Are Trans Communities Losing Intersex Allies in the TERF Wars?

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On demisexuality, marginalization, and privilege

I wanted to share some musings on demisexuality.  

People who identify as demisexual fall between the sexually-oriented and the asexual (as you can see in this graphic courtesy of AVENwiki.)   Asexual people are marginalized in contemporary American society, which views sexual attraction as the basis of couplehood, domestically-partnered couples as the basic building block of a stable society, and being in an aspirationally permanent sexual relationship as the marker of maturity and mental health. (Note that this wasn't the case in the Victorian era, in which asexuality or at least demisexuality were considered normative for "women of quality," i.e. white middle-class women. Sexual attraction was viewed as completely unnecessary to a woman's marriage.)

Demisexually-identified people occupy a social position analogous to bisexual/pansexual people in the LGB community, and to genderqueer people in the trans* community. And like bi/pan folks or genderqueer folks, sometimes they experience a good deal of social marginalization, and other times they do not. For example, a person could identify as a genderqueer biromantic demisexual, but live as a typical-appearing woman married to a man, and experience lots of social privilege. Or ze could live as a lifelong singleton, mainly romantically interested in women, presenting very androgynously in a buzz cut with a bound chest, who is highly socially marginalized in a social world built around coupledom and sexual attraction, heteronormativity and gender policing.

Sometimes people with liminal identitites--the ones who break down the binaries of male/female gender identity, gay/straight sexual orientation, and asexuality vs. sexuality--are doubly marginalized, both by the "mainstream," and by the marginalized umbrella group to which they ostensibly belong. This is sad and reprehensible. Yet at other times, people who assert liminal identities really do come across as dabblers who want to play with the cool kids, and then go home to their lives of privilege.

All of this is introduction to the following anecdote: a cis woman college student asserted to me that she was demisexual because she didn't enjoy hookups. She wanted to get to know someone, feel safe with him, date him, and have her romantic interest fanned by his doing caring things like giving her little gifts before she wanted to have sex.

To me, that sounds exactly like the description of normative female sexuality as presented in a zillion (socially-conservative) critiques of hookup culture.

The central issue that socially isolates people on the asexual side of the spectrum is not feeling any sexual interest in other people, and in a demi person's case, feeling sexual attraction under limited circumstances. I can see how saying "I'm demisexual" rather than, "I don't do casual sex" could be quite useful in starting a conversation about one's limits without seeming prudish. But this woman wasn't experiencing isolation or marginalization due to demisexuality--she has a boyfriend, and from her description, seems to have had an active social and sexual history.

Really, the impression I received is that this woman hangs out in a feminist crowd that contains LGB folks and trans* folks, and as a cis woman who dates men, found that the language of demisexuality increased her coolness factor. And that felt appropriative to me.

But I'm not a person from the asexual side of the spectrum, so maybe I'm off-base here. Feedback is appreciated!

On Escaping Sexism

As a trans* guy, I've been asked one of the classic questions a number of times: "Did you perhaps transition because you wanted to gain status as a man rather than fight sexism as a woman?"

The answer, of course, is no: I transitioned to male status because I am a man.  That's my gender identity.  Yes, I'm genderflexible about it; no, this flexibility doesn't mean I should have just stayed legally female.  I moved toward a position that would allow me to live my life authentically as myself, and I'm much, much happier now.  It's great to come home, as it were.

So, I didn't transition in order to gain male privilege.  But I do have it, now.  It's true that my male privilege is discreditable, so that I can lose it in situations in which my trans* status is held to negate my manhood, but most of the time, I am accepted as male, and this comes with benefits.

They're nice benefits.

I didn't ask for male privilege, but that doesn't mean I can disclaim it.  White antiracist activists still enjoy white privilege; male advocates of gender egalitarianism still enjoy male privilege.  As a man, I'm taken more seriously in a variety of ways than I was when I was framed by others as being female.  As a professor, for example, I'm less likely to have lecture points challenged by students now.

What got me thinking about this topic today was that I found myself looking at students' ratings of me on ratemyprofessors.com.  The majority of my ratings on the site were written after my transition, but there are 7 or 8 from before it.  The ratings are consistently positive and say that my classes are interesting both before and after my transition, but one thing has changed, and that is that my students who have known me to be male don't say anything about my appearance, but that's not true for pretransition raters.  In fact, one of my students who perceived me to be a woman gushed that I was "adorable."

Ick.

OK, why do I find it distressing to have a student write something they clearly intended to be complimentary?  Well, first off, because this is one of the ways sexism works: by associating women with the body, and imposing on them a duty to be attractive.  I stand in front of a class to convey ideas to them, but before transition, students were examining and judging my body on some attractiveness scale, rather than just engaging intellectually.  Now, I have always taken care to present myself professionally, and part of that means being well-groomed, and I take that care as a man--my shoes are shined, I wear a tie.  But I know from reading endless reams of student evaluations that my good grooming used to be much more important to my students than it is now.  Before my transition, I regularly got comments on student evaluations that complimented my clothing.  Now, I get none of that--my evaluations all focus on my teaching.  As they should.

But there's something else about the term "adorable."  Though the student that described me as adorable clearly meant it positively, the term is subtly belittling.  Supposedly it just means someone or something that is admirable, worthy of being adored, but people who admire President Obama don't go around calling him "adorable."  It's an adjective we use to describe kittens, cute children, charming little cottages. . . and women.  It presents the person or thing described as small and weak, not powerful.  So when a student calls a professor adorable, it presents the professor as lacking authority.  It belittles the person while framing them as appropriately feminine.

I am so glad to have left behind a life where I had to deal with this constantly, just because I was understood to be a woman.  

I try to imagine what it would be like to be a trans* woman instead of a trans* man.  How would I feel if, for the first time, a student wrote that I was "adorable?"  I imagine the difficult ambivalence: "Oh, I've been validated as a woman!  But *sigh* I'm being evaluated superficially on my body."  It's so much harder to have as a destination a place where you lose status than a place where you gain it.  I have a great deal of respect for my trans* sisters, who must take on both transphobia and sexism, when I only have to deal with the former.

So: I didn't transition to gain male privilege.  But I have to own that I do enjoy it.

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.

Trans Women on the Margins

This is a post aimed at my queer community allies, with some simple and hopefully entertaining illustrative charts.

As a trans man, I need to say that I am sick of seeing queer people dump on trans women.

Why would people marginalize others who are supposed to be part of the same LGBTQIA community? Occasionally I encounter it when I'm speaking with older lesbians who still buy the Evil Empire rhetoric that trans women are really men who are trying to smuggle their phallic privilege into women's safe spaces, in order to run the whole world and sneak peeks in women's bathrooms. More often I'm in a space dominated by gay male politicos where trans issues as a whole are thought of as distracting--something that scares off the Main Street straight supporters who might otherwise support same-sex marriage. But sadly, I run into it regularly in the sort of spaces I'm told should be most comfortable for me: spaces full of educated, activist, third-wave-feminist queer folks. The kind of places, ironically, where androgyny and genderquerity are celebrated as radical and transformational.

A while back I had a conversation with a young white cis lesbian--let's call her Sadie. Sadie had recently, she said, "discovered" trans men. (Perhaps we are some sort of continent. . .) She was telling me how cool she thought I and other trans men were, because we "got" sexism, having seen firsthand how women are treated. I chatted a bit about how gender transition is an interesting window into sex discrimination, as studies show that upon transitioning, trans women make significantly less money than they had previously, while trans men make about the same, or a bit more. Sadie paused a moment, then said, "Well, I don't know about trans women." I asked what she meant, and she replied, "I guess I've mostly only seen them on television, and they look like glamorous living stereotypes." I agreed that television gives a very limited view of what trans women are like--just as the images of (cis) lesbians in the media are usually either of hot femme chicks who are meant to appeal to male fantasy, or of butch women who are presented as the opposite of sexy. Sadie replied, "OK, that's true. But I'm still not sure about transsexual women. One did hang out with me at a party once and it was kind of freaky." I asked what she meant and she said, "I don't know, she just. . . well. . . didn't really look like a real woman, you know what I mean?"

At this point in the conversation I ran out of tolerant educational patience, and just said, "No, I don't know what you mean. You do realize that there are plenty of homophobic people out there who complain that lesbians don't look like 'real women.'" Sadie got flustered and replied defensively, "Yes, but she made me uncomfortable when she hung out with me at the party that night. I have a right to feel safe."

Dear Fellow Members of the Assigned-Female-At-Birth Queer Community: you have an absolute right to be safe. No one should be permitted to harass or harm you. But you do not have a right to feel safe, if you're going to define that as being free from challenge to your preconceptions. Protecting yourself from threatening acts is important, but treating another person as a threat just because you're uncomfortable what they look like is juvenile prejudice. How can you demand that society at large accept your gender transgression and your nonconforming appearance, say too bad if people think you look or act weird--and then turn around and tell other folks to conform to your expectations or you'll declare them weird and exclude them so you can feel nice and safe?

Look, I'll make it simple with a couple of charts. Yes, they're tongue-in-cheek. This is the universe of queer people, as viewed through the eyes of bigots you despise:

























You see how most queer folk are marginalized and villainized, as you deplore. Now, here's the queer universe as seen from a transmisogynistic position:

























Now the purple circle of querity is a circle of joy--yay--but trans women get excluded from the party. Well, unless they look and act just like cis queer woman, in which case you'll permit them entry in exactly the way that the Midwestern homophobes you detest tolerate that churchgoing, Lands'-End-wearing, quiet lesbian couple.

Before I get in trouble, let me reiterate that I myself am a member of the queer community who was assigned female at birth. I have plenty of great friends of every sex and gender location on the map who stand arm-in-arm with trans women and others who are especially marginalized. I'm not trying to demonize any group.

All I really want to say is please, avoid hypocrisy. Don't marginalize others for the very same reasons bigots marginalize you.