When #MeToo Celebrities Fail Trans Women

If celebrities are going to profit off of being the figureheads for our collective traumas, then we have the right to demand they do it right.

Trans people are sexually victimized at a sadly high rate. All victims of sexual harms deserve to be respected and represented by those treated as the spokespeople of the #MeToo movement. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I want to speak out about a nasty case of ally fail that took place this week, when a presumed spokesperson for abuse victims shouted down a trans woman.

This is Rose McGowan. You probably know who she is, but if you don't, she's best known as an actor playing one of the attractive witch sisters on the aughties show Charmed. Recently, what she's been famous for is being one of the victims of sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein kept the story of his assault of McGowan quiet for a decade through a combination of paying her settlement money and hiring agents to keep the story out of the press. That McGowan was sexually assaulted was horrible. That Weinstein could get away with it, appalling. McGowan was victimized and she has my complete empathy for that.

When the news that Weinstein had assaulted and sexually harassed at least 8 women finally broke last October, McGowan initially refused to comment. But after a few days, she became part of the breaking wave of celebrity women speaking out about having been sexually assaulted or harassed by powerful Hollywood men. This was the start of the #MeToo movement. Rose McGowan became a hero of the movement on Twitter, when her account was suspended for 12 hours for allegedly violating Twitter's privacy policy, in the midst of her sending a flurry of tweets about Weinstein. This led to mass outrage about the silencing of victims of sexual abuse. McGowan's actions were one element triggering the birth of #MeToo, and I respect that.

The #MeToo movement detonated by the Weinstein news coverage quickly swelled and spread. Celebrities and scientists and political aides and grad students and masses of ordinary people--a majority of them women, but including men and others--joined in calling out their abusers. People told their stories, to reporters, on social media, in classrooms and face to face. It was an important moment of mass disclosure and mass confrontation.

The #MeToo movement continues to have social influence, and as one of the innumerable victims of sexual assault, that is very important to me. But there is an issue that arises in our contemporary world dominated by media, for-profit and social, and that is the issue of representation. Whose voices get amplified? Who is the face of the movement, and how is that person chosen? Who gets to profit off of their victimization, and who instead pays a steep price for speaking out? Will the person who gets to speak for us represent us well? Represent us all? Or will they actually kick some of us in the teeth while being celebrated as heroes?

Rose McGowan has become a key face of the #MeToo movement. She just published a memoir, Brave, about her experiences with Harvey Weinstein. A five-part E! documentary about her experience has also just started to screen. She's doing the full tour of news and entertainment shows to promote her book and talk about what happened to her and what she did about it.

McGowan is a victim, but she's also someone who is getting a whole lot of profit out of telling her story--both in the direct form of the money she's being paid for her book, documentary, etc., and in the form of revived and amplified celebrity. I don't have a problem with that, in principle. Imagine a world in which every one of us who has been abused received karmic retribution in our own lifetimes, and became rich and powerful, while those who harmed us made to apologize on national media. That would be cool.

That's not going to happen, unfortunately. A sadly small percentage of the victims of sexual harassment or assault will ever see any justice. Just a tiny handful will become rich and famous as the media faces of our collective suffering. Ideally, those fortunate few would be selected for a good reason. Perhaps they suffered the ghastliest abuse. Maybe they worked for years to directly aid abuse victims. Perhaps they are excellent spokespeople who have put in years studying people's experiences, and know how power and marginalization and abuse work, how they play out differently according to class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and the full range of social statuses--and can explain this to people.

This being America, though, usually the people selected to profit by being spokespeople are celebrities. Like Rose McGowan. That's not fair, but that's the way our culture currently works. We ordinary people will rarely become the media face of a movement. But we can at least demand that the celebrities chosen to represent us do that: represent us.

The problem, of course, is that celebrity relates to social privilege. One of the earliest aims of the #MeToo movement was to call out men's dominance of the entertainment industry and abuse of that power. We live in a world of #OscarsSoWhite. The underrepresentation of people from marginalized groups among our media figures is pervasive. And so we wind up with spokespeople like Rose McGowan: a white cisgender woman who this week shouted down a trans woman, in the process making transphobic comments and spewing out colorblind racism.

Here's how that went down. McGowan was speaking at a book release party for her memoir, Brave. People from the audience were asking her questions. And a trans woman pointed out that trans women suffer extreme rates of sexual and physical violence, and asked McGowan to speak to that. Her motivation for asking McGowan this undoubtedly came out of statements McGowan made in an interview by RuPaul last summer, in which McGowan framed trans women as really men who have no idea what real women go through.

McGowan's response was to deny that trans women face more victimization than cis women, then to put a happy face on that by calling the trans woman "sister" and saying "we're the same"--a gesture, I take it, of McGowan's positioning herself as a good spokesperson for trans women victims of sexual violence.

The woman who asked the question was not happy with the response, and she and McGowan spoke and then yelled over one another. The trans woman was removed by security, chanting "white cis feminism" all the while. And then McGowan proceeded to yell and rant at the audience. She was outraged at being called cisgender and at having her whiteness pointed out. She screamed,

"Don’t label me, sister. Don’t put your labels on me. Don’t you fucking do that. Do not put your labels on me. I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone. I do not subscribe to your rules. I do not subscribe to your language.

"You will not put labels on me or anybody. Step the fuck back. What I do for the fucking world and you should be fucking grateful. Shut the fuck up. Get off my back. . . I didn’t agree to your cis fucking world. Ok? Fuck off. . .

"I’m fucking mad with the lies. I’m mad that you put shit on me because I have a fucking vagina and I’m white or I’m black or I’m yellow or I’m purple. Fuck off. All of us want to say it. I just do. . .

"There’s not a network here devoted to your fucking death. There’s not advertisers advertising tampons with a camera lovingly going up a girl’s body as she’s being lovingly raped and strangled. Piss off. And until you can collect that fucking check, back up. My name is Rose McGowan and I am obviously fucking brave.”

What this rant presents is in fact a Top Hits of white feminist colorblind racism, trans-exclusionary feminism, and self-aggrandizing bad allyship. Shut up and be grateful, trans woman. Terrible things happen to cis white girls! I don't experience cis privilege or white privilege. You're attacking me because I have a vagina and for the color of my skin. I don't care if people are black or white or purple, and by bringing up my whiteness you are the real racist. (But I do care about what genitals people have, oh yes, and make presumptions about what is in your pants! And I refuse to call myself a cis woman, because that's a trans imposition, more proof that trans women are really men trying to control the real women.) I'm so brave I'm willing to shout down a trans woman, something everyone wishes they could do, but is too afraid!

Ugh.

Herein lies the main problem of the spokespeople of contemporary social movements being, not the most qualified person, but the most famous one. You wind up with somebody who has little awareness of their own privileges. You wind up with someone who is below the 101-level of understanding how privilege works. They still see it as an on/off switch. "I've been victimized, so I am not an oppressor." They haven't yet learned to see that all of us have dozens of social statuses, and enjoy privilege along some and endure marginalization along others. They haven't yet done the work to examine how they themselves are benefitting from the marginalization of others. You get people speaking for a social justice movement who are themselves bigots. You get transmisogynists who paint trans women as a sexual threat rather than as sexual victims. You get the familiar, specious argument that as victims of sexual assault by cis men, because they frame their bias against trans women in terms of fear of assault, cis women's transmisogyny should be validated rather than decried.

You get people who frame as personal attacks on them calls for them to recognize how being a person of color or trans or otherwise socially marginalized makes victimization worse. You get people who present those who critique their inadequate spokespersonship as the supposed problem with progressives today. You know: the complaint of a "circular firing squad."

Attacking one's allies because their choice of terms is anything other than 100% perfect is bad, to be sure. But this is something else. This is calling out transmisogyny and colorblind racism on the part of someone who is supposed to be the public voice of #MeToo. You cannot be the voice of people who deal with so much worse crap than you do, as a white cis celebrity, if you are in denial about your privileges, or worse, actively voicing bigotry.

This was #MeToo fail. And we all have the right, and the responsibility, to call on our media spokespeople to stop failing us.

Rose McGowan, you have my complete sympathy and solidarity with regard to your having been sexually assaulted. But you are harming my family, my communitymembers who are not cis white women, and I demand you do better in exchange for your profiting as our figurehead.

Cis Gender, Ipso Gender

Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary, revered by many as the arbiter of the English language, finally added the term "cis gender." Many, like Slate's Anna Diamond, consider this an important step forward. Others, however, resist using the word. Some are overtly transphobic, and insist that they just be called "normal." Others claim to be allies, but insist that the term cis gender is just too strange or clinical or academic for the general public to ever use. The Guardian's Paris Lees says that it fails "the hair salon test."

I find this claim that "normal people" can't be expected to use the term cis gender ridiculous. My daughter was all of eleven when she started to use the term cis gender in conversation. By the time she was 13 or 14 she was having discussions with friends in which she could clearly articulate that she enjoyed wearing boxer shorts sometimes because messing around with gender expectations was fun, but that this activity did not make her any less a cis girl. When she was fifteen, she started dating her partner, who is genderqueer.

We do not live in San Francisco or New York--we live in the staid Midwest.

For kids growing up as digital natives, puberty involves surfing the internet and reading about a wide range of identities. The idea that the term "cis gender" is used only by academics and gender theorists and not hair stylists would make my daughter and her peers chortle.

For me, the struggle I'm involved in is not to get people to learn the term "cis gender," it's to get people to understand how that term does not apply in the way often presumed in the case of intersex people. I want people to learn about the term "ipso gender"--because that's a term that really is not widely known.

The term "cis gender" is often defined--I would say incorrectly--as having a gender identity that matches the sex one was assigned at birth. So, in standard usage, if your birth certificate says "F", and you identify as a woman (whether feminine or masculine in presentation being irrelevant), you are cis gender. If it says "F" and you don't, because you identify as a man, or as genderqueer, or as agender, or as anything other than a woman, then you are trans.

In the popular imagination, a trans person is someone "born in the wrong body," meaning they have a gender identity that conflicts with their physical sex. Trans people have been shifting the conversation away from the framing of trans experience as a gender identity/sex characteristic conflict, and toward framing it as a conflict between gender identity and sex assigned at birth, for understandable political reasons. Transphobes often present physical sex as binary, natural, and determinative of "reality." Trans advocates battle this by pointing out that physical sex is actually a spectrum, that binary sex is coercively imposed (see intersex people), and that gender identity determines one's reality. 

The problem is that this argument, which is conceived of as centering intersex experience, actually renders invisible much of my intersex community's experience with violence and gender identity. And that's because it refers to a person as "cis gender" when they are born with primary sex characteristics that are intermediate in nature, but are surgically reassigned to conform to a binary sex ideal, if they grow up to identify with that assigned sex. Calling someone who has essentially undergone a forced sex change in infancy "cis gender" is extremely problematic. This is something that intersex people have been justifiably protesting for years (for example, see gender fluid author and intersex activist Hida Viloria).

So, when speaking of intersex experience, what I hope people will do is to recognize that primary sex characteristics do matter, and we can't just talk about binary sex assignment on one's birth certificate. I urge people to define someone as cis gender if they have a binary gender identity that matches the one expected for people born with the primary sex characteristics they had at birth (genitals, gonads, chromosomes). For intersex people, being born sex-intermediate, a cis gender identity would be a nonbinary identity of some sort. A trans gender intersex person is one who gender transitions to the binary sex they were not forced into at birth. And a person who is born intersex, then medically and legally assigned to a binary sex, who then grows up to identify with that sex is ipso gender. (Ipso gender borrows from the prefix used in chemistry to refer to a substitution in the same place, as cis gender uses the prefix meaning "on the same side" and trans gender uses the prefix meaning "on the other side.")


So, for those of you who are fully familiar with the term cis gender as it is typically used, I'd like you to please consider rethinking it a bit. Because the majority of intersex people today do identify with the binary sex we were assigned, typically surgically, in infancy. The percentage of intersex people who gender transition is high, comparatively speaking (estimates vary widely, but the percentage is higher by at least a couple orders of magnitude in comparison to individuals who are not intersex by birth). Still, the majority of my intersex sibs do not gender transition from the sex they were assigned at birth. Yet great violence was done to my ipso gender siblings in forcing an assignment, rather than letting them grow up to assert their own identities, and to make their own decisions about what surgery, if any, to seek. Infant sex assignment surgery often robs a person of all or some capacity for sexual sensation, and leaves many feeling mutilated. Calling an individual who has endured this "cis gender" makes the pain and violence involved invisible.

I do want to point out that a cis gender intersex person, who has a nonbinary gender identity, suffers in the same way that a trans gender intersex person does, because they were assigned, typically surgically, to a sex with which they do not identify. For intersex people, cis and trans, this often means having to cope with two gender transitions--the first imposed in infancy, and a second one we consent to later in life. Ipso gender people at least have the privilege of not having to gender transition again. But we need a term to center the fact that imposed genital surgery in infancy, along with other unconsented-to medical interventions in later childhood, are a form of violence, even if a person does grow up to identify with the sex assigned at birth.

I hope people will familiarize themselves with the term ipso gender. Thanks!

Trans Gender Body Mods: Who is "Obsessed"?

Many—though by no means all—trans people seek at least some body modifications (hormone replacement therapy, hair removal, surgery, etc.).  

In this post I want to talk about why we do this, and to critique the way seeking trans body mods is often framed.  The common medical framing presumes a cost-benefit analysis in which reduction of internal psychological distress is weighed against medical risks.  And the common layperson’s framing centers the problematic idea of us seeking to “pass.”

In my last post, I explained why I believe the language of “passing” is damaging.  I know that there are some trans people who get upset by such critiques, because they hear an attack on the language of passing as a dismissal of the pain of their gender dysphoria or the intensity of the transphobic violence and disrespect they face.  This post should make it clear that I want to do the very opposite of that.  I just want us to approach this discussion in a way that facilitates change.

Let me start with a personal example.  

A while back I participated in a study on chest binding. In filling out the questions, it became clear to me that the researchers framed chest binding in terms of a risk-benefit analysis.  They presented the benefit of reducing bodily dysphoria by binding the chest as balanced against physical risks associated with binding.  This is a framing that I find to be commonplace today in medical circles.  A trans person is presented as engaging in practices considered physically risky (binding or tucking, taking hormones that increase cardiovascular risks, undergoing surgeries that cause pain and always involve the danger of infection, a poor reaction to anesthesia, etc.). If these physical costs are seen as outweighed by the mental health benefit of reducing psychological dysphoria with the body, then the physical risks are justified. 

This is such a very American professional framework for transition: economic, rational, and individualistic. In its deployment by many cis laypeople, the same framework is given a rather sadistic moral cast.  Undergoing painful and dangerous body modifications is understood as the price trans people must pay if we want to be respected in our identified genders. (This is why, I believe, many cis people feel they have the right to ask us whether we’ve “had the surgery,” despite our protests that other people’s genitals are none of their business.  They feel that if they are being asked to respect our gender identities, they deserve to know if we have paid in coin of blood for that recognition.  The idea that we should not have to pay to have our genders respected any more than they do is apparently novel to them.)

Anyway, back to the study: the tension that I saw in the survey is one familiar to many people seeking medical transition services: paternalism.  It seemed to me that the researchers believed some binding practices (such as the use of duct tape or ace bandages or binding for extended periods of time) are too risky to be justified by any psychological benefit.  This will sound familiar to many trans people who have sought medical transition services.  Often we are turned away, as medical gatekeepers have declared hormones or surgery too risky for us.  My own spouse had had a doctor refuse to refill her prescription for estrogen because her total cholesterol level on one blood test was 201, 1 point into the “high” range.  It was blindingly obvious to my wife, to me, and to most any trans person that the risks involved in withdrawing transition services were much higher than the risk posed by a single cholesterol point of possible added cardiovascular risk.  But under medical paternalism, it is not the trans person zirself who decides if the benefits of medical transition outweigh the risks—it is the doctor.  This gives a doctor’s idiosyncratic beliefs about trans people a great deal of power. This is evident, for example, in how many genderqueer people seeking medical transition services have found they have to present themselves falsely as having a binary trans identity in order to access those services.  Presenting as genderqueer/agender/etc. is a disadvantage because doctors often impose their personal belief that nonbinary identities are weak, wishy-washy, impermanent, or insufficiently “real” to justify the risks of treatment.

After being rejected by paternalistic medical gatekeeping to transition services, some trans people just give up, resigned to lives of psychological misery.  Other, shall we say, more self-actualizing individuals simply turn to the grey and black markets, for example by buying hormones online.  Responding to this reality, the modest number of regional trans clinics mostly operate under the “harm reduction” philosophy, under which clients are advised of the risks involved in hormone replacement therapy, permitted to sign an informed consent form, and then allowed access to hormones.

I’m fully in favor of the harm reduction approach, which grants trans patients the human dignity of being allowed to make informed decisions for ourselves. But the framing of decisions about transition under harm reduction is just as individualistic as the paternalist model.  It’s about a contract being signed by a rational actor weighing physical risks against psychological benefit.

As no man, woman, person of any other gender, or person of no gender at all is an island, I find this pretty silly.  

We are not atomized individuals free-floating in space, making decisions about whether and how to modify our sexed bodies.  We are social creatures, with employers and coworkers, partners and offspring, schoolmates and neighbors.  And so many of the current risks and benefits of trans body modifications are social in nature, not medical.

Anyone who gender transitions does so because they wish social recognition of their gender identity.  If it is enough for us to know in our own minds what our true gender is, then being forever misgendered by others matters not at all, and transition is unnecessary.  Note that I am not equating gender transition generally with medical transition—many people transition socially without the use of hormones or surgery.  But whether we choose to and are able to access medical services, choose not to do so, or try but are unable to access them, the acts of coming out to others and of asking that others change the pronoun by which they address us are social in nature. 

And this brings up the thorny issue of being accepted in our identified genders.  For many binary gender transitioners, this is conflated with the idea of “passing,” or being perceived as a cis person of one’s identified gender.  (I’m very critical of the term “passing”—you can read my full critique here if you like.)  In my ideal world, gender identities would be accepted in the same way that, say, religious identities are: we just take someone’s word for it.  If someone tells you they are Catholic or Hindu, you say, “OK.”  If someone tells you they have converted to Judaism, you say, “Oh, OK,” and maybe you ask them about their experience, but you never say, “I refuse to acknowledge your Jewish identity because you don’t have a Jewish nose.  If you get a nose job maybe I’ll think about it, but since you didn’t grow up Jewish, I really don’t think you can know what it is to be a real Jew.” (By the way, I’m Jewish, and I am aware that there are some Jews who see Jews-by-choice as less authentically Jewish, though that is against both Torah and rabbinical advice.  But I’ve never in my life encountered a person, Jewish or otherwise, who has said “I won’t acknowledge you as a Jew unless you get plastic surgery to make your nose look Jewish.”)

Unfortunately, my ideal world where gender identities would be respected when announced, without regard to physical appearance, is far from the world we live in today.  

In the real world we have no choice but to negotiate, not only is transphobia, or hatred of trans people, rampant, but so is cissexism.  Cissexism is the belief that cis people’s gender identities are authentic, innate and unquestionable, while trans peoples’ identities are questionable performances.  One aspect of cissexism is the belief that one has the right to choose to respect a trans person’s gender identity or not—that one sits in judgment on our identities and presentations.  And central among the criteria that cissexist people use in deciding whether to respect or mock us is physical appearance, especially bodily configuration.  To be deemed “worthy” of the pronoun “she,” cissexism holds, one must have a body that looks like that of a cis woman.  To be granted the right to the pronoun “he” requires a body appearing cis male.  And to be acknowledged as genderqueer, a person is expected to be completely androgynous in physical form.

Now, the prize that cissexism dangles before us turns out often to be illusory.  Cissexism is deeply bound with enforcing the gender binary and essentialist notions of binary sex.  No matter what a person’s body looks like, it turns out, cissexist people generally treat all nonbinary genders as jokes, refusing to use nonbinary pronous or just “forgetting” all the time to try.  A trans man can bulk up, grow a beard, and get top and bottom surgery, but no matter—many cissexists will assert that he doesn’t have a “real” penis, and is thus a poor simulacrum of a man they will call “he” out of pity.  And transfeminine peole have it worst of all.  Transmisogynistic hatred focused on trans women is intense, presenting them as deceivers of straight cis men, potential rapists of cis women, and some unspecified but ominous threat to children.  Cissexist gender policing of trans women’s bodies is most extreme, inspecting necks for adam’s apples, staring at the size of hands, scrutinizing chests, and monitoring jawlines.  If they are visibly trans gender under this scrutiny—as so many trans women are—they are the subject of constant ire and harassment, mocked as “shemales” and “he-shes.”  Only the most model-perfect are granted the prize of being treated as women.  And even this prize turns out to be booby-trapped, because their very cis-conformity is reframed in romantic and sexual contexts as a sham, a trap, tormenting cis straight men by somehow making them gay.

So: cissexism is rampant in our society.  Its claim that it will grant us respect, if and only if our bodies “match” our identities, is largely a sham—and yet it is compelling to so many of us as trans people.  It keeps masses of trans people in the closet, convinced they can never transition because their bodies appear too stereotypically cis male or female.  We transition so that others will respect our gender identities, and if we are convinced no one ever will respect us because we don’t have the price of a nice suburban home to spend on plastic surgery, or that even if we spent a million dollars, it would never be enough, then many of us decide there’s no point in even trying.

For those of us who do come out, bod mods often become almost an obsession.  If you take a look at the mass of trans support sites, and you will find a million posts entitled “How well do I pass?—X months on HRT.”  Go to some genderqueer support groups, and you will find masses of people binding their chests, agonizing over whether they would look more androgynous if they took a little estrogen or testosterone, or commiserating over wanting some of the effects of HRT but not others.  The way this is framed by psychotherapists and doctors is as an individual preoccupation that is a keystone of the formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria.  It’s treated as an internal psychodrama of alienation from one’s flesh, the idea of feeling “born in the wrong body.”  And it’s certainly true that many trans people are driven to transition in part by a sense of unhappiness with their curves or lack thereof.  But this feeling does not emerge in a vacuum.  It is born from a life lived in the context of cissexism and its insistence on “passing” as cis gender as the gateway to respect for trans people. 

We’re the ones diagnosed with a mental illness, but it’s society that is sick.  Doctors say that we as individuals are weirdly obsessed with our sexed bodies, but it’s gender policing by a cissexist society that makes us rationally preoccupied with how our bodies appear. 

I’ve had conversations with various trans friends that start, “If you were living your life alone on a desert island. . . ,” as we have tried to disentangle personal wishes for body modification based on internal dysphoria from social forces pushing us toward them.  It’s an impossible exercise on many levels, because we’re never going to live such a life, and because social forces have shaped our feelings and understandings on an unconscious level.  Still, it’s interesting to me, because while some friends have said nothing would change for them, other people I’ve had such conversations with have said they’d want fewer body modifications.  Personally, if I were living on that proverbial desert island, or, slightly less implausibly, in some sort of trans gender utopian commune, what would change for me is my attitude toward top surgery.  I want it now, living in my Midwestern American context, but I wouldn’t in an ideal or asocial setting.

If nobody was around gender policing me, I could deal with having moobs.  I mean, I wouldn’t mind looking like Michelangelo’s David, but I'm a middle-aged guy with reasonable expectations and hardly obsessed with having a model body.  Early in my transition, I wore my binder every waking hour, but now, as soon as I get home from work, unless there’s company, I immediately take it off and relax.  Let’s face it: for most of us who wear them, binders are really uncomfortable.  But my attitude of relaxation and body acceptance has very little effect on my binding behavior outside the house—I bind tightly, whenever I’m stepping out my door, which often means for 12-18 hours a day.

Now, here’s where I return to that study I mentioned (remember the binder survey?).  According to the health information given with the survey, binding for more than 8 hours a day is medically risky.  As a rational individual, I should balance my dysphoric urge to bind against physical risks, and apparently I'm doing a poor job of it—I’m too obsessed with my body, making me put it at risk.

But I’m not obsessed with my body.  

I’m not binding for long days due to psychological reasons.  I don’t want top surgery because my body revolts me, or because my moobs feel like alien flesh somehow appended to my chest, or because I have a desire to live “stealth,” hiding my trans status.  I am responding to a social context in which the risks of my not binding or getting top surgery are huge.  I teach large lecture classes full of Midwestern undergraduates.  I sit in meetings with Midwestern administrators.  They all know I'm trans—I’m not in the closet—and there are rough patches, but mostly I get by pretty well by wearing jacket and tie, growing my beard, and binding my chest to pass muster with gender policing.  I recognize that in this I am privileged. But if I suddenly showed up with size D breasts bouncing around under my shirt, I have no doubts that it would trigger a cissexist freak-storm.  It’s one thing for your standard cissexist onlooker to see that I’m short and wide-hipped for a man, and have a somewhat odd-shaped chest.  I fall short of the masculine ideal, but it’s clear I’m making an effort.  Presenting as a man with a free-flying and quite substantial set of breasts, however, is a crime according to the gender police.

Unintentionally violating the cissexist law that gender identity and body must “match” gets you stigma, but overtly flouting this law is treated as a much more serious crime.  Now, the results are generally much worse for the transfeminine than they are for transmasculine people like me.  But there would be consequences—material consequences—for me, for example in the form of poor student evaluations and negative interactions with colleagues, and I am the sole economic support for a family of three.  Furthermore, the other members of my family have physical disabilities, meaning they must rely on me to do tasks like the shopping that would be made much more difficult and potentially dangerous if I appeared, not just as trans, but as “flaunting” a nonconforming body.

I know that there are people in the U.S. walking around in public with the combination of beard and big breasts and an androgynous body, if not in the Midwestern setting I live in.  Frankly, I’m in awe of their strength.  If I were single, maybe I would find out if I am strong enough to take the body I’m comfortable with in the privacy of my own home, and live with it in full view of a cissexist society.  Maybe I could dare to swim in a public pool, furry moobs exposed, or mow the lawn with my shirt off, like my cis male neighbors do, and dare the police to arrest me for bodily nonconformity.  Certainly I’d love to give the finger to our society’s gender policing, sexualization of body parts deemed female, and general body shaming.

But I am not just an individual with political goals and psychological impulses.  I am embedded in a society and in a family.  And I have duties to my spouse and child that mean that since I cannot afford top surgery, and my insurance excludes coverage of transition-related services, I have to bind my chest for more hours a day than is medically approved.

Any study or theory of trans experience that presents us as acting solely in response to internal psychological impulses deeply misrepresents our lived reality.  And a medical establishment that withholds hormones or surgery based on a cost-benefit analysis that only takes into account medical risks, and not the social stigma, unemployment, and violence that those of us transitioning in a cissexist society risk without those services, does trans people a great disservice.

At the same time, it’s very important to me to resist naturalizing and internalizing gender policing by evaluating myself using the language of “passing.”  Besides implying that my presenting myself as a man is deceptive, the language of “passing” puts trans people in an impossible position, where the “success” of our transitions are determined by something we cannot control: the way we are treated by others.  No matter what body mods we seek, or voice training we do, or how carefully we choose our clothing, other people can still mispronoun us, either consciously and cruelly, or based on their unconscious cissexist ideas about bodies without actively intending to be cruel.  We cannot control whether we “pass”—we can be passed as cis gender by others who honor our gender identities, or not passed as cis gender by those who do not, and control of that lies with them, not us.

So I want to emphasize that I am advocating for the great import of trans body modification and access to medical transition services largely because of our social context of constant gender policing.  Ideally, I believe, what requires change are not trans bodies, but society.  It’s cissexism that drives so much of our preoccupation with body mods.  What we must most fight for is the social acceptance of visibly trans bodies as being fully as valid and attractive and as deserving of respect as cis bodies.  In an ideal future, when all gender identities are fully supported and respected, I believe trans people will seek to change our bodies less than we do now.  But since we live neither in that ideal future, nor on desert islands, we must cope with the fact that social change is slow, and we have to live in the world as it is now, even as we fight to change it. 

Right now, trans people of all genders pursue body modifications for three reasons: (1) to reduce the social risks of stigma and mistreatment that are aimed at visibly trans bodies, (2) to get the social benefits of respect that are currently granted only to cis-appearing bodies, and (3) to reduce internal gender dysphoria.  The first of these, reducing mistreatment, I see as a necessary evil: something we rationally try to do to protect our safety, but much more effectively addressed by putting an end to transphobic discrimination and violence, making protective camouflage unnecessary.  The second of these, seeking to appear cis to get respect, I see as a dangerous illusion, because we cannot control whether people will grant us that respect, and because it perpetuates the idea that trans bodies like ours are inferior.  It’s only the third—seeking changes in our bodies that reduce our personal, internal gender dysphoria—that I believe would persist, in a world that moved beyond transphobia, transmisogyny and cissexism.

May that day soon arrive.

On Masculine Honor

It may seem like an odd thing for a trans guy to say, but I've realized that I'm more secure in my masculinity than many men.

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.

Transphobia, Racism, and Segregation

I want to talk about some contemporary issues, and how they relate to American history. The exclusion of trans people from facilities and organizations is not often framed as segregation, but that is exactly what it is, and I want to illustrate that. This will be a rather “heavy” post, but it's important to talk about recurrent patterns in American social history, so that we can learn lessons from our collective past. I'll be discussing patterns and parallels, not equivalences. Racial segregation in the U.S. came into being in the aftermath of racial slavery, the most extreme form of oppression our nation has seen, and one that, as a white man, I cannot claim fully to comprehend. Transphobic segregation does not have this terrible history directly behind it, for which I am grateful. That said, trans people suffer from segregation every day, and to understand the problem, and gain insight into solutions, we have to examine patterns of the justification of segregation across history.

Sometimes, as a trans person, it seems like every day brings another news story about some transphobic incident or initiative. At times there's a ray of light, but often it's followed by a dark cloud of backlash. I have two situations of this sort on my mind right now, both having to do with segregation. These situations illuminate a common thread in American history: the enactment of bigotry through segregation policies that are justified as somehow “protecting the innocent” by oppressing a minority group.

The first of these situations relates to an incident in which a trans woman was shopping at Macy's. When she took some items to a dressing room to try them on, she was denied access by a sales clerk. The customer went to the manager, who told the clerk to let her in to try on her items. The clerk refused, shouting that God doesn't recognize “transgendereds” and that the customer was thus just a man in a dress, about to violate a private women's space. Embarrassed by the scene and by the employee's noncompliance, the manager fired her. The clerk soon acquired a circle of religious advocates demanding her reinstatement, but Macy's actually quietly refused. (See here.)

The day that I read about Macy's asserting a nondiscrimination policy, I was pleasantly surprised. The store would not put up a symbolic “Cis Women Only” sign above the changing room. But, sadly and predictably, a lot of backlash followed. In just one of the actions taken in retaliation, Rep. Richard Floyd, a Tennessee republican, introduced a state measure prohibiting transgender people from using public bathrooms or dressing rooms that conflict with the sex listed on their birth certificates. (Tennessee, by the way, does not permit people to change the sex on their birth certificates when they gender transition.) What uproar this would have led to when bearded Tennessee-born trans men dutifully entered ladies' rooms, one fortunately has only to imagine, as the state sponsor of the bill chose to withdraw it as distracting the legislature from pressing economic issues. While the withdrawal brought me a sigh of relief, I keep hearing the words that Rep. Floyd spoke when introducing the bill:

“I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry. Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts.” (See here.)

Floyd's words follow a time-worn groove in the politics of bigotry in America. A minority group is framed as posing some imaginary threat to privileged innocents, and segregation and violence against that minority are thus framed as justified. The U.S. saw such violent “logic” on a vast scale after the end of the Civil War and the manumission of all who were enslaved. Here are the words of Sen. Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, speaking on the U.S. Senate floor in March of 1900 in favor of racial segregation and against voting by African Americans: “As to the Negro's 'rights,'— I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” (See here.)

The wave of racist violence against African Americans in the wake of Reconstruction took place on an appalling scale. Between 1889 and 1940, 3800 lynchings of African American men and women were reported—and doubtless, many more went unreported. There was a claim that most of these were in retaliation for black men raping white women in what was termed the “New Crime,” supposedly caused by black men reverting to a “savage type” once the “civilizing influence” of slavery was removed. In fact, as activist and author Ida B. Wells found in her research on 728 lynchings, the majority of lynching victims were not even accused of rape, but of crimes such as “quarreling with Whites” and “incendiarism.”

There is a difference of scale in the level of violence faced by African Americans after Reconstruction and by trans people today. But contemporary transphobic policies and violence follow this historic pattern of blaming the true victim. Rather than owning their bigotry, legislators, street thugs and shop clerks claim that the trans people they exclude or assault “started it.” We don't enter a restroom to use the toilet, they claim: we come in to sexually assault those in the women's room or challenge those in the men's room, so segregating us and/or assaulting us is justified. Any violence against us is framed as merely self-defense, or as defending the honor of women and children. The fact, of course, is that trans people are the victims, and our “offense” is not attacking the “helpless,” but challenging the worldview of an angry, privileged, insecure group.

And so we see our first theme: the projection of violence onto the victims of bigotry.

Justifications for both racial segregation and the segregation of cis and trans people are unfortunately often based on religious worldviews—as the sales clerk justified her actions at Macy's. Many religious organizations are firmly in favor of trans people's rights. But in the U.S., transphobes often present their ideologies as dictated by the Bible. The standard claim of contemporary transphobic Christians is that gender transition violates God's plan:

“Most basic to our understanding оf sex іѕ that God created twо (and оnly two) genders: “male аnd female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). All the modern-day speculation abоut numerous genders—or еven а gender “continuum” wіth unlimited genders—is unbiblical. . . God’s creation оf еаch individual muѕt surely include His designation оf gender/sex. His wonderful work leaves no room for mistakes; nо оnе іѕ born with the 'wrong body'. . . In the Law, transvestism / transvestitism wаѕ specifically forbidden: 'A woman muѕt not wear men’s clothing, nor а man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests аnyone whо dоes this' (Deuteronomy 22:5). . . Transgenderism іs not genetically based, аnd іt is nоt simply a psychological disorder; it iѕ rebellion аgainѕt God’s plan.” (See here.)

(The fact that sex is indeed a spectrum, which is something that as an intersex person I am aware of every day, raises a problem for this worldview. I once asked an evangelical leader how he could reconcile his claim of divinely-created gender dyadism with my intersex birth status, and the prevalence of intersexuality in all species. He responded that God did not intend for me to be intersex, but that in a world of sin birth defects occurred, and that in the world to come there would be no “errors” like me. . . which conflicts with the simultaneous claim that “His wonderful work leaves no room for mistakes; nо оnе іѕ born with the 'wrong body'.” There is a great illogic in claiming that people born with intersex bodies that bother the majority have defects that must be medically corrected, but nonintersex trans people cannot seek these same medical services because God makes no mistakes.)

Transphobic Christians see in gender transition more than a case of “individual sin;” they see a danger to society as a whole. The entire LGBT community is framed as sexually perverse, polluting society with the belief that sexuality need not be limited to the confines of a marriage between one person who was assigned male at birth and one person who was assigned female. Trans visibility is seen as carrying a further seductive and contagious danger: the idea that both physical sex and gender roles are mutable, which will spread to children and confuse them about their “true” sexes, making them rebellious. In questioning their sexes, they believe, their children will question God's plan as manifested in human bodies since the creation of Adam, and Eve from Adam's rib. Children who question their sex also question Adam's superiority and Eve's submission to him. Thus, trans people threaten the “proper” order of all gender relations in society.

This framing of a persecuted minority as posing a threat to the plan God made manifest in the body also has a long history in the U.S.. Consider this editorial published in a Madison, Wisconsin newspaper, the Daily Argus and Democrat, on September 11, 1857. The editorial advocates in favor of racial segregation, and bases its argument on the idea that segregation will prevent interracial relationships, which are against God's plan:

“Our Creator clearly never intended these two widely dissimilar races to fraternize; if he had wanted them to be one, he would have so made them—but he has placed, with his own finger, a mark , in color, intellect, physiognomy, and other strongly marked characteristics. Whenever these lines of demarkation are endeavored to be obliterated by amalgamation, the white race has been degenerated, enfeebled, and degraded, as a natural consequence.”

Though written a century later, the 1959 order of the trial court in the case of Loving vs. Virginia uses quite similar language. (It would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court, putting an end to bans on interracial marriage in the U.S.) In sentencing Mildred and Richard Loving to jail under Virgina's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 for having married out of state and returned to Virginia, the trial court wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

So we see another recurrent theme: a claim that bigoted civil policies follow God's plan as made clear in the color and shape of the flesh.

I want to examine one more theme—the way that gender and sexuality play out in enforcing marginalization. To do this, I want to turn to another story in the news: that of a 7-year-old Colorado trans girl, whose application to a Girl Scout troop was first denied, then accepted, leading again to lots of backlash. I've already noted that LGBT communities are framed as sexually perverse by bigots. Now, trans people are a gender minority, not a sexual minority. Gender transition does affect sexuality (a person who had been perceived as a straight man is categorized as a lesbian after transitioning, for example), but this is epiphenomenal rather than the cause of gender transition. We gender transition based on our gender identity, not for sexual reasons. Still, gender transgression is so linked in the popular imagination with “homosexuality” that it may seem inevitable that trans people would be viewed by bigots through a sexual lens. But the evocation of sexuality in American bigotry predates LGBT rights movements, and plays out even when sexuality should be deemed a nonissue.

Trans women have been slandered as men costuming themselves as women in order to gain access to women's private spaces to peep upon and sexually assault them by all sorts of groups. Excluding trans women from women's bathrooms, locker rooms, and other “safe spaces” is justified through a familiar Western system of sex/gender ideologies which frames “good women” as fragile sexual victims, to be put on a pedestal in a gilded cage. This same belief system frames even good men as sexual aggressors, able to control themselves around chaste good women, but naturally and excusably provoked by the actions of bad women to take sexual advantage of what is “offered.” Trans women suffer the doubly-negative fate of being framed as sexually aggressive men when in a woman's space, and as bad women who are “asking for it” in a men's space.

But Bobbie Montoya, Girl Scout aspirant, is seven years old. We contemporary Americans should see her as asexual, an innocent child. And yet the rhetoric deployed against her is remarkably unaltered from that directed at adult trans women. First of all, she's trying to enter a girl's space, so she's constantly being framed as a boy. The large majority of news reports blare “Boy Wants to be a Girl Scout,” or something similar. (See, e.g., this.) More importantly, she's framed as posing some sort of ominous threat by transphobic organizations. Three Louisiana Girl Scout troops that disbanded to protest the Colorado troop's action described the admission of trans gender children as not only “extremely confusing” for “normal” children, but as posing a danger to girls. (Here.) In a viral video calling for people to boycott Girl Scout cookies over the trans girl's admission, a 14-year-old Girl Scout says not only that the “radical homosexual agenda” of gender transition can't be permitted and that the trans girl is a boy, but that her presence endangers the other girls' safety. (Here.)

Bobbie Montoya is a button-eyed tot, not even four feet tall, living under extreme scrutiny. She poses no risk to anyone. And yet those fighting against allowing her to desegregate a cis gender Girl Scout troop continually evoke some sexual risk, some nameless dread. What this makes clear is that the justification of segregation as self-defense against a sexual risk has no relation to reality. It is a strategic claim, a trope. The fact that it emerges in the case of trans kids just makes this more obvious.

The gendered nature of the claim of sexual risk means that the bigotry faced by trans people differs a lot by gender. Trans women get the short end of the stick, attacked as victimizers when framed by the prejudiced as men, and sexually victimized when framed as women. Trans men suffer too, but not quite as dramatically. When framed as men, we can be attacked as victimizers, but when framed as women (as we often are by transphobes), though sometimes we are sexually victimized as “bad girls” who are “asking for it,” often we are put in the less physically dangerous (if unpleasant) position of being treated by bigots as pitiful and ugly self-mutilators who must be protected from ourselves.

This pattern of gender differences echoes the dangers faced by African American women and men after Reconstruction. Black men faced a great risk of being physically attacked by racists because they were framed as the most dangerous of male sexual aggressors. White fantasies about black male size and sexual violence were quite potent. For example, one white man who joined a mob of people flocking to look at the body of a lynching victim wrote that “the crowds from here that went over to see [the victim] for themselves said he was so large he could not assault her until he took his knife and cut her, and also had either cut or bit one of her breast off.” (Here.) In fact, stories like these were urban (or rural) legends, fantasies with no relationship to the actual cause of the lynchings, which were usually retaliation against the victim acting in a nondeferent manner, challenging a white man, rather than some accusation of rape. But these violent stories allowed white mobs to feel justified in torturing victims before lynching them, and in mutilating their bodies afterwards.

African American women in the period after the Civil War were the group that actually suffered from an epidemic of transracial rape, in a reality that was an inversion of the myth of the “New Crime.” Evidence of this lies in the marked increase in the proportion of mixed-race children born to African American mothers in the period after the war.

What we see in the case of racial violence after the Civil War is a series of projections, in which a bigoted white majority reversed the positions of victim and attacker. This pattern is echoed by transphobic assaults today in the “trans panic” defense. A cis man who encounters a trans woman and finds her sexually attractive is viewed by bigots as justified in assaulting her for “tricking him” into finding her alluring, her very status as trans woman inviting violence. A cis man who kills a trans woman and claims she initiated a sexual encounter with him, after which he discovered her trans status, routinely walks away with little or no jail time—even if that claim seems patently implausible (see, e.g., this). Conversely, trans men are at risk of becoming victims of “corrective rape” by transphobic straight cis men who find them attractive, their trans status being seen as a provocation, with the chances of prosecution being slim.

It becomes clear when examining the way that gender and sexuality are filtered through bias that those who are the victims of segregation are also the victims of sexual assaults and sexual myths. And yet segregation is justified in the name of protecting the “innocent” majority from a supposedly dangerous, deviant minority group.

What lessons can we draw from the parallels we've seen? In enacting segregationist policies, whether in the case of race or gender identity, there are two bases commonly drawn upon. The first is a claim that the marginalized group represents a sexualized threat to the majority—a claim that is inversely related to actual victimization. The second is a religious claim that God has written an intent that the minority be discriminated against in the flesh—in the color of the skin, or the shape of the body—and that religious order demands enforcement of discriminatory policies. The first claim can be opposed by marshalling the facts to point out empirical reality. The second can be countered by noting both the diversity of religious opinion and the constitutional separation of church and state in America.

The lessons of history show that fighting segregationist policies requires social movements, not just logical arguments. It took many marches and sit-ins and protests to bring about racial desegregation. Furthermore, ending segregation at law doesn't end it in practice. The results of racial desegregation in the U.S. have included the gradual defunding of integrated public transportation, white flight from integrated neighborhoods, and the ongoing de facto segregation of schools by neighborhood. Today, I live in the most racially segregated major metropolitan area in the U.S., so this reality is clear to me. The suburb next door, a former segregated “sundown town,” is now under 2% African American, while African Americans make up about 35% of the total area population. (Map.) So I don't want to come across as implying that ending formal segregation is a sufficient solution to the problem. It isn't. But we live in a time of great flux for the rights of trans people, with nondiscrimination policies and discriminatory policies both being added to the books around the country. I do believe that if advocates for trans people can make clear the continuity between regulations excluding us from facilities and organizations, and the laws that enacted racial segregation in the U.S., it would affect the way some people see us. It's not a panacea, a magical solution, any more than ending legal racial segregation has solved the problem of racial inequality—but it is something worth doing.

So, please, if you have a discussion about discrimination against trans people, use the term “segregation” to refer to our exclusion from schools, public facilities, and organizations. Because segregation is exactly what it is. And point out that the supposed sexual risk posed by integration is a myth—as is abundantly clear in the case of letting a little trans girl into the Girl Scouts. We're not out to “get” cis people. We just want to be able to use the bathroom like anyone else.