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.

Some Advice to Allies Following the Suicide of Leelah Alcorn

Having listened to a bunch of conversations about Leelah Alcorn's suicide, I wanted to provide some advice to cis gender allies who would like to help advocate for children and adults who wish to gender transition.

Leelah Alcorn committed suicide because, rather than respecting her gender identity, her family rejected it, isolated her from friends and the internet, and sent her to "Christian therapists" who told her a trans identity is a sickness she must cure by faith and prayer. Her despair was built of familial rejection, societal transphobia, the pain of not being allowed to live in her identified gender, and a lost hope that she would be able to transition before puberty and her body's masculinization.

It's this last item that I want to talk about with you. Like other trans-identified children, Leelah wanted to have access to puberty-blocking drugs. (Yes, they are considered safe--doctors regularly prescribe them to children who don't identify as trans, but are experiencing "precocious puberty" at a young age. And yes, all they do is postpone puberty, which will resume if they stop taking the drugs. The fear often cited by those unsupportive of allowing children to live in identified genders other than that they were assigned at birth--that it's just a phase which they may grow out of--shouldn't justify denying trans children access to puberty-delaying medications, because if a child actually did decide not to transition, they could just stop taking the meds and their puberty would resume.) By using hormone-blocking meds, a trans child can avoid experiencing their body changing in ways that undermine their sense of self--something most trans people alive today have experienced, and can tell you is very painful.

I have heard some very well-intentioned allies arguing for trans children's access to transition services--supportive therapy and hormone-blockers--in the aftermath of Leelah Alcorn's suicide. I appreciate that advocacy a great deal. But there is an aspect of some of what I've heard that I've found very problematic, that I want to raise with you here, and that has to do with discussions of "passing."

First of all, the term itself is one I find highly problematic, as I have addressed before on this blog. In short, we usually use the word "passing" to refer to a person hiding their true identity. I am not "passing" as a man. I am not "really" a woman who is performing a successful deception on the public. I *am* a man. By reiterating the term "passing," well-intentioned cis allies re-entrench cissexism--the belief that cis people's gender identities are authentic and unquestionable, while trans people's gender identities are a performance open to question, and in some way fundamentally deceptive.

It is true that most people who identify as trans men or trans women would like to have bodies that conform to our society's ideals of what men's and women's bodies look like. Those ideals are currently based on cis bodies. Binary-identified trans people typically wish to have bodies similar to cis people's for one or both of two reasons. The first is internal--the thing we call dysphoria. People who identify as women, whether cis or trans, often feel uncomfortable with having substantial amounts of facial hair, for example, or with having only one breast, and would feel the same if they were living alone on the proverbial desert island. They want their bodies to conform to some basic female norms--again, currently defined around idealized cis female bodies. Thus, a trans girl who starts to grow a beard at puberty is very likely to experience psychological discomfort with that. That's bodily gender dysphoria.  And just as when a cis woman has a mastectomy, we view surgical recreation of the missing breast as a medically-justified reconstruction rather than cosmetic, we should view removing breast tissue from a trans man's body as medically-justified, not cosmetic.  It's a way to treat internal gender dysphoria.

But another reason most binary-identified trans people today wish to have bodies similar to those of cis women and men is social: the huge impact on our lives of transphobic gender policing. Visibly trans women in particular are subjected to huge amounts of social stigma, street harassment, job discrimination, bathroom panic, and sexualized violence. This social mistreatment of trans women is transmisogyny, and it is intensified in interaction with race/ethnicity, and with other characteristics such as disability. But even those of us with the privileges of being white and male suffer disrespect and sexualized violence when we are visibly trans gender. Wanting to avoid disrespect, discrimination and violence is rational, and we're told the way to do this is to gain access to hormones and surgery and voice training and other services so that our trans status will become invisible. We're told that we must "pass" as cis people to avoid transphobia.

Now, it is true that Leelah Alcorn wanted access to testosterone blockers so that her body wouldn't masculinize at puberty, and as an adult trans woman, she could have a body that would look like that of a cis woman. Probably, she wanted that both due to internal gender dysphoria, and to avoid social gender-policing shaming and violence. As an ally, it's fine and right that you should want to voice support for Leelah and for trans kids everywhere, and to explain why access to puberty-postponing medication is important.

But please, please, don't do it by saying something like this: "A trans person needs to pass in order to be successful. If they don't pass, their lives will be horrible. So they need all sorts of medical treatments starting before puberty."

Please bear in mind several things. First of all, the vast majority of the trans people you'll encounter today have had no access to puberty-postponing drugs. So most trans men you'll meet developed breasts and hips, and most trans women you'll meet had their voices change, their shoulders broaden, their facial hair start to grow. If you say "unless you start transition before puberty, your life will be pathetic," you're consigning all of us to a dustbin of gender tragedy.

Secondly, bear in mind that violence and mockery are not "caused" by being visibly trans gender. They are caused by transphobia. The end goal of reducing the appalling rate at which trans people attempt suicide will be met when we embrace visibly trans people of all genders. Normalizing the idea that only those who live in a binary gender and appear cis gender by valorizing "passing" is counterproductive.

I am certainly not asking allies to stop acknowledging the extreme stigma aimed at visibly trans people, especially visibly trans women of other marginalized statuses, such as trans women of color. What I'm asking is that you frame that stigma and violence as problems rather than as facts of nature. Don't naturalize the idea that trans people must "pass" to be "successful." Instead, acknowledge the force of gender-policing violence in our society, but frame it as a problem we as a society must fight. Our goal should be to live in a society in which trans bodies are not seen as deviant, ugly, lesser, or in need of massive medical revisions. A visibly trans body should be embraced as no less valid than a cis person's body.

Yes, it's good to advocate for trans children's right to be treated with love, respect, and medical transitional support. But I would frame this in terms of reducing internal gender dysphoria, not in terms of some requirement that trans people get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical interventions if we are to be respected.

I appreciate the advocacy of all of our allies. And as my allies, I hope you will work to dismantle the ideology of "passing" rather than entrenching it in your advocacy for our access to transition services.

That Awkward Moment

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

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

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

Sigh.

Martine Rothblatt and Tired Journalistic Tropes

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Teaching (Trans) Gender

I am a white, middle-aged, intersex trans man. I teach sociology at a large Midwestern state university, and sociologically speaking, gender transitioning here has been fascinating. It's a story of prejudice and of privilege.

On a personal level, it's been weird.

I'm the first professor to have transitioned at my university, despite its huge size; while locals think of the university and surrounding area as very liberal, from a national perspective, they're quite socially conservative. It's a land of racial segregation, and of LGBT+ closeting. Many of the tenured white gay cis male professors I know here, for example, are not out at work, and communicate about sexual orientation in coded phrases straight out of the 1950s. (Having moved here from the San Francisco Bay area, the level of closeting is eye-popping.) As far as I can tell through my social networks, two people proceeded me in gender transitioning at my university, both trans* women staff members who soon left. In any case, my administration had little experience in dealing with gender transitions, and none with the issues raised by an instructor doing so, when I announced that I had begun the process.

My university has no official policies and procedures for dealing with gender transitioners, though it does formally include a ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression in its antidiscimination clause. Since it's a huge institution, the lack of policies made transition a bureaucratic nightmare. I could write a long and very tedious post just about that, but suffice it to say that as I enter the fifth year of my transition, I am still finding my old female name being given out by yet another independent university software system.  And I still have in my files, where I regularly now ignore it, a memo to all individuals with offices in my building stating which single male bathroom I will use on campus, so that they can avoid it if they wish.

(This very awkward memo was the only notice given by my university about my transition to others, and I was expressly forbidden to send emails myself to people outside my department to let people know. The administration's reasoning was that if they let me announce my gender transition and name change, they'd have to let every woman who got married and changed her name to send a broadcast email, clogging up 40,000 mailboxes. When I pointed out the difference between getting married and gender transitioning, that was considered “political,” and sending political email on work computers a violation of state law. Thus, years into transition, I still find myself on committees with people I've worked with before who now have no idea who I am, and I have to come out endlessly. It's just as socially awkward for stammering others as it is for me.)

The physical process of my early transition was made especially awkward because I got to go through it in front of my large introductory-level class of 350 Midwestern students. Most of them were 18 or 19 and on the tail ends of their own awkward adolescences, and few of them were aware of ever knowing a trans* person in real life. I did explain to them that I had changed my legal name and the gender on my ID, that I was beginning my medical transition, and what pronouns to use in referring to me (despite explicit instruction from administration not to discuss my transition, because it was my “personal” and “political” business that I should not “impose” on students). I had to give students some way to understand and address their instructor. But many students couldn't process the information and didn't know what to make of me. In hindsight, it's sort of amusing, but at the time. . . ugh. My very androgynous body made students anxious, and they stood much farther away from me when speaking to me after class than students had in prior years. Every time my voice cracked, a little ripple or shudder moved across the lecture hall. I often caught students inappropriately staring at my chest or my groin, and both they and I would flush when I caught them.

That semester my student evaluations, while still generally positive, were much less enthusiastically so than in the past—and most were very awkwardly worded to avoid any use of pronouns (“The professor seemed to know what the professor was talking about.”). Of the modest number of students who did use pronouns in writing their evaluations, more used female pronouns than male (and none used gender-neutral pronouns). My gender—and students' discomfort with my physical androgyny—were front and center in everyone's classroom experience, both mine and that of the students.

But after a couple of years on testosterone I had grown a solid beard, and people by and large “read” me as male, including in my classes. The majority of my students called me “he” without hesitating, and the chest-and-groin-checking was much reduced. My student evaluations rebounded into the quite-positive zone. And my personal experience rebounded further yet. I found that I now received male privilege. Before my transition, students had regularly commented on my appearance, dress or hairstyle—now none of them did so, as men are judged by their minds much more than their bodies. Students now see me as more authoritative than in the past. Most defer to me more, challenge me less, and some even find me intimidating (at my mighty 5'2”).

And it's not just male privilege that I now experience, but that most celebrated form, white male privilege. I have become The Man. And while this means that some students of color in my very racially-segregated setting, while still respectful of me, also react to me with greater distrust than students of color displayed before my transition, amidst the white majority I am treated as a person of dignity, trustworthiness, competence, and esteem. This happens in the classroom, in administrative meetings, and when I'm driving a car or visiting a store. As I've only experienced this for a few years out of my almost 50, it's glaringly obvious to me, and I'm amazed that my fellow white men who are cis gender seem so often to feel disrespected and put-upon. Small reductions in deference to white male power prey on their minds, but believe me—our privilege is still very substantial.

I have to note how much easier it is to transition to male, and to do so as a white person. My wife is an intersex gender transitioner like myself, and I see every day how much more difficult it is to be a trans* woman. Transphobia directed at trans* women is much more virulent, and is compounded by misogyny. Androgyny in trans* women is treated with much more negative social sanction than androgyny in trans* men. Trans* women of color are routinely treated by others as if they were sex workers, and subjected to extraordinary levels of discrimination, abuse, and violence. So I enjoy not only privilege as a white man, but in comparison to others in the trans* community.

I wanted to lay all of this out before raising a problem I face, relating to a modest number of students who now complain about my teaching. I want to make it clear that I recognize how privileged I now am as a white male tenured professor to be able to have such a job issue to worry about at all. Still, as a trans gender man, I have issues to worry about that my cis counterparts do not.

I teach hundreds of students every year, and every year a small number of them who are not doing well in my classes, perhaps a dozen, complain about my teaching. It's rarely my teaching style that they object to; they usually complain about one of two content areas. One of these I don't worry about: they object to my teaching about global climate change in my social problems class. Students who complain about this are usually cis white guys with right-leaning politics who argue that I am teaching “pseudoscience” concocted in a leftist conspiracy. Whatever. The empirical evidence for global climate change is great, and I am sure the political motivations of this group of students' objections would be clear to my administration if the students were to file formal complaints.

The other group of students' complaints I worry about regularly, however. These involve students who object to what I teach about intersex and trans gender issues (basically, that forcing cosmetic genital surgery on unconsenting infants is a bad social policy, and that transphobia is a form of bias akin to sexism, racism, and homophobia). Unlike those who object to my teaching about climate change, these students are usually (cis) women who take my gender class. Some are white women from rural areas of the state; some are African American women from urban locations; many of them explicitly self-identify themselves to me as Christian. They believe that sex must be binary, and that “corrective” surgery for intersex “disorders” in infancy is a medical imperative. Further, they believe that binary genitals (constructed or present at birth) must determine gender, and that a desire to gender transition is both a mental illness and immoral.

From my perspective, this group of complaining students is exactly like the first group: they hold to an ideology that is political in nature and in conflict with the literature in my field. As I point out at the start of my classes, there are many different perspectives that can be taken on any given issue—biological, psychological, religious, political, etc.--but that they are taking a sociology class, and in this class, are expected to learn and employ the sociological position in assignments and exams. I have no desire to be the thought police, and I tell them I support their right to use other perspectives in other contexts. But it is my job as a professor to teach them the subject matter they have signed up to learn. Most students have no problem with this—but there are some who are very resistant.

So, the two groups of complaining students may be analogous in being resistant to learning class content—but the students who object to the intersex and trans gender components of my classes pose much more of a problem for me.

One problem they present for me is that they often persistently misgender me. Now, I teach my Sociology of Sex and Gender course as an online summer class. This means that students don't see me in front of them—instead I have a virtual presence for them, constructed mostly via text. During the first week of class, I do have students post pictures of themselves, and I post one myself. And our first exercise requires students to state their gender identity and list the pronoun they use—and again, I do the same myself. Further, each student receives at least four personal comments from me each week, and all are signed “Prof. Costello.” So, my gender, pronoun, and the form of address I expect are theoretically made clear to them. In the early days of my transition, I was more likely to be addressed as a male in this online setting, due to my clear masculine self-framing, than I was in my in-person classes, where my physical androgyny outweighed my self-presentation in students' minds. But now, the reverse is true. Students in my in-person classes don't often misgender me. Every summer, however, I have some students who persistently refer to me as “she,” or the eye-rolling “Mrs. Costello”--something students never called me before my transition. I correct them in a matter-of-fact manner, first addressing whatever their substantive point was in their post or email, but they often continue to mispronoun me. Rather than helping to correct any peers who misgender me in online discussions, other students often seem to become less sure of the “realness” of my male status, and some become uncomfortable, seeing me as “forcing my issue down other people's throats” (an aggressively Freudian description one student gave me in an email intended to be sympathetic). This happens despite my constant efforts to be polite to people who refuse to recognize my gender identity and legal sex that trans* friends see as going well above and beyond the call of professional duty. The persistent misgendering makes me feel dysphoric, and the class atmosphere less comfortable for all.

In my class on sex and gender, I assign one exercise about intersex issues, and one with an optional trans gender focus. It's in this context where I most often encounter active student resistance to course content, though it does arise elsewhere. Now, to be clear, the way I grade all course exercises is according to the quality of the essays submitted. Students are expected to cite course readings or lecture points in analyzing a hypothetical situation. So long as they do that, and write a coherent essay, their conclusions can be whatever they like. For example, this summer a student wrote her essay on the abortion unit of the course about how she believed doctors should universally screen fetuses for intersex conditions and abort those found to have them. I personally strongly disagree, but so long as the student cited course materials sensibly and wrote a cogent analysis, she'd receive full credit. I don't let the fact that I perceive writing such an essay to a professor whose intersex birth status was clearly revealed earlier as microaggressive impact my grading. But if students fail to try to engage in any way with the course materials, and simply assert their opinions, citing no class readings (or sometimes citing instead their Christian status, which is no more a source of sociological authority than is my being Jewish), then they do quite poorly on an exercise.

The problem is that such students often perceive their poor grade as due to my “pushing an agenda.” More: they frame me as an abuser. They often present themselves as trying to protect innocent children from sexual radicals who seek to damage them. Complex and inchoate ideas often come up relating to permissive versus authoritarian parenting, or eugenic ideology (from white students), or the imposition of purportedly white preoccupations onto struggling African American families (from Black students), or about the decline of American civilization. But central to most student complaints about poor grades on intersex and trans* exercises is the framing of me as lacking any authority to teach on these matters, because I am “biased.”

The idea that only the privileged have the right to speak about the marginalized because the privileged are objective and the marginalized are not has been critiqued by many. Before my transition, cis male students in my gender class often complained that as “a woman,” I was biased while they were not, and that the statistics I cited were not credible. I didn't worry about this at the time, because if any of them ever made a formal complaint to the administration, I expected the administration to be suspicious of such a claim. (It turned out I was probably wrong. I almost didn't get tenure because an outside reviewer claimed that my research on race/class/gender in the professions was a mere voicing of personal bias against white men. He bolstered this claim by attacking my very large qualitative research project (almost 100 in-depth interviews plus 18 months of participant observation) as not meeting the significance standard for a quantitative study, which was just silly, but it gave his critique the veneer of “objectivity” that led my tenure case to be voted down. I did finally get tenure on appeal, after a long and exhausting battle, but it was a very close thing.)

Now, my university, like most, is generally staffed by people who believe that gender discrimination is a bad thing, not to be tolerated. Even so, male professors earn more than female ones, are more likely to get tenure, and are less likely to be accused of bias in their work. But what about trans* gender discrimination? While my university does have a formal policy banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression, in my experience, many of the faculty, students and staff are uncomfortable with gender transition and hold private or public cissexist views. And so I am rationally worried about what would happen if one of my students who do poorly on a trans* or intersex assignment in my class were to take their complaints beyond exchanges with me and up the administrative hierarchy. Supposedly I have job security in the form of tenure, meant to protect professors' ability to teach and engage in research with full academic freedom. But tenure is not “forever” if a professor commits an offense, such as criminal activity, dereliction of duty—or harassment. And I have no doubt that students who persistently misgender me and who refuse to engage in course materials dealing with intersex and trans* materials feel that I am “harassing” them, rather than vice versa. And remember, some frame me as advocating child abuse, which is a criminal offense. One of my recent students who watched an optional video link I posted to a mainstream TV news story about a young trans* girl wrote a post accusing me and the media of assisting the girl's parents in “abusing” her by “allowing” a “confused boy” to wear dresses. And while contemporary social science literature supports the recognition of trans gender identification in children, it's plausible that there are administrators at my university who share my complaining student's perspective: that I am pushing a disturbing agenda and harassing students who fail to parrot it back at me.

Given that I was explicitly instructed by administrators not to use my teaching podium as a soapbox for advocating my “personal agenda,” I worry that including segments on trans* and intersex issues in my courses on gender, sexuality, and on social problems might somehow be framed as a breach of duty on my part. But to avoid teaching on these topics where they are obviously relevant is something I see as the real breach of pedagogical duty. Should I as a Jew not be able to address religion in my courses, because as a religious minority I am not “objective”? Should my colleagues who are people of color not be able to teach about race in their classes? Taken to its logical extreme, are the only suitable sociology professors cis, straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class, Christian men without disabilities? (Of course, the opposite is in fact true: a person who has experienced something has a better understanding of what is involved than someone who has no such first-hand experience. You won't find me taking a SCUBA diving class from someone with only academic book-knowledge of diving. . .)

Many, many instructors have faced this issue of being members of a marginalized group and being accused of bias when teaching about that group. As a white man, I enjoy a privilege many of these instructors have not enjoyed, that of being presumed competent as a professor by virtue of my race and gender. At the same time, privilege is always context-dependent. As an intersex trans* person, I'm a member of a small minority that is currently considered quite outré , in the Midwestern city where I live.

And thus, in teaching on the topics on which I have the greatest expertise, I always feel at risk, my job security subject to challenge from people who refuse even to do class readings. And that. . . is sad.

Camp You Are You

Recently, Slate ran an article on You Are You, a summer camp for children who were assigned male at birth and who would like to have two weeks in which they are free to dress in feminine attire.  The article, illustrated with photographs by Lindsay Morris, has gotten a lot of attention in my online social circles, and I wanted to reflect on it.

(The photo on the left is not one of Morris' photos, which are copyrighted; it's a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a young boy.  No, he wasn't crossdressing--young boys wore frilly frocks in his day.  Gender norms change a lot over time. . .  But you can look at Lindsay Morris' photos by clicking here.)

I celebrate camp You Are You for giving children and their families a safe space to enjoy freedom of gender expression.  What I want to do here is to discuss the article, and the commentary on it I've encountered in my online milieu.  I'm not going to attempt to respond to the public comments on the Slate site, as reading such comment sections often makes a sane person despair of the human race.  Instead I want to address the issues raised by people with good intentions.

As such articles go, the Slate article is a good one.  I appreciate the framing of camp You Are You in the article as being about the joys of gender expression, rather than about "tragic" children's lives, which is a more common and frustrating trope.  Now, the subtitle of the article is "A Boys' Camp to Redefine Gender."  I appreciate the recognition that a person--child or adult--can identify as male but prefer a feminine gender expression. People so often assume that gender identity and gender expression need to match, which is silly--I myself know a young boy who is both very clear that he is male, and very, very glittery and feminine in his presentation. He's lucky enough to have parents who support him in his desire to wear what makes him happy, and correct others who say "what a lovely girl you have" in a matter-of-fact manner.

All of that said, I see that this is a camp that is really for kids who were male assigned at birth and who enjoy feminine gender expression, whatever their gender identity. I presume, as the article notes, that some of these kids are trans* girls. Framing a trans gender girl as a "boy" troubles me, as does calling all the kids "he".  I understand that this is an article for a Slate audience, but I don't think it would be very difficult to say, "'You Are You' is a camp that lets children who were assigned male at birth enjoy the freedom to glory in feminine dress in the company of others who enjoy the same thing. Camp organizers don't care how these children will identify in adulthood--as gay or straight, as cis or trans*, as genderconforming or gendertransgressive. The camp just gives these children a space to enjoy themselves as they are now, however they identify."

Interestingly, in discussions of the issue of the author referring to all the children at this camp as boys, I saw people coming to opposite conclusions by looking at the photographs: either seeing the kids as mostly trans* girls, or seeing them as mostly self-identifying as boys. 

My perspective is that from the article and from looking at the pictures, none of us can tell how these children identify. Some of them may look just like cis girls to us, and others we may perceive as clearly male-assigned-at-birth children wearing dresses. That has no relevance at all to gender identity. Some people who have gender transitioned look like cis people, and some of us are visibly trans* our whole lives. The only way to tell a person's gender identity is to ask them.  I find people's speculating on others' gender identities based on how well the person "passes" as a cis person hurtful, not helpful, and I hope as a trans* person that our allies will soon learn to avoid it.

Another theme that I encountered in responses to the article was a concern that the photographs of the children at You Are You revealed that someone was teaching or forcing the children to be hyperfeminine, perhaps sexualized, in their expressions of femininity.  This often came up in comments from cis feminist women.  It arises, I believe, out of a lack of frame of reference, especially since so often references were made to drag queens, and how their hyperfemininity made the commenters uncomfortable by seeming to "mock" or stereotype women.  So I want to elaborate a frame of reference for understanding the many different sorts of gender expression engaged in by different groups that can all find themselves collected under "the Trans* Umbrella."

Let's start with adults, and the drag queens often cited in this conversation.  In adult culture, drag queens and kings generally display an exaggerated femininity or masculinity that we call camp. It's not meant to be a portrayal of how everyday women or men look--it's performance, often ironic. It can explicitly address, acknowledge, and play with gender stereotypes, and pay homage to cis gender celebrities' gender performances as just that: iconic enactments of particular styles of embodying and displaying gender.

People who are unfamiliar with the genre of the drag show may presume that drag queens (or kings, but as a culture we're much less fascinated by them) are attempting to embody everyday femininity (or masculinity) and not getting it right. But a drag queen performing a Lady Gaga routine is aware of the artifice of Lady Gaga's performance of femininity, and that the women she sees at the grocery store rarely look like that. So the concern is misplaced and comes from lacking the frame of reference.

Then there are adult crossdressers, who are not performing in shows, but dressing up at home. The key phrase here is "dressing up." A cis woman who is dressing up for a date often dresses in a manner not just more carefully considered than her everyday clothes, but more self-consciously feminine (the party dress, not the jeans). If someone is crossdressing at home for sexytimes, of course they're going to want to put on a sexy outfit. Because of the way our culture associates femininity with beauty and sexual attractiveness, even a very straight, very male-identified man may at times slip on a pair of thigh-high fishnets at home and feel sexy. He may be uncritical about the way in which articles of feminine attire are considered sexier, and how this constrains women in everyday life, but he's certainly aware that most women don't wear thigh-high fishnets every day.

And then there's the phenomenon we can call "Halloween crossdressing." Halloween is one day a year in which we're encouraged to costume in the U.S., and many people take the opportunity to crossdress and go out in public. ( I've found that while cis people tend to be a lot more comfortable with Halloween crossdressing, trans* women who have transitioned are often uncomfortable with it, because they encounter a lot of bro-ish men who base their costumes on their vision, not of cis women, but of some conflated image of drag queens and trans* women.)

And so we come to trans* folks. People who have transitioned are just living our lives in our identified genders (female, male, or some other gender). That is not to say that there's nothing performative about that, as we must often calculate how best to present ourselves in a manner most likely to ensure that others recognize and reflect our gender identities back at us.  Depending on our bodily configurations, this may mean that we need to display some very carefully selected, quite gendered items to maximize our chances of being recognized in our identified genders without somehow coming across as "overdoing it," which can make dressing for the day more work for us than it is for many cis people.  But cis people perform gender as well. Anyone needing proof of that should just spend a day at a middle school (egad: the selfconsciousness, the awkwardness, the hypermasculine grunting, the oddly-applied makeup). It's just that after reaching full maturity, many cis folks stop being aware of the performative nature of gender, as it's become as second-nature as riding a bike. And people who gender transition experience a similar trajectory: at first, there's a period of awkward exploration of one's personal style, but it eventually becomes second nature.

OK, then, what about the kids at camp You Are You? Well, first of all, I'd point out that in the contemporary U.S., kids' clothing is more highly gendered than that of adults. I know that my cis gender daughter and her friends struck me as a pool of miniature drag queens when they were around five and moving through the Princess Phase, dressing up as their favorite icons of exaggerated Disney femininity and prancing about in glittery pinkness. Meanwhile their male-assigned peers ran around with masculine emblems emblazoned on everything (Batman, sports heroes, dinosaurs driving trucks emitting lightening bolts). It seems to me that our society teaches children to learn to do binary gender by sending them all to Camp Camp.

Now, the hypergendered nature of kids' attire drops off as they get older, though it re-emerges in a pseudoadult form at puberty. Many of the children at camp You Are You look to be in the "big kid" range, when boys and girls alike tend to run around at summer camps in t-shirts and shorts. But "dress-up" clothing for big kids remains highly gendered.

So my take on the kids at You Are You is that they are going to a special camp that allows children assigned male at birth to wear feminine attire. They could go to some other generic summer camp and wear shorts and t-shirts very easily--but here, they are allowed the freedom to glory in feminine expression. So of course they want to dress up! Perhaps some of them are trans* girls living full time as such with the full support of their communities, but I presume that this is not the case for many of the children. So maybe in their everyday lives, they can wear t-shirts designated "for girls" without harassment, but showing up at school in a dress is a very different story. This is their chance to do that. And remember: kids' dress-up clothing is often hypergendered. It's not that these children think, "real females must wear lots of flounces and makeup and heels instead of jeans, and mustn't play sports or build things because they'd break a nail." They're just dressing up in the same way cis girls putting on a fashion show for their friends would, in the attire our society sells for girls of their age.  And note that the photographs of the fashion show are the ones used to illustrate the Slate article.  A good part of the reason that readers get an impression that these children are wearing very feminine attire that would make hiking around at camp difficult is that we see photographs of them at their fashion show, but not of them going for a hike in more practical girls' clothing.

As for the accusation that the children are acting in a sexualized manner, I think that's an adult projection. We associate crossdressing with sexuality in adult lives, and project that onto children who are just embodying femininity. (Trans* women often suffer from a similar conflation of ideas, and are rudely presumed to be hypersexual.) Yes, it is problematic that our society sexualizes femininity, but these children are not to blame for that fact. I find it creepily reminiscent of rape culture when people (often feminists!) accuse trans* girls and women, and feminine boys and men, of being sexually provocative. Any person of any gender and any age should be able to go out in a dress without being assaulted, and without being accused of "asking for it."

So: for those who feel uncomfortable with the photographs of the children at camp You Are You, please bear these things in mind. The kids are dressing up, and are aware of that fact, and how girls and women dress to go to the supermarket. The photographs we see are those that are most "dressy," because of our society's anxiety about, and fascination with, crossing gender lines. And we should not demand that those who are marginalized be the people who solve the social problems associated with gender, such as the association of feminine dress with sexual provocation, when those with gender privilege can wear the same clothes to go out to a party or on a date without the same demands being made of them personally.