It's
peculiar because, like other trans folks, I have to live with a great
mass of cis people perceiving my gender as “fake.” I know that
lots of people think that guys like me can't be “real men.” Many
flatten all issues of sex and gender down to genitals and judge trans
men as deficient, whether we've medically transitioned by one route
or another, or not. Others prejudicially deny the reality of gender
transition. They claim they can spot us a mile away, and if they
can't, that we've deceived them, and deserve to be threatened with
violence or humiliation.
You'd
think that living under such circumstances would make me much less
secure in my masculinity than most cis men, but I've not found that
to be the case. It's not that I'm some icon of rugged manhood. I'm
5'2”. I have the musculature of a middle-aged college professor,
which is what I am. I bind my chest, and my knees creak.
But
all of that is fine with me, because I have no fear that it negates
my male status. I am a man because I identify as such. That's all
there is to it. I've walked the awkward and bemusing path of gender
transition, and while I'm not done with that journey, I am fortunate
enough to now be acknowledged as legally male, which certainly
doesn't hurt. But by the precepts of the trans ethos, a person's
gender is determined by their identity—not by the size of their
feet or their phalloclitoris; not by whether they excel or suck at
sports; not by bureaucratic rules or the marker on their passport.
However, for so many cis men, manhood is governed by the Code of Masculine
Honor, not gender identity. According to this Code, status as a
“real man” is a privilege, and can be revoked at any time. And
what negates it is any whiff of feminine gender expression.
Masculinity is defined negatively as the rejection of all things
feminine, and femininity is defined through a disturbing
concatenation of weakness, sexual desirability, technical
incompetence, emotional tenderness, powerlessness, nurturance, and
beauty. The result is the fodder for so much humor, middle-school
fag-baiting, and towering insecurity based on feminine challenges to
“true manhood.” A dude can find his masculine honor called into
question in innumerable ways. It could be by being discovered by others to be walking a chihuahua,
crying at a “chick flick,” earning less than a female coworker,
having a gay son, shaving his legs, being unable to throw a football,
holding his girlfriend's purse or his daughter's Hello Kitty
backpack, being technically incompetent and relying on his wife to
fix the car or the computer, enjoying ballet, losing an armwrestling
match to a woman, being a “cuckold,” or wearing any one of a
panoply of feminine-coded garments, accessories, or cosmetics.
It's a
tediously familiar scene. The new kid at school is discovered to
lisp. A man at the office is publicly dressed-down by his female
boss. As a guy bends over to tie his shoes, lacy underwear peeps out
of his pants. What follows is a ritual tormenting by a group of
other males: the victim is called a sissy, a bitch, a fag, a wuss, a
GIRL, often in high-pitched, mock-feminine voices. The challenge to
masculine honor is iconically avenged through violence—honor
restored if the victim becomes the dominant aggressor. There are
other ways out. The victim can clown around and try to turn the
hazing into a joke. He can verbally disdain the harassment and
assert that he has other forms of masculine power that matter more
(income, political power, sexual prowess, physical strength). He can
defend sensitive modern manhood. But under the Code of Masculine
Honor, only the response of physical reprisal is seen as fully
restoring “real man” status. Deck your challenger, and you can
stand over him and crow, “Who's the bitch now?”
The
ritual enforcement of the Code of Masculine Honor leaves swaths of
cis men eternally insecure about their masculinity. Nobody can
embody all of the precepts of ideal manhood—being tall and muscular
and hung like a horse, able to fix machines with ease, being a sports
hero, a deadly fighter, having political authority over others and
enviable wealth and harems of nubile sexual partners. That's the
stuff of fantasy. Of comic book heroes and gangsta personae. Mere
human males can never meet such a standard, and so all are left aware
of their “failings.” And to deflect attention away from these
failings, the insecure call attention to others' in the endless
ritual of hazing. They avoid any association with “sissies” and
“fags”--even if they themselves are gay. Just look at all the
men-seeking-men ads that frame the seeker as hulking and
“straight-acting” and not interested in feminine men.
The
thing is, the Code of Real Manhood doesn't just hurt men. It's built
around class privilege and homophobia, and most especially, around
misogyny. It centers on the idea that femininity is humiliating—that
the worst thing imaginable is to be a “girl.” For this reason,
feminists have long critiqued it, and championed gentle, sensitive
masculinity. This is turn has led to one of the most longstanding
and powerful bits of antifeminist rhetoric: that feminists are
seeking to “unman” men. We may live in an era in which masculine
behavior is evolving. Today, a man may change his baby's diaper
without being laughed at as henpecked, as he would have been in the
1950s. Guys may pluck their unibrows without causing much of a stir.
Middle-school boys may chide their friends for calling everything
they dislike “gay.” But the hazing maintenance of the Code of
Real Manhood retains great potency.
Gender
transition has brought me many good things. One of these is that in
order to do the hard work of coming out to family and friends and
coworkers and negotiating the many hurdles of gender transition, I
had to reach a place of surety that my masculine gender identity
defined my status as a man in a way others must respect. This gave
me security in my manhood. But gender transition also came with some
“gifts” I could do without. One of those was a welcome into the
world of random challenges to fight. As an academic and a shrimp, I
don't get a ton of them, but it periodically happens. A guy cuts me
off pulling out of an alleyway nearly causing an accident, and then
storms out of his car and tells me to be a man and get out of mine,
spoiling for a fight. Three large young men brimming with insecure
cockiness follow me down a street, commenting on how faggy my pink
hair is and how I'm too much of a faggot to turn around when they're
talking to me.
Though
I find myself in these situations, I've yet to get into a fight. One
teenaged boy slugged me once and ran off, but that was random and not
interactive enough to count as a “fight”--which is exactly the
point. I haven't found myself in a fistfight because I don't rise to
the bait to defend my masculine honor. It's not that I don't feel
that if I had to defend myself, I couldn't. (And I don't say that to
prove I'm a man—I think that most people of any gender can learn to
defend themselves if they have to.) I don't rise to the bait because
I don't feel challenged. My masculinity is not based on my vehicular
dominance or the color of my hair or my physical strength, but on my
gender identity. Inside, when I'm called a “fag” for dying my
hair pink for a while, I'm rolling my eyes. Outwardly, being sane, I
simply don't respond. And when my cheek is metaphorically slapped
for a ritual duel and I don't return the slap, generally the fight
fizzles. The Code of Masculine Honor is not served by fighting with girls, or
with people who don't care if you call them one.
That
doesn't mean I don't think the Code poses a
serious problem for trans people. Those who enforce “real manhood”
guard its territory closely, and are often hugely transphobic. They
refuse to let people in or out of the man club based on their gender
identities. While as a trans person I don't feel undermined by
claims that my behavior is incompatible with honorable masculinity,
I'm deeply hurt when people assert that I am literally not a man.
And I am fearful of the fact that some defenders of “real manhood”
engage in a very ugly form of violence—not individual duels of
masculine honor, but warlike boundary guarding, involving group
attacks on people who reject the archaic Code: fagbashing, gang rape,
brutal trans murders.
The
sad ubiquitous fact is that trans women are at particular risk from
enforcers of the Code of Masculine Honor. From the perspective of
the Code, they enact the ultimate treason when they leave the man
camp to embrace their female identities. In asserting that they
experience being a woman as preferable to enjoying the privileges of
masculinity, they speak heresy.
As a
result, women who are visibly trans gender suffer appalling levels of
violence. I ache for what my trans wife must cope with on a daily
basis: the ongoing harassment; the regular challenges to fight posed
through body-checking and name-calling; the random terrorism of
boundary policing in the form of bottles thrown at her out of cars or
attempts at sexual assault. Whereas I face few overt threats, and
have been able to diffuse them, the level of violent enforcement of
the Code of Masculine Honor she encounters makes it hard for her to
live a life not constantly on the defensive.
And
what I find particularly sad about the violence my spouse faces is
that most of it comes from men who are marginalized, and face
challenges under the Code due to that marginalization. Guys with low
incomes and men of color. Self-hating, repressed homosexuals.
Pubescent boys. It's amazing how often the men who get in my
spouse's face and tell her she's a “disgrace” are very short.
The
Code of Masculine Honor operates not only to perpetuate masculine
privilege, but to perpetuate marginalization. It keeps men who face
discrimination for various reasons from uniting to change systems of
social power. It mobilizes insecurity to divide and conquer. And it
generates a constant level of self-doubt that leads to a situation in
which I, a trans guy, am more secure in my masculinity than so many
of the cis-privileged men around me.
As a
man, I say down with masculine honor.
