but you write your blog post in language that appears to operate from that presumption. It makes me pretty darn sad.
Passing trans* folk are not the “bad trans* folk” that have bought into this or that myth, or that must advocate binaries. People pass for many reasons, just as they fail to pass because of any number of reasons.
If there are people (trans* or non-trans*, it’s the behavior, not the identity that matters) aggregating these selfies and deliberately selecting only the people who pass as cisgender, I would adopt an initial presumption, from which it might be hard to move me, that this selection process is a harmful contribution to the gender system even if the selfies themselves are not.
The people taking the selfies are not the problem, and nothing is preventing gender resisters from also taking selfies in any gendered bathroom they like. I imagine that theocrats of both major genders would be nearly-universally horrified at such selfies no matter the restroom in which they were taken, and the point that birth certificate checks wouldn’t create a gender-pristine world will have been made from more than one trans* community’s perspective.
You say,
but I say those pictures will be just as uncomfortable for the theocratic gender-narcissists, and just as powerful politically. It is, in fact, only together as trans* folk that frequently pass (with our permission or against our will) with trans* people that very rarely pass (because of our open resistance or because markers beyond our control creating meanings with which we are uncomfortable) that the mainstream will see these policies to be as contemptible as they truly are. No matter what the policy, when you have some people policing the bathrooms you can’t get the result the gender-narcissists want. They either craft their policies to try to out the hidden trans* folk, in which case the openly trans* folk fuck everything up, or they craft their policies to try to keep trans* folk hidden, in which case the trans* folk who pass as cisgender but are suddenly occupying spaces unexpected for them will fuck everything up.
It’s like the right wing pretending that queer marriage was ever illegal. Some of them believed that a transsexual man couldn’t marry a man, because he went and got a phalloplasty and he knew what he was doing and that’s that. So the transition matters. But then the transsexual man wishes to marry a woman and half of the right throws a fit because that makes the couple “really” lesbian…because the transition doesn’t matter, what you’re born with counts.
The right wing openly holds both of these positions simultaneously and doesn’t want to be confronted with the contradiction. The answer isn’t critiquing trans* people who pass as cisgender for being public and visible (although you can critique the non-trans* society that maintains trans* oppression for making trans* people who pass more socially palatable, if that happens to be the case in your corner of the world and “passing” isn’t considered a horrible lie that will justify your murder).
The answer is getting trans* folk that cis* folk assume to be cis* and trans* folk that cis* folk assume to be gender resisters (whether this is intentionally true or not) to engage in a joint project of exposing their fucked up gender bullshit where everyone can see it.
Imagine, instead of criticizing certain folk for their visibility and activism, a joint project that sent this message:
Raising it as a question has some problems (it allows cis* gender-narcissists to continue to believe that their opinions on the topic are actually valuable), but advocating a single position allows the violent trans-hating jerk wads to oppose a single position. They will join together to fight the outside enemy. When you raise the question for them, they will find that they have major disagreements within their own trans*-hating movement, and they stop fighting us to start fighting each other (at least for a bit).
But to get them to realize it requires people assumed to be cis* and people not assumed to be cis* working together. Both groups visible at the same time.
To my great discomfort, I can’t help but understand your blog post to include a criticism of the visibility of certain trans* folk. We’ll actually need to encourage visibility for everyone if were going to get through this bullshit, theocratic time.
I totally understand what you are saying but I think these selfies are making a valid point.
During the debate on gays in the military we heard rubbish about straights being uncomfortable showering/sharing sleeping quarters with gays/lesbians. (Tough enough to fight al Qaeda, but too timid to tolerate gays in the shower!) It was pointed out that if they have ever used a public gym or taken physical education in high school or college they almost certainly have showered with gays/lesbians. Doing so pointed out the absurdity of flipping out over something that has already happened.
I think we can show the same issue at play here. That they most probably already have shared public restrooms with transgender people, were unaware, and unharmed because just like gays don’t join the military to stare at straights in the showers, transpeople don’t transition to abuse cis people in restrooms.
By showing photos of a bearded, tattooed, muscled, bare chested man and saying to women is this who you want in restrooms with you it shows the absurdity of such laws. That is clearly a man by any measure but under these laws the same women expressing timidity about transgender women would have to share restroom, locker room and shower facilities with this man.
It’s not going to convince the peddlers of poison, but it might make some of those who have swallowed the poison think. When a woman expresses fear of being stalked by men, that is a real-life fear. The point, however, is transwomen are not men and transmen are.
kestrel @3 thank you! i’ve been needing that.
Crip Dyke:
I can only make the title of the post so long. I accept that technical correctness could be misinterpreted in the way that you describe. I obviously do not mean to say that anyone who passes, voluntarily or otherwise, is not trans.
Regarding the application of the term binarist, in this case, I needed a term for someone who does not identify as genderqueer or genderfluid. In other words, someone who does identify as a man or a woman, regardless of their expression thereof or status as cis or trans. Under this definition, I am a binarist, even if I do not believe gender is binary as a concept–my identity is firmly and unfailingly “woman,” (among other things), all the time. My gender expression is conformist because people have gendered me correctly for years, so I admit that I must be meeting their expectations of what an androgynous woman is “supposed” to look like.
Thus, even though it has only been legal for me to use the women’s washroom for 4 months in my jurisdiction, I have never had a bathroom harassment issue. I don’t prepare myself in the morning and ask myself “do I look cis enough?” …BUT, whatever my authenticity is, it reads to cis people as “woman.”
If the protest photos being signal boosted actually featured two trans people by those descriptions, I wouldn’t have a problem. However, the ones that actually set the interwebs on fire are all solo pictures accompanied by the argument, sometimes explicit, that this man/woman isn’t going to be disruptive because they look like all the other men/women. No one should be passing along those protest photos and making the argument that trans men can look like men too, so obviously they’re not disruptive in men’s washrooms. They’re not disruptive in men’s washrooms for the same reason 99.99% of men aren’t disruptive in men’s washrooms–they just want to pee. That shouldn’t have anything to do with their appearance, as was implied by those who shared the photo protest, including some of the writers on this network.
Regarding the horizontal oppression comment… I disagree. Passing privilege is a thing. If you are perceived as cis, even after coming out as trans, you are still sorted higher into a hierarchy by a cis-supremacist society. It is absolutely still punching down for trans folk who are (voluntarily or not) perceived as cis to argue they aren’t disruptive in washrooms because they look like all the other men/women. What about the people who can’t/don’t meet those expectations? Their representation is suspiciously absent from the protest.
The protest (as it has been currently executed) still continues the conversation about trans folk as if it’s supposed to be about appearances; that it’s okay to judge trans people’s acceptability in public facilities by their ability to look cis. And I’m not okay to play by those rules.
It seems you now disagree with this statement you made in the OP:
I’m inferring that from this statement in your follow up:
It doesn’t explicitly say that the photos would fail as activism because a non-binary person appeared in them, but I think the implication is there. So do you agree or disagree that a non-binary campaign of similar selfies would have value? If you agree now, then it seems you disagree with your earlier assertion that the campaign you criticize “only works” because the current activists are typically perceived as cis*.
This is important, because if non-binary folk **can** perform successful photo-activism, then the current photo-activism does not rely on being perceived as cis*. The people who are perceived as cis* will choose only one bathroom for their “which one of these doesn’t belong” photos, whereas non-binary people could choose either. Thus the choice of which bathroom is based on that, but their capacity for activism in no way depends on being perceived as cis*.
Thus, the capacity for activism does not in any way constitute a privilege inaccessible to non-binary folk.
As for this bit:
Thanks for clearing that up.
There’s a world of difference between being feminine and being feminist. As “-ist” and “-ism” are associated with ideology and advocacy, I would have used the words differently. I would have used the term “binary” when you’re using “binarist”, so I clearly was confused about what you actually were saying.
Ah! Now I see what would have upset you so much. That is, indeed, a terrible argument and should be criticized. This is the same BS that HRC used so frequently:
:vomit:
So, yes, that’s a terrible argument.
But here’s the thing: I really wish you would have taken apart the argument. I re-read your OP. There’s no quoting any of that argument and there’s no paraphrase of that argument so that it can be criticized. Your criticism is entirely directed at the pictures themselves, and at the “privilege” of being able to take a photo that would shock the gender-naive.
If your problem is with the argument, please criticize the argument.
Well, yes. You are sorted into a hierarchy, but this is involuntary. Furthermore, it’s not “punching” anyone just to have privilege. It’s punching down when you use your privilege to hurt those below you.
Opposing those bathroom bills doesn’t hurt the non-binary.
I fully concede that the rhetoric that you mention in your comment, not your OP, frequently constitutes a form of punching down. To really be punching down, though, you have to do what HRC did. They didn’t merely use the photos of upper-middle-class lesbians and gay men. They combined that with legislative activism that specifically advocated ditching gender ID protections and frequently took positions that conceded you could fire a person for being disruptively queer, just not for being queer. Of course, the “disruptively queer” that they conceded could be a firing offense included merely being relentlessly readable as queer.
So that constituted an attempt to legislate on behalf of themselves, and to increase their own power, by reassuring bigots that they could fire all the people that they really wanted to fire anyway.
The campaign you describe does only half of that: the bathroom bills they oppose would not have been beneficial for non-binary folk. And they aren’t advocating legislative action that would muster support for passage by excluding the non-binary from protection.
In the rhetoric (not the photos) they ARE still using their ability to fit in with folk in one of the major genders (including when in the bathroom) as a reason to listen to their argument…but you still haven’t described any rhetoric that makes it clear that they think you ***shouldn’t*** listen to people who don’t fit into either major gender (including when in the bathroom).
That’s an action that deserves criticism, I agree, but I don’t know that I’d reach for “punching down” rhetoric when they are in no way at all trying to make the situation worse for non-binary people, and they are also in no way at all trying to get the legislature in a way that will benefit them more than it benefits non-binary folk.
To sum up this section: The rhetoric you describe is BS rhetoric, but I didn’t know about that: your OP only criticized the pictures and the visibility. Moreover, “punching down” is rhetoric that I don’t think is fairly used here. When I criticized HRC for something superficially similar, there was a lot more context that showed their willingness to disadvantage non-conformist QTs for the political advantage of conformist QTs.
Further things about “punching down” become important when you read the rest of your statement.
The thing is, the photos are more about the fact that such persons ARE disruptive in the bathrooms the legislators think they should use then the fact that they are NOT disruptive in the bathrooms they currently use. It is binary thinking to believe that to argue one is the same as arguing the other.
I’m willing to concede that folk are doing that, but the pictures themselves aren’t doing that: you’ll have to quote some of the rhetoric that actually does that before your criticism is at all fair.
Moreover, I quote one more time for emphasis:
look, that’s not an argument, that’s a fact. It’s not punching anyone to say what’s true.
It would be punching down to say,
That certainly would imply that being conformist should come with privileges.
It is NOT punching down merely to state the fact.
And, lastly:
Their representation will be present as soon as they take some selfies and pass them on. What about their absence is “suspicious”?
Why is their absence “suspicious”?
Whom do you “suspect”? Is this bashing non-binary folk for not getting off their butts? Are you suspecting them of being lazy or of being cowards?
I don’t think anyone would come to that conclusion, based on what you’ve written above, but by leaving things so incredibly vague, you don’t give anyone a fair chance to see the merits (or demerits) of your statements. I feel very uneasy with such a statement. It feels like an accusation that can’t be refuted (or even opposed).
Obviously your motivation to oppose the rhetoric of privilege is great, and it can easily be opposed whether or not we agree that “punching down” is an accurate label for the photo campaign. I support that effort. My critique here is because your opposition to the photos, without any description whatsoever of the objectionable rhetoric, is problematic.
Finally, while “passing privilege” is, in fact, a thing, I strongly disagree with the idea of calling it “privilege” in the sense of “oppression = power + privilege”. The alliteration makes such a phrase tempting, but I think it’s misleading and harmful. passing has real world consequences, but passing on its own does not make the passing person into the oppressor.
At this point I just have to admit that I do not have the energy to ration for a detailed response on your scalpel-like dissection of my post. You’ve started like 5 different conversations in your last comment, and actually addressing all of them is going to require an essay that’s an order of magnitude longer than the OP, to say nothing of the 5 other conversations you started in your first comment.
Judge me harshly if you must, but at this exact moment, I do not have the energy to do that right now.
I understand, and I do not judge you harshly.