A Hope for the Transgender Day of Remembrance

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, let's remember honestly and with open eyes. Here in the USA, the names and faces of those murdered each year reveal that we are not just talking about the evil of transphobia. We are seeing a terrible and terribly clear example of intersectionality, of intersecting biases--transphobia, misogyny, racism, classism, ableism, etc.

The people who are being remembered today do not look like me. Their deaths are deeply relevant to me because they are my siblings, but as I am not a trans woman of color living on the economic margins of society it is important that I acknowledge my privileges, including the vastly lower chance that I will be murdered in an outburst of (always intersectional) transphobia. I do not wish to appropriate others' experiences to paint myself as a martyr by proxy.

People who are cis gender, or male, or white, or middle-class, or living without disabilities should mourn our fallen trans siblings. But if we do so without focusing on our duty to the living, our memorials mean little. Treating murdered trans women of color as pitiful martyrs at ceremonies where living, breathing trans women of color feel unwelcome, or nervously tolerated, or denied agency to be lead partners in directing the event, or are in fact totally absent because "nobody knows any". . . that illustrates the extent to which the participants are part of the problem.

Because the problem is not just "out there" in the cis, straight community. The problem of transmisogyny, especially as it intersects with racism, classism, ableism and other biases, is alive and well in LGBTQ+ communities. It's easy to revile the evil of those who murder the most marginalized among us. It's much harder to own our own privileges and take responsibility for our participation in perpetuating marginalization. All of us--every single one--has some sort of privilege. It's easy for us to focus on the ways in which we are ourselves marginalized, but it's when we examine and own our privileges, and take action based upon that, that the truly transformative things happen.

I hope that this TDOR, we all reflect, not just on the lives of the fallen, but on what we personally can do to reduce the marginalization of the living.

Who Belongs in Women's Spaces, Again? Women's College Edition

This weekend, the NY Times cover story was on trans men at women's colleges.  I found the article very frustrating, first of all due to the title, "When Women Become Men at Wellesley."  Dear NY Times: trans men are coming out at college, which is different from cis women "becoming" trans men.  Your title is as off-base as one reading, "When Straight Women Turn Into Lesbians at Wellesley."

The subtitle of the article is "Can women's colleges survive the transgender movement?" The answer to this hyperbolic question is obviously yes.  The reporting in the article itself is much less inflammatory, so let's just re-title it in our heads to match the actual content--something like "Women's Colleges Struggle with the Place of Trans Students"--and consider that content.

I understand why trans men wind up in women's colleges. If you're a young person who is assigned female at birth, and you are struggling a lot with gender issues, a women's college might seem a good place to go.  One student in the article, Jesse, says "he chose to attend Wellesley because being female never felt right to him.  'I figured if I was any kind of woman, I'd find it there.'" It's actually quite common for people struggling with trans identities to enter institutions highly centered around the sex they were assigned at birth--for example, many trans women report joining the military or entering highly masculine fields such as firefighting to see if those institutions can reconcile them to living in the gender expected for someone of their birth-assigned sex.  Of course, the result, for many, is to realize they do not identify with that gender at all.  And so it's right and good that students who realize they are trans come out.

But once a trans man or masculine-of-center genderqueer person comes out at a women's college, they have to face the fact that they are a man or masculine-of-center person in a woman's space.  Personally, what I would do at that point is start making arrangements to transfer to another college, because I support the existence of women's colleges in a patriarchal society, and the whole point of them is that they are for women--and I am not a woman.  That said, I don't believe that transmasculine students should be required to uproot themselves and transfer out.  Leaving a college can be emotionally difficult and have financial repercussions, and a transitioning student has a lot on their plate to deal with. I believe that an ethic of care demands a struggling transmasculine student be permitted to stay, and be treated with respect as a man or genderqueer person.

But there is a big difference between accommodating struggling transmasculine students and having trans guys make women's colleges all about them.  And that's exactly what I'd call it when trans men keep insisting that when these colleges call themselves "women's colleges" without adding "plus some transmasculine people" they are doing evil.  That's exactly what I'd call it when trans guys demand that students should stop calling their classmates "sisters" and start calling them "siblings."  I absolutely agree that it undermines one's identity as a man to be referred to as a sister, and I'd hate it too--which is exactly why I would not stay at a women's college.  To stay, and then insist that your needs as a man outweigh the needs of everyone else who chose to go to a women's college . . . that's hubris.

I've certainly met my share of trans men with hubris.  When someone transitions from female to male, they face hurdles in the form of cissexism and negotiating legal and often medical challenges--but they also gain male privilege.  All trans people are aware of the challenges they are facing.  But many trans men seem little aware of the male privilege they are gaining.  That's normal, in the sense that most people are unaware of most of their privileges--but it's ironic when you encounter it in someone who talks about patriarchy and cis privilege, as I have.  Just like a cis man, a trans guy can be oblivious to his own privilege, taking over conversations about sexism in a circle of cis women, or transmansplaining cissexism to a trans woman.  You see, when someone who is being respected in his male identity talks, whether he is cis or trans, people listen more attentively than they do when a woman talks.  That's basic patriarchy, and I've certainly experienced the difference in how my statements are taken more seriously as a result of transitioning to male status.  If you're expecting it and looking for it, as a man, you can see it some of the time and catch yourself.  (I'm sure it happens often without my recognizing it.)  But I've met my share of trans men who conflate their new male privilege and the greater deference they are granted with their gaining confidence and coming into their own as they transition.  They presume people pay such attention to what they say now because they have fascinating things to contribute.  And at a women's college, where young men are a novelty, this effect of attention centering on a man is exacerbated.  (Some of the ways this manifests in the article are pretty creepy, in terms of cis women proving they can be "tranny-chasers" too, but trans men like Jesse report loving having become popular and having people "clamoring" to date them.)

Personally, were I a woman at a women's college, I'd be upset at trans men telling me not to presume my dorm or class was a women's space.  My accepting of transmasculine students would not contradict the fact that they are sojourners who chose to enter a rare territory designed for women.  I guess I'm just fascinated, given the uproar that many cis feminists made when trans women tried to participate in women's events like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, specifically so that they could be with other women, that when trans men plant their flag and actually say "stop calling this a women's space," the opposition is so minimal.

Which brings me to the topic of transfeminine students in this article--a brief bit near the end of the piece.  I find it very disappointing that an article about women's colleges should give trans women such little attention, while devoting masses of space to transmasculine people.  Look: fundamentally, trans women belong at women's colleges, and trans men don't.  But there's little to report, given that no trans woman has ever attended Wellesley, as far as anyone knows.  (If one did, she did it utterly in the closet, and at great personal risk.  Such things have happened before, however--Anita Hemmings, a woman of African descent, passed as white and graduated from Vassar in 1897, though she was outed in the last weeks of her exemplary college career and kicked out, lucky to have a diploma mailed to her afterwards.)

What really disturbs me is that much of what the article conveys on the topic of trans women entering Wellesley is the opinion of some trans guy.  He says that trans men and genderqueer people who were assigned female at birth belong at Wellesley--but that trans women should have to face barriers to admission, and be treated with suspicion.  No trans woman should be admitted, he declares, unless she can prove she's started medical transition or has changed her name legally (steps very difficult for someone of a typical age to be applying to college to have taken, requiring parental support for the transition and financial resources).  Why this disparity? To keep Wellesley a safe space for women, of course! If she hasn't had medical and/or legal interventions, a trans woman might not really be a woman, he claims. Taking the difficult steps of coming out and applying to Wellesley as a woman aren't enough proof of her commitment! Maybe her identity is fluid and she'll identify as a man again . . .  But hey, aren't genderfluidity and lack of interest in medical interventions treated as fine in transmasculine people?  Yes, says the trans dude. "Trans men are a different case; we were raised female, we know what it's like to be treated as females and we have been discriminated against as females.  We get what life has been like for women."

This argument is appalling on so many levels. First, it is exactly the reasoning used by "gender crits" and Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists to "prove" that gender transition is an impossibility: that gender socialization is rigidly binary, inescapably tied to birth-assigned sex, and sex assigned at birth is thus immutable. The thing is, the TERFs are at least logically consistent in saying that this means not only that trans women are "really" eternally men, but trans men "really" eternally women.  It's transphobic logic--yet it's being voiced here by a trans gender person.  How is this possible?  Enter transmisogyny: the trans Wellesley student applies it only against trans women, while ignoring the implications of the argument for trans men like himself.

Underlying the ability of this trans man to assert a transmisogynistic logic while refusing to see how it applies to trans men is that hubris again.  Look, he basically says, a trans woman on campus might make cis women feel uncomfortable in what's supposed to be a women's safe space!  But apparently it never occurs to this student that a cis woman seeing him in her dorm at night might feel unsafe.  He presumes (a) that women can always tell if a given man is cis or trans at a glance,  (b) that everybody agrees trans men are always "safe" in a way cis men are not, and (c) that if a woman did feel unsafe seeing him in her dorm, her reaction would simply be wrong, as he is Mr. Perfect Nonthreatening Male of Female Experience, and can tell her what she should feel.

For a trans man to believe that trans women pose a threat to female safe space, while transmasculine people should be allowed free access to women's spaces--that demonstrates a combination of patriarchal egotism, lack of awareness of one's own male privilege, and transmisogyny that I deplore.

I do believe that trans men in women's colleges should be treated with respect, but I look forward to the day when a report on trans students in women's colleges will center transfeminine people and decenter transmasculine ones.

That Awkward Moment

I wanted to do a quick post about this thing that happens a lot, which is probably quite clear to you if you are a white trans woman, or spend much time with one.  I've illustrated it courtesy Bitstrips (click to see a larger version).  It's a window into the ways that intersectionality and the consumptive chaining of varieties of marginalization work, even when the only people you have interacting are white women.

The scenario goes like this: young white cis women meet a white trans woman.  Because her trans status is in some way visible to them, they do not treat her as they would other women they encounter.  Instead, they treat her as a drag queen--as if she were some hyper-gay man performing femininity for their entertainment.  Their framework for acting flamboyantly gay is some sort of urban femme minstrelsy, so they greet her through an awkward performance of tropes of fierce black femininity.  And for good measure, they treat her body as sexualized public property, perhaps by slapping her on the rump.

It's horribly cringeworthy.  It's cissexism piled on transmisogyny topped with misogynoir. But the young white cis women involved think they're being supportive and progressive, and an attempt to call them on any of the many problematic layers of their greeting results in defensiveness and hurt feelings.

Sigh.

Are Trans Communities Losing Intersex Allies in the TERF Wars?

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Martine Rothblatt and Tired Journalistic Tropes

The article New York Magazine ran on Martine Rothblatt this week could have been great, were it not ruined by tired old tropes of journalism about trans people.  This was clear from the moment you see the sensationalist title--not, say, "Meet Martine Rothblatt, America's Wealthiest Trans Woman," but "The Highest-Paid Female CEO in America Used to Be a Man."  

Martine Rothblatt is a genderqueer transhumanist trans woman with a multiracial family and a passion for artificial intelligence and virtual worlds. Sounds like my own spouse! The difference is that Rothblatt is a wealthy CEO with a lot of fancy toys that make her fascinating to a mass audience.

The New Yorker piece presents lots of interesting biographical detail. But it opens by talking about the very small percentage of CEOs who are women, and how the Rothblatt is the highest paid of this tiny minority. There's no discussion of how trans women on average are unemployed at very high rates and are poorly paid, in fact economically disadvantaged in comparison to cis women. The implication--jumped on by transmisogynist commenters in many threads I've read--is that Rothblatt and other trans women are not like "real" women, and are advantaged like men. Empirically, this is not the case, but every social pattern has exceptions. The first American female millionaire was Madam C. J. Walker, an African American child of parents who had been enslaved. Her success selling hair straighteners and skin lightening creams does not prove that African American women were more socially empowered than white women in the 19th century. Her success was an exception to the rule. And such is the case of Rothblatt as well.

The New York Magazine piece also presents a gratuitous physical description of the sexed characteristics of Rothblatt's body early in the piece ("magnificent, like a tall lanky boy with breasts"), and informs the readers that she has had "radical" transition surgery. This approach is so, so tired. Journalists may claim that what the reader of any piece about a trans person first wants to know is how sex-conforming their body is and whether they've "had the surgery," but this is cissexist gender-policing BS that journalists are in large part responsible for creating and perpetuating. I find it terribly offensive.

Anyway, if you can get through that, as far as biographies of the wealthy go, Rothblatt's life story is certainly interesting. Americans love to read about the lives of the rich and famous, and the stories of every Fortune 500 CEO who is not a cis white man is likely to be venerated by their communities, as they are few and far between, and generally viewed as "success stories."

But instead of framing Rothblatt against a backdrop of the huge social disadvantages faced by trans women generally--as a story of her overcoming the odds--she's framed instead as more successful than cis women because she is "unisex," as if genderquerity confers social advantages rather than social marginalization. And that journalistic presentation is not only wrong as a matter of fact, but does active harm to trans women by seeming to validate the claims of transmisogynists, who frame trans women as privileged male impostors in women's spaces.  After reading several posts about this article full of TERFs crowing about how Rothblatt proves that trans women are really oppressive men, I'm feeling very tired, and like New York Magazine owes the trans community an apology.

If we can't get it right at PrideFest. . .

This weekend I spent two days at PrideFest Milwaukee.  I was especially looking forward to it because on Friday afternoon, a federal court in Wisconsin held that the state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, and a number of my friends were among the couples who joined in a delirious rush to get married before any injunction could be issued.  I was very happy for them, and was anticipating a particularly giddy PrideFest.

In many ways, it was a lovely weekend.  I've been attending this particular pride celebration for 15 years.  The first time I attended, just after moving from San Francisco, it was a shock.  I had to enter the festival grounds, pulling my scared young child along by the hand, through a huge gauntlet of homophobic protesters shouting that we were going to go to hell for our perversions.  Inside, the crowd was small and, in a racially diverse city, very white.  The entire event seemed quiet and tentative.

Things have changed a lot since then.  The protesting homophobic groups are much smaller, and a loving counterprotest of PFLAG volunteers stands by the entrance to the festival grounds, so that nobody has to push through a hostile wall of bodies to enter.  Inside, the venue is full, and the crowd much more racially diverse.  There's a visible trans presence, both in terms of organizations hosting information-and-activity tables, and among the attendees.  There's a festive smattering of furries brightening up the place.  A goodly number of children of assorted ages are in attendance, happily collecting scads of stickers, or being pushed in strollers by parents of all flavors.

So, PrideFest Milwaukee has come a long way.  But I'm sorry to say that it still has a long way to go, because it is not yet doing right by trans people.

What I want to note in particular is the bathroom problem.  There are no designated gender-neutral, inclusive restrooms.  This is 2014, and even the mainstream professional association conferences I attend as a sociologist designate and give clear signs directing people to gender-neutral bathrooms.  The conferences are held in hotels that may not have such facilities, so what the organizers do--this is not rocket science--is select a capacious facility designated for one binary gender or another, and put a sign over the door labeling it a gender-inclusive restroom.  But PrideFest--guaranteed to have more genderqueer and gender-transitioning people attending than the crowd at the American Sociological Association conference--does not do this.

Maybe it wouldn't matter that much, if people just felt free to use whatever binary-gendered facilities were most convenient.  It is, after all, an LGBT+ festival, and the inclusion of all genders should be an aim of all attendees.  All the bathrooms should be, in effect, gender inclusive.  But unfortunately, that is not true.  There is a segment of the crowd that isn't just forgetting there's a T in LGBT.  They are opposed to trans inclusion.  They want to attend a cis lesbian-gay-and-maybe-bisexual festival.  In particular, there are cis lesbians present who don't want to let trans women into "their" spaces--like the women's bathrooms, or the "Wom!n's Lounge and Cafe."

What this means is that, at PrideFest 2014, I know a number of trans women who were harassed when all they wanted was a place to pee.  One of them was my spouse.  There were visibly trans women who received glares, misgendering challenges to their entering women's bathrooms, and physical shoves.  And there was nowhere else for them to "go"--not that a trans woman should be forced to use a gender neutral restroom, when all women, trans or cis, have an equal right to use the binary-gendered bathroom that matches their gender identity.  But at least a gender-inclusive restroom would have been a safe alternative for a woman being harassed in the bathroom because she is trans.

Gender policing and bathroom panic have no place at a Pride festival.  The massive illogic of threatening trans women who are trying to pee on the bogus theory that they pose a threat to other women in the bathroom is a classic example of how bigotry works.  Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has been justified in the same way--as necessary to protect threatened innocents.  A lesbian teacher would "convert" her helpless students, a gay male scouting troop leader corrupt the morals of his charges.  The "homosexual" has been framed as a threat in the locker room or the group shower.  To have some cis lesbians turn around and make the same sort of charge against a different group of marginalized women is a nasty irony.

It's not just some cis women who made PrideFest 2014 feel unsafe for trans people.  Walking around the festival grounds with my visibly trans wife, I watched unfortunate numbers of cis men and women of all stripes directing microaggressions at her.  That's not to say there weren't also people present who gave her big grins or who complimented her hair or told her that she looked lovely.  But I witnessed too many of the very same microaggressions she gets outside of a Pride festival: people snickering at her, elbowing their friends and pointing at her, or giving her long, unsmiling stares.  At least there were no bros yelling at her to stop wearing women's clothes or shouting, "Look at the tranny!"  But that's hardly a high standard of what to expect at an LGBT+ celebration.

What I'd hope would happen at a Pride party is that when people acted in rude or harassing ways, other people would call them on it.  When a visitor at the table hosted by a genderqueer organization is demanding to know what genitals the individual sitting behind the table keeps in their pants, it shouldn't just be up to them to explain why that's a rude question.  When a passerby feels compelled to inform a young person wearing a button saying "my pronoun is he" that this is silly because he looks like a pretty girl to him, someone should step up in that young man's defense.  But that didn't happen in the case of these incidents.

People tell me that it's the nonconfrontational culture of the Midwest that explains this.  People in Wisconsin are polite, and don't want to make a scene or embarrass someone by calling them on inappropriate behavior.  But if people in the Midwest are so nonconfrontational, why are they confronting trans people about their pronouns, or right to use the bathroom?  If Midwesterners are so polite, why are they asking strangers about their genitals?

I can say this: I know that there are plenty of cis people out there who want to be good allies.  This morning, in an attempt to take at least some step toward addressing the bathroom issue, I made up a batch of signs that were variations on a general theme of  "Trans? Genderqueer? Worried about using the bathroom?  Ask here for an ally to escort you."  Then I went around to various organizational tables and asked if they'd be willing to put one of the signs on their table, and to escort anyone who asked for assistance.  Fourteen of the organizations put up a sign.  Most of the time, cis women at the table said that they were so sorry to hear that this was a problem, and that they would be very happy to help trans women use the bathroom in safety.  And that's a good thing.

Still, one of the organizations that agreed to take a sign was running a survey about experiences with health care, supposedly for LGBT people, and obviously recently constructed, since it asked if the person filling out the survey had tried to get insurance through "a health care exchange (Obamacare)."  Yet the questions only asked if the person suveyed had faced various sorts of poor treatment due to their sexual orientation.  I went to the person running the booth and pointed out that I've had a variety of poor healthcare experiences due to my trans status, but that the healthcare providers in question never even asked about my sexual orientation.  Her response was to say "Ohhhh, I see what you mean," and then to advise me that if I wanted to I could answer the questions as if my trans status were my sexual orientation.  But it isn't.  And not having thought of that beforehand is not a sign of being the best of allies to all the trans people answering the survey.

(Another health survey I filled out at PrideFest was even worse.  It asked me if I was attracted to people who were "male, female, transgender, other, or it doesn't matter."  As if a trans man is not a man, and a trans woman not a woman.  As if nobody would have a trans partner unless they were "sexually oriented" to trans people of all genders as a class.)

I know things could be worse.  A few years ago, signs were put up on the bathrooms at PrideFest saying that nobody could use the facility unless the gender on their ID matched the gender specified on that bathroom door.  At least the organizers aren't taking steps explicitly to gender police entry to the bathrooms.

But I was really hoping for better.  This was a year in which there were people present glowing with joy because their friends had just been legally married.  Trans people have often complained that so much community energy is being focused on marriage equality, while little is focused on access to transition services, or on the needs of those who don't identify with the gender binary, or on the violence directed at visibly trans people.  I didn't want to sound grumpy in a year where a significant victory was being celebrated.  But if my wife gets harassed for just trying to pee, that's going to put a serious damper on our family's LGBT+ celebration.

Next year, I want to see both clearly identified gender inclusive facilities available at Milwaukee's PrideFest, and an active ally network helping to ensure that all people--most especially trans women--are able to use the bathroom that feels most affirming for their identity.  I want a community that commits to calling out people at the event who marginalize those with less privilege than they have, because they are trans, or a person of color, or fat, or wearing a fursuit, or whatever their marginalized difference.  And I want that to be the case at Pride celebrations everywhere.

Let's all step up to try to make it so.