I’ve struggled over the last four weeks with a post bashing around inside my skull. It seems unable to escape but also unable to calm down. I’ve wanted to write a rather lengthy post about language and the problems that I see with certain tendencies in trans* advocacy these days around language. But every time I go long-form, there’s so much that I can’t find a place to stop. So then I tried to go short-form, but that didn’t convey the real difficulty of the topic I wanted to engage. So now I’m going in a completely different direction, with a seemingly unrelated introduction and then, probably, a short-form take on the topic itself, allowing you all to take from it what you will, given the context provided by the introduction/preface.
So a good, long time ago, the internationally celebrated center of learning that is UMM ran into a spot of difficulty: apparently some right wing jerks were being right wing jerks. Whodathunkit. Usernames are Smart, a longtime commenter whose work and thoughts I remember as generally respectable and valuable*1, disagreed with PZ Myers suggestion that Morris residents treat as trash any scattered copies of the Young Republican rag “The North Star”. (Yes, they deliberately stole the name from the abolitionist newspaper of Frederick Douglas, which famously included one of the only ads promoting the Seneca Falls “convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” to run outside of the State of New York).
I disagreed with Usernames’ disagreement, and said so. The crux was that while I agree that white people should be accountable to people of color when attempting to address racism in the US, I disagreed that suggesting actions (like trashing any “scattered” copies of The North Star that weren’t in their designated paper-piles) was the same as telling people from other groups what experiences define their groups. I also disagreed that waiting for people of color to plan a response is the right course of action when a white person is confronted with racism in that person’s presence. This doesn’t mean that white folk should be praise for anything they do, just for taking action. No, this is merely the natural consequence of refusing to put people of color on the spot, to make people of color responsible for ending racism.
When suggested reactions (or actual reactions) turn out to be counter-productive (or simply widely disliked) by the communities of color directly affected by a specific racist action, then the un-fun begins: we white people get to accept accountability for our errors. But this is not simple, nor is it black-or-white. I wrote at the time:
when the groups most affected don’t have a reasonably cohesive message – when there is disagreement – white folk have to use our critical thinking to make a decision about how to proceed. Disagreement among folk of color over best response tactics doesn’t relieve white folk of the responsibility to act to end racism.
… both when there is and when there isn’t a reasonably cohesive message, critical thinking must be engaged to make sure that you don’t do something unethical just because the idea arose from communities of color. Sometimes this is as easy as refusing to stand with those who would launch a war, but other times it requires asking difficult questions about whether the people of color most able to get attention to their analysis/perspective are in fact people who really represent the folk targeted by a particular racist action. Horizontal hostility, sexism, classism, ableism, all these can affect what responses get recommended.
We don’t get a free pass to enact sexism because we are fighting racism.
We get, if we have good and honest friends, the gift of accountability on all the moral dimensions of our choices all at once.
That sure sounds like a crap deal, doesn’t it? And yet it’s true. We can’t fail to act because we have unearned privilege. Neither can we fail to act when injustices target a marginalized community that hasn’t (yet) achieved unanimity. I mean, think about it. You can’t take advice from Thurgood Marshall because some college student named Clarence Thomas resents the existence of affirmative action programs? That’s a recipe for everlasting injustice.
So, here we get to The Big Disagreement.
Certain people, including people I respect, including Siggy and Shiv here on this network, have advocated using words related to gender and sex very differently from how I would choose. Shiv has quoted (IIRC) Julia Serano discussing how referring to certain trans* women as “male” is never acceptable. Siggy wrote A personal style guide on sex vs gender which included some important parts, such as
Some people say that “woman” refers to gender, while “female” refers to sex. I think this is incorrect, on both the descriptive and prescriptive level.
Now, I agree with Siggy’s analysis of the descriptive: people can and do use these words interchangeably. I disagree with Siggy’s analysis on the prescriptive level:
When we think about “male” and “female”, so many of our associations are with gender. If we tell people that “male” and “female” are really referring to sex, we are making it really easy to associate sex with gender.
Think about what Siggy is saying here: we are inappropriately associating sex with gender to the extent that the words that are nominally about biological categories (male and female) have been misused to the point that “so many of our associations are with gender”. This leads Siggy to assert that any attempt to re-distinguish sex from gender leads to a sort of recreation of awareness of the sexed-connotations of male and female, and thus cements those associations with the gender associations just discussed to create a jumbled aggregate that is even less subject to change over time.
Well, okay. I get the idea behind giving up on male and female, but conceding the meaning of male and female to the reactionaries and the confused doesn’t actually do anything to disassociate sex from gender either. You still need to be able to speak about bodies separately from personalities. How do we do that? Unsurprisingly for such an intractable problem, Siggy can’t give us the cure-all we would like:
If I want to talk about specific physical characteristics (e.g. if it’s medically relevant), I refer to the physical characteristics by name. For example, the two most common chromosomal types are not “female” and “male” but XX and XY.
If I want to talk about a whole cluster of physical characteristics, I talk about male-typical or female-typical characteristics.
Okay, but how is “male typical” less affected by gender-associations than “male”. And if we can’t use “male” to refer to certain aspects of certain bodies because the word has too many gender associations to do so without retrenching the concept of binary and biologically fixed gender that always matches expectations of genital shape, then why can we use “male typical” to do the same thing? Is there any language that we can use?
Some people have a particular attachment to the phrases “people with vaginas” or “people with penises”. This is awkward, and as an ace blogger I can say that not everyone wishes to hear about genitals all the time. Also some gender dysphoric people would prefer not to be reminded of their genitals all the time.
Definitely true. I want to make it clear that I agree with this. But what is the import of this for our communication choices? When we’re speaking of giving birth or testicular cancer or some aspect of fertility, we can’t use “female” because that confuses sex with gender, and we can’t use “vaginas” because that’s too blunt, too harsh, too personal, too invasive. So what can we say?
Ultimately: nothing. Though it’s not Siggy’s intent to silence anyone, and I greatly appreciate Siggy actually making an overt attempt to grapple with these difficult issues, this particular post over on A Trivial Knot has much more to say about thinking carefully about when you might be discussing gender despite a personal tendency to think you’re talking about sex than it has to say about how to actually talk about sex. Combined with the admonitions to avoid certain language, there’s no real way around that without a supplement to Siggy’s post, we’re left in the difficult position of having literally no language at all that safely communicates membership in a sex category so that we can discuss risks or experiences that do differ based on body types.
In my work I have consistently, some would say relentlessly, attempted to keep a clear distinction between sex and gender, but I have not attempted to shy away from using terms like “female” or “male”. I have used phrases like “female men” to communicate very specific ideas that depend on nakedly facing the locations where equating sex and gender becomes untenable. I do this for very specific reasons: unlike some other trans* persons, I am transsexual.
Now, I’m not classically feminine. In fact, many would not call me feminine at all. Yet my gender expression, as unfeminine as it might be in some mainstream heterosexual spaces, is entirely unexceptional for a woman in the dyke-centered queer spaces I frequent.
This is important to understand: in my subculture, I do not (egregiously) violate expectations of gender. Rather, I violate the expectation of others that a person of my gender will have a certain sex. Though I seek (as all radical feminists seek) to eliminate compulsory gender, so long as I do not venture too far from my home community it is not expectations of gender that primarily affect my ability to participate in society. Rather, it is expectations of sex. In framing the most recently quoted part of the style guide, Siggy says:
what if I actually want to talk about someone’s physical characteristics? It depends on the context. In many contexts, people aren’t really interested in talking about physical characteristics, but are using physical characteristics as a proxy to talk about whether they’re cis or trans, and whether they’ve transitioned or not. That is, usually we’re not really interested in sex, but rather gender and gender history.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree. I find far too many people are constantly interested in the contents of my pants. There are multiple genres of porn designed to satisfy the curiosities and desires of cisfolk interested in trans* bodies. Moreover, this is entirely geared for the non-trans*. What about me? I have to be able to speak about my own body. If I concede to the reactionaries and the confused that male merely means man (because it’s too hard to get people to understand the separateness of biology and psychology), how do I narrate my own story? Can I say penis? But, no. As Siggy anticipated, **I** am not comfortable using such specific terms, not least because I have accumulated extensive anecdotal evidence that if I use such words, the people wanting to press me for sexed, sexy and sexualized details of my history will only be emboldened, and will frequently fail to hear the unsexy, non-sexualized details of my history that are nonetheless sexed. In addition, as Siggy also mentioned, such language isn’t exactly welcome among any random audience I might have.
So where do we go from here? Shiv and Serano are undoubtedly correct that referring to trans* women as male (regardless whether they were AFAB) is a tactic of marginalization, dehumanization, and dismissal on the part of far too many who use it. Siggy is undoubtedly correct that female and male feel more familiar to the English-speaker’s ear when expecting an adjective than do man and woman.
But the fact remains, that without an adequate plan for how we can discuss trans* history and experience, erecting female = woman as a rule of reasonable speech only makes education efforts more difficult.
Imagine a world in which I could be almost-universally understood when saying that at age 21 I had male privilege but not men’s privilege. The concept of male privilege is indeed desperately confused by the conflation of maleness with the status of being a man. Yet, it’s not reasonably deniable that there are some privileges that I did have as a result of a male body that related directly to that body, that were unearned, and that relate to societal vectors of oppression. For instance, a hugely disproportionate amount of medical research is performed on male subjects. Though we have socially constructed the category “male” and though there are probably many therapies and illnesses that will not significantly differ along the lines of our constructed female/male split, some risks really do appear to be statistically different for the two different demographic groups. Because of this, when the risks are the same for the two groups, I lost nothing by the biased research.
When the risks differ, I benefitted from the biased research. There was no reason for my health to be prioritized over the health of my trans*masculine or ciswomen friends. And yet it was. This was an unearned privilege, and can only reasonably be described as a male privilege. On the other hand, there are privileges of men as a group in which I did not share. Discussions of gender oppression and sex oppression could both greatly benefit from being able to make these distinctions, yet those discussions only become less possible if we accept Serano’s positively-motivated insistence that trans*women are not and have never been male and Siggy’s reluctance to use sex terms as terms for bodies because confusion between sex and gender exists.
There are many tensions in this discussion. One that stands out for me is the tension between harm reduction and eradication. While trans* women are raped and killed in part because of the myth of the deceptive trans woman (or “trap”), it may very well be useful in preventing violence to convince the vast majority of people that referring to trans* women’s bodies as male is inappropriate at any time and when describing any moment in a trans* woman’s life. Yet truly eliminating trans* oppression requires understanding the sex/gender distinctions that we’ve been attempting to articulate to the cis community for many decades now.
I can hear Serano’s statements with the benefit of having met with her at conferences and having read her books so that I can confidently say that she doesn’t mean this “ban” to constrain individuals attempting to define or even just explain themselves or experiences. Nor, I am sure, does she mean this ban to constrain the partners and close friends of trans* folk, assuming that those folk have taken the time to truly learn what a given trans* person would want communicated and to whom. In short, Serano means this to be a ban on using words like female and male to describe anyone who doesn’t voluntarily accept a specific word or description as authentically representing themselves, and simultaneously a ban on using these words to describe persons who do accept the descriptions/labels if the author/speaker doesn’t have clearly communicated consent to use those words in the context they are actually used and with the audience that actually hears them. As a consequence, this means that accepting Serano’s advice would require that sexed words are never used to refer to large groups of trans* folks, since it is impossible to have crystal clear consent for such descriptions from everyone in the affected group. I infer Shiv, also, to be treating Serano’s suggested rule as something that should be interpreted in a specific context which allows for greater self-determination than the statement appears at first glance to allow.
For Siggy, I am less certain, but I strongly suspect that Siggy never intended admonitions about how easily sex and gender can be confused to constrain actual trans* people trying to explain their own lives and experiences.
But here’s the thing: whether or not I am correct about Shiv, Serano and Siggy, there are explicit conflicts between their positions and mine. I disagree with Siggy that public confusion about a topic could ever be a reason to accept the confusion of two concepts and move on. If two concepts have been confused, then people for whom the concepts are relevant need and deserve education about how those concepts are distinct. Sure, this is much more difficult in this case than in the case of the Copenhagen Interpretation since actually understanding the Copenhagen Interpretation is relevant to far fewer persons’ lives than are human bodies and human genders. But I don’t see the fact that it’s a big job as a reason to give up.
Likewise, in relation to both Serano and Siggy’s statements, I find it unhelpful to suggest avoiding language without giving a good idea to folks what language might take the place of the now-obsolete terms. We must be able to speak about these things, and while I’m sympathetic to the idea of taking some language off the table (at the very least taking the language off the table when not in certain specific settings where the audience can be expected to have additional knowledge that public settings cannot guarantee), in too many cases lately I’ve heard other trans* folks talking about the importance of not using certain language without doing the work of providing reasonable suggested replacements.
Yes, we have to end the dehumanization that targets queer, trans* & intersex folk who are so often lumped together as trans (even when they’re not). Yes, we might have to take steps to prevent violence now while working on that longer goal. We have to do both. At the same time. Really well, because the consequences are so very serious.
And so what can you, reader, do, faced with contradictory advice coming from multiple different people engaging the same topic with so much thought and passion and competence?
You get to make your choices and you get to accept accountability. If I or other white trans* folk over-emphasize eradication when the worst violence targeting trans* women most frequently targets trans* women of color, then I will be accountable to those who have a better system for managing immediate risks to the most vulnerable members of my community. If some transgender people move forward with language that assumes that bodies are private and should not be the focus of any trans* related education, they’ll have to be accountable to the transsexual people among us who point out that without understanding our bodies as sexed, we can’t access treatments that alter aspects of sex except as cosmetic efforts, and thus as efforts we undertake at our own expense when we are already at much greater risk of job discrimination and poverty. If cisfolk fail to understand the differences in perspective between transgender folk and transsexual folk, they will have to be accountable when they make efforts towards justice that fail one or both those communities because of those understandings. Transmasculine folk will make mistakes that require accountability to transfeminine folk. The reverse will also be true. We trans* folk have already failed intersex people in many ways and will continue to do so in the future. Such mistakes also necessitate accountability.
So, yes. Read Siggy. Read Shiv on her own and when she’s quoting Serano. Read me some more if you like. But none of us have the one perfect take on what to do next, on which words to use and when, which words not to use ever and why. None of us have the perfect education program laid out that will serve the world’s effort to transform its gender-compulsory systems to entirely voluntary behaviors and associations.
Ultimately, this revolution is yours whether you are trans* or not. You can read anyone you like, but none of us will give you answers. At the end of your path of learning will remain more than one fork you may take. Sometimes you will be confronted with choices none of which lead to good places. As scary as it may be, the choice, and the consequences, are still yours.
Okay, that wasn’t short-form at all, but at least it’s done.
*1: If I’m wrong and Usernames has a history of trolling some folks or other bad behaviors, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember it. I remember Usernames positively, if not extensively.
I have to run, so this will be a quick response that I may follow up on later.
I definitely think there’s a gap in our language about trans people, the gap that I try to fill with “male-typical”. I recall Ozy once made a plea for new terms. But as a cis person I don’t think I have much business proposing a new term, particularly since I myself would not use the term very often. BTW “male-typical” is slightly idiosyncratic–I took it from a particular trans blogger I highly respected (whose blog was sadly taken down). I like the term but I rarely have cause to actually use it, and perhaps I’m not the right judge of such things.
in the current environment, any argument asserting a way you can call trans women “male”, in ANY context, constitutes ammunition for TERFs and other reactionaries to attempt to legislate trans women out of existence.
whether or not your argument is correct, advancing it now is just another arrow in the TERF quiver, just another “Aha, look, even this male-to-trans here agrees they’re not really female!”
ESPECIALLY, triple-plus especially, WITH THAT TITLE. “Every Other Trans Person Is Wrong”. i suspect it’s tongue-in-cheek, but they won’t see it that way.
@abbeycadabra:
Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that a trans* woman and her lover can’t use the word between themselves. Do you really believe that in a triad relationship, a trans* woman’s two lovers can’t talk about themselves on the subject of, say, birth control and then use “male” in that conversation when their 3rd lover comes up?
As for the title, if they choose to selectively quote me here to support some agenda and use the title to impart some special authority or honesty to me, then they’ve so far distorted what I’ve said that it is no longer anything I’ve said. Remember what I said in the conclusion:
I can’t be responsible for liars who misquote me and refuse to accept the substance of this post, which is merely
1. that rules can be neither as broad nor as simple as others have suggested, and
2. that whether you follow a “rule” suggested by others or not, you are still a moral agent and the consequences of choosing to follow that rule or use that wording are still yours.
I get why Serano makes the assertions that she does (although I’m genuinely confused at Siggy’s suggestion that using the word “male” harmfully confuses sex and gender, but that using “male typical” does not), and I’ve said that if my writing actually does contribute to harm then I need to be held accountable for that. But what you’re talking about is me being responsible for the actions of others. My writing doesn’t say anything like, “Trans* women are really, really male, but it’s a big secret and nobody else will tell you this”. If binarist, existential radical feminists want to twist my writing into saying that, then that statement is truly theirs and they get to be responsible for that, not me.
That is not a publication. This is.
broadly true, but in this case they can also quote you precisely without lying and get the ammunition. for that purpose, it’s not the points you were making but the examples and experiences you used to make them. look at all the parts where you explained at length and in precise detail how and why it is okay to call (parts of) you male, and how you talked about having male privilege.
that is currently a major TERF attack vector. “You had/have male privilege, you weren’t oppressed, you CHOSE to be this! Real women don’t have a choice. You’re a lying man.”
and the worst of it… what do you think it does to trans women who deal with TERFs every day to read articles that (at least seem to) read “I’m a trans woman. Trans women are male. I have male privilege and so do you. No matter what the other trans people say.”
you can get mad at me for this, but i can promise you that in at least one case, it hurts like hell.
@abbeycadabra
I think that, unfortunately, a lot of activists think this way (on many topics, not just trans activism). It’s the intuitive fear to have. But I think it’s mistaken.
My take on activist strategy: you have to go with what’s true and disambiguous, and this doesn’t give your opposition more ammunition, it gives them less. That’s one less piece of truth and clarity that they have as ammunition against you. Because it isn’t against you. And then the real difference between you and them can be easier for people to see: they have errors in their position, and you (hopefully) don’t.
Of course, clarity and disambiguity is one of the main issues with the terminology right now…speaking of which:
@Crip Dyke
Ya, I’m a fan of conceding some things for the sake of argument to get the the heart of the matter, and “tabooing” certain words in a discussion to sidestep misunderstanding, but that’s different than conflating sex and gender terminology all day every day, and getting others to do likewise.
this is extremely naive, and assumes the opposition is acting and arguing in good faith. this is almost never the case with people motivated by hate or disgust. they do not CARE whether their arguments are true; if they did, they would not make them.
the terms are already inextricably conflated, all the more so since our concept of ‘sex’ is socially constructed and ‘gender’ has biological components, regardless of whether you are separating them or not.
@abbeycadabra:
I’ve been struggling with how to respond. Clearly you’re hurt, and I’m sorry for the contribution of my writing to that hurt.
So now let me address a few things. First, just to get it out of the way, I’m very careful in the post to say that I did not have men’s privilege and that I’m only imagining a world where it would be comprehensible to say that I ever have had male privilege. And I made it quite clear that this was about that imaginary world, not our current one.
In this world, that statement is not comprehensible. It is not true given the common understanding of “male privilege” as a feminist term of art, and little to nothing about any meaning that might be true and might be what I intended would actually be communicated through the phrase.
So, that’s my clarification on “male privilege”.
Apart from that, though, some of the things you’ve written seem to have the same problems as what I’m exploring above. You wrote:
But then later you wrote about the extreme case of a trans* woman and her lover:
This is half of my point. To quote myself:
You start out saying that it’s never okay in any context, then you revise what you say to limit yourself to “publication”.
I’m uncomfortable with hard rules because when we articulate them, we always imagine certain givens (the statement is in public and permanently recorded, for instance, and thus can be either tracked down in a library or linked online) that don’t seem to show up in the wording of the rule. When we write “you can never in any context…” and then in real life people encounter situations that make the rule of highly questionable usefulness, the rule erodes and individual people become responsible for their individual choices. “Crip Dyke said this was okay,” or “Serano said that was forbidden,” fall by the wayside. We must think more deeply, care more deeply, and make choices much more consciously.
Rules are not enough, and although useful in many situations (or else they would never have become rules) they are sometimes counterproductive.
Okay, I have more time to comment now.
The main inspiration for my “style guide” was because Laci Green was in the news, making comments about how trans women are male. From her perspective, she was not misgendering trans women, she was simply stating an objective fact about their sex. She believes that her usage is correct, because that was in feminism 101. She’s taught feminism 101 herself, she should know. From her perspective, all the trans women who are criticizing her had simply failed to internalize the basic lessons.
And you know, I do remember reading about the female/woman distinction in feminism 101! Wasn’t that in the genderbread person? Just checked, it’s still there in the genderbread 3.0. And frankly, I feel lied to. This distinction between female and woman is *not* a distinction that people generally make, not even feminists. People only ever bring it up when they’re being pedantic, and I suspect if it weren’t the woman/female distinction, it would have been the who/whom distinction.
The bottom line is that the female/woman distinction has had its chance, and had it for a long time. It has utterly failed. When I said,
that was speculation as to why the female/woman distinction has failed. Perhaps my speculation is incorrect. Or perhaps my speculation was correct, but “male-typical” would fail as an alternative. Regardless, it is clear that the female/woman distinction has failed. I don’t mind if you find it useful in your personal life, but I will not use it myself and will not recommend it for general usage.
The problem with a lot of this sex/gender terminology is that there’s a real danger of getting coopted. For example, FAAB and MAAB have been coopted by lesbian gatekeepers, basically to put as much emphasis as they can on the cis/trans distinction, justifying trans exclusion. I do not believe that just because MAAB and FAAB have been coopted, we should reject them entirely. Nonetheless, I think coopters should be taken into account, and when a term is coopted so extensively it should eventually be rejected.
And sometimes that makes language really difficult. It means we occasionally have gaps. It means there are lots of obscure rules about correct usage. It means we have to develop new language over time. This can feel like a pointless game, like we’re constantly conceding more and more ground to the coopters of our language. We should be constantly questioning the way the game is framed. But that doesn’t mean we can just stop playing.
funnily enough, nothing i said was about rules per se, but rather about consequences. saying these sorts of things, primarily but not only in public, has knocking-on effects independent of whether or not you’re right. you’re being very precise and picky with your language, which is in and of itself fine and dandy, but what i’m talking about is the people who won’t be.
it would not be so fraught to claim that “in some circumstances we can say trans women have male privilege/parts” if it weren’t for the hordes of people looking for just such a thing to brand us monsters.
Absolutely true.
@abbeycadabra
Hmm, in what way?
Sure, but how does this make my advice less practical etc. than the alternative?
Yup, which is why (like I said) I don’t use such terms in contexts where it would likely cause miscommunication (I “taboo” them).
@ brian pansky
it sounds very much like you have never come up against deliberate hate.
this:
can only possibly hold true if your opponent cares about the difference. if instead they are deliberately quote-mining and misrepresenting and using every dishonest tactic to demonize you, they are NOT ENGAGED IN DEBATE. as a consequence, anything you say that is “true and clear” is irrelevant to them and completely ignored, unless it contains something that can be taken out of context and used to demonstrate why you’re a fucking monster who rapes real women and needs to be destroyed.
not an exaggeration.
your claim that an ‘opponent’ would change anything they are doing, react in ANY WAY to a good point, “truth and clarity”, presented by you INHERENTLY assumes the ‘opponent’ is interested in engaging with your actual points and cares in the slightest about what is or isn’t “true and clear”. this is palpably not the case.
and that’s why it makes your advice less practical, in fact worse than useless, in fact dangerous.
because you are assuming we are arguing with an ‘opponent’. i am talking about fighting an ENEMY.
Some very interesting points and especially the discussion here in comments. A lot of these problems with language come up when I try to talk about trans and feminist issues with my Czech friends, for instance any distinction between man/male is entirely impossible because in Czech it is muž/mužský a direct adjective form, with mužství and mužnost (manhood, manliness) cannot ve used in comparable ways; the closest to “gender” we have is rod – used to mean the grammatical category and the word for sex is pohlaví which also means genitals. Trying to carve out sentences conveying similar concepts in Czech often leaves me stumped (sexed bodily attributes? Leads to convoluted zpohlavněné tělesné vlastnosti?).
Thanks for the heads up, I definitely see TERFs and transphobes overemphasizing usage of male and misrepresenting trans people who use it with nuance in sex/gender distinct ways.
Thanks again, every ernest discussion of trans issues and language like this I learn something new.
=8)-DX
As a trans woman, I have to say I find it particularly irksome to have the term male privilege applied to medical issues around my own embodiment. I’ve given myself a few days to mull this over and to allow my anger to calm a bit. I have a lot to say on this topic. I apologize for the length.
I find the assertion of male privilege in relation to trans feminine embodiment to fall flat when I consider the disadvantage I’ve faced as a person with a trans feminine body. Where exactly was all the medical research upon transgender bodies and transgender medical issues which would have benefited me early in my life, before I transitioned? Where was that research when I could have been diagnosed much earlier than I was and I could have had puberty blockers administered before high levels of testosterone distorted my body? Where was that research in keeping a hateful father and hateful community from putting me through the emotional and social wringer when I was growing up—doing their best to shove me into a life that was slowly killing me? Even 30+ years latter, when that research is now available to help young trans girls and trans boys, the research is still ignored and suppressed.
I’m sorry, but asserting that supposed male privilege was somehow a boon to trans girls’ & trans women’s existence when it comes to medical issues doesn’t really pan out. There’s a paucity of research which covers’ trans people’s medical issues and bodies and where that research does exist, it is hard to find and largely ignored. Many doctors are clueless about these issues. I often have to educate them and with doctors who are transphobic, my trans feminine body becomes an anchor around my neck, endangering the quality care I receive. Whether it’s before or after transition, the consequences of that paucity of research, the denial and repression of existing research, and the barriers to quality care imposed by prejudice have a deep negative impact upon trans people’s lives. Furthermore, it’s generally difficult to have health insurance cover many of the prohibitively expensive life saving medical procedures for trans people. Trans feminine people’s “male privilege” regarding medical issues takes a turn toward the morbid when we kill ourselves because we can’t access the care we so desperately need.
I’ll take this even further: I have a huge bone to pick with cis feminist theory and I say this as someone who identified as a radical feminist for well over a decade. I say this as someone with a certificate in women’s studies and a degree in sociology specializing in gender: much of feminist theory fails miserably when it comes to describing trans lives. When cis feminist theory is applied to trans lives without heavy modification, it only serves as another source of oppression. At a certain point, I had to give up on much of cis feminism and move toward trusting my own understanding and experiences of sex and gender as a trans person. Imposing a cis feminist narrative upon my life interfered with understanding of my own life.
Initially, radical feminism provided some useful tools in deconstructing sex/gender based oppression. However, in the long run, its limitations led me down a path of continued internalization of cis-distorted perceptions of trans people. In other words, radical feminism’s limited understanding of sex/gender reinforced my internalization of transphobia and cissexism. Most of cis feminism’s ideas, regardless of the particular variant in question, are predicated upon the notion of a sex/gender binary which one occupies only one side of from birth to death. There is little to no allowance for experience outside of that rigid binary and there is little to no allowance for a fluidity of experience across the boundaries of that binary. Cis feminist models of sex/gender are based upon cis experience and the limitations of those modes reveal themselves when trying to describing trans experience of sex/gender. They do a poor job of describing how trans people experience and interface with sex/gender based oppression and privilege.
The bottom line is that trans lives do not fit the cis imposed binary. Trans lives do not fit cis social narratives surrounding what the experience of being a sexed/gendered person entails. Their taxonomies do not work. Their binary notions of privilege, dominance, oppression, etc. don’t work either. Most of it pretty much fails. Nevertheless, because cis people’s culture and life experience form a huge and powerful social hegemony, it is far too easy to internalize their understanding of their lives as our own.
In the end, it doesn’t work… and trans people do not deserve the internalized gaslighting and political knife twisting which come from force fitting ourselves into cis people’s understanding of sex/gender. We don’t deserve the cultural imperialism which cis people try to impose upon us daily in trying to force our lives to comply with their social narratives.
I’m a trans woman. I’m female. My body is female. I’ll do my damnedest to set the boundaries of my own life.
Fuck any cis person who has a problem with that.
They can take their taxonomies, their social theories, and their political sensibilities and keep them as far the hell away from my trans life as possible. Any cis person who feels otherwise, feminist or not, can shove it.
@Timberwraith:
Thank you for a thoughtful and serious contribution to the discussion. I really appreciate the time you put in and I’m sorry for the contribution my own words made to your distress.
Aw, that’s OK, Crip Dyke. Thank you for giving my rant a read and considering my arguments. Honestly, many of these thoughts have been brewing inside of me for a long time—long before reading your post, actually. It felt good to get them out in writing. It was a calming experience.
Thanks again for listening. 🙂