I'm around 50 years old, and a lot has
changed in the queer community since my youth. And yet, the more
things change, the more they stay the same, and I want to discuss
some of these ironic consistencies with you. They relate to gender
policing.
Here's something that has changed: when
I was in college, there was no recognized trans* student
community—there was just the “lesbian and gay” community, and
it was small. When I showed up at college, there was a welcome party
for the new “lesbian and gay” students, and out of a class of
1200 freshpeople, four of us showed up. Today, when I attend the
welcome reception for new LGBT+ students on the campus where I am the
director of an LGBT+ studies program, it's more like a hundred happy
new faces. Out of the four of us who showed up when I was a
freshperson, two of us were actually trans* identified, but that was
something we had no way to articulate. This was the era of lesbian
separatism. “Transsexuals” were framed on campus as men who
pretended to become women in order to try to seize control of
“womyn's spaces,” Ã
la Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire.
Bisexuals were supposedly gay men and lesbians who were afraid to
really come out of the closet and were traitors to the community.
The only accepted identities were lesbian or gay. Today, things are
quite different. Students at the welcome reception self-identify
proudly under a panoply of terms: queer, asexual, demisexual,
polysexual, heteroflexible, bi, bear, furry, trans*, genderqueer,
neutrois, etc. etc.—and oh yes, lesbian and gay.
As
you might imagine, I had a hard time fitting in to the “lesbian and
gay” community of my college years. At my university, there were
two organizations at the time, one “lesbian and gay” collective
that was really understood as the gay men's group, and one lesbian
separatist organization. Having never identified as a lesbian, I
started going to meetings of the mostly-gay-men's collective. I was
there because, inside, I identified with the men, but the idea of a
trans* man was not yet on anyone's radar, and even I only thought of
myself as sort of spiritually akin to the boys. My deepest
secret—that I was born with a sex-variant body—I told no one.
Like most intersex people of the time, I understood my differences to
be a shameful secret, and my sex assignment a permanent status I
would always live with. So while I was attending the guy's meetings,
and feeling I was in the right place, nobody, including myself,
thought of me as being there because I was “really” a man. The
best I could do at the time was to fill the role of one of the few
token women participating, and keep my private incohate identity to myself.
A
bunch of my gay male friends referred to me by a term they thought
was cute: I was their “fag hag.” I hated that term with a
passion—the way it excluded me, treated me as a groupie, and framed
me as someone who must only hang around gay men because “she” was
a hag who couldn't get a real boyfriend. The thing is, that was also
how I was understood by the women in the lesbian separatist group.
They saw me as a lesbian who had been blinded by the patriarchy into
thinking she'd get more status by hanging out with men, who were
contaminating me.
And
so the lesbian separatist group staged an intervention. They called
me to a meeting, and when I arrived, they sat in a circle around me
and told me that it was their duty to break through my false
consciousness, and that I must stop betraying the lesbian community
and change my errant ways. I was injuring the lesbian community by
the ways I was dressing, identifying, and behaving, and they were
going to stay by my side and monitor me intensively and break through
my false beliefs and bring me home.
And
then they lay down the rules. First, they didn't think I really
understood that I was a “womyn,” born innately different from and
better than the men. (They were right.) Men, who always tried to
steal women's power, were using me as their little wifey in their
organization, and I was putting myself at risk of rape by spending so
much time with them. I had to agree to at least go to as many
meetings of the lesbian separatist group as the “men's collective.”
They would work with me to get me to understand my essential womanly
nature, as they were shocked when I said I didn't really think of
myself as different from the men. I needed to identify with the
goddess within me and see myself as the womb of creation.
The
second rule they lay down was that I had to stop calling myself
(using the term available at the time) “bisexual.” I was
betraying them when I refused the label “lesbian,” and they all
apparently felt deeply wounded. As for actual sexual behavior,
sleeping with men would be sleeping with the enemy. Yes, men could
be attractive—a number of them had had male partners in the
past—but to be true to the lesbian community, they wouldn't do that
any more, and I shouldn't either.
Interestingly,
it was the third rule that the group was most incensed about, and
that pertained to how I dressed. Most days I wore jeans and tank
tops, but other days I wore what today I'd call femme drag—I had
some 1950s dresses, and would wear them with elbow-length gloves and
cat-eye makeup. My gay male friends always liked that, and would ask
to borrow my dresses when they wanted to dress up for a drag party.
The lesbian separatist group was horrified. They told me that I was
a victim of patriarchal false consciousness who believed the myth
that lesbians, in mockery of heterosexual power relations, engaged in
butch-femme relations, and that sometimes I was acting like a butch,
and sometimes a femme, and that this was terrible. I had to
understand that the personal was political, and this meant I had to
dress like the women in the group. And Politically Correct Dress
(the actual term they used) was androgynous. They gave me a long,
long lecture on correct androgynous fashion, showing me their own
soft pants and political t-shirts and labrys jewelry. They told me I
should never again wear a skirt. (Sheer bloodyminded rebelliousness
in the face of this explains why I, someone who didn't identify as a
woman, wound up wearing skirts much of the time for the rest of his
college career.)
So,
the rules boiled down to this: there was a correct identity
(lesbian), a correct way to behave (avoid men), and a correct was to
dress (androgynously). I was a problem in need of much intervention.
So while I devoted a great deal of my time during my college years
toward community activism, I never really felt comfortable or at home
in the community I spent so much time trying to serve.
Fast
forward 30 years, and clearly a whole lot has changed since my gender
and sexuality were policed at college. I have since gender
transitioned, and as an openly intersex trans man am “allowed” to
coordinate the LGBT+ studies program at the university where I now
teach. Recognized identities have proliferated, and the queer
community is much larger and more visible. But the rituals of daily
queer life remain much the same. There are meetings and conferences,
“awareness days” and dances, poetry readings and protests, and
informal but regular hanging-out in coffeeshops, clubs and bars.
And
separatism and exclusion? They're still happening at these venues,
if not in the formal way of my own queer youth.
If
you had told me about the queer community as it exists now around my
current college campus, it would have sounded like paradise to me.
It's full of people who, like me, were assigned female at birth but
don't identify as such, and who like to play with gender
presentation. They identify as genderqueer, as bois, as neutrois, as
trans gender, as genderflexible—in any way they please. They are
full of a sense of radical mission in subverting the gender binary.
But
you know what? I'm still often getting the cold shoulder as someone
who seems to have betrayed the cause. Even worse is is the treatment
my spouse, an intersex trans woman, gets: they freeze up when she
approaches, glare at her, nudge eachother, and turn away, making it
quite clear they consider her unwelcome at their events.
I've
written before about this business of genderqueer people who were
assigned female at birth excluding trans* women from their party (see
here). I find it both cruel and ironic that what gets raised,
informally this time instead of as written doctrine, is Transsexual
Empire logic for excluding trans* women, complete with misgendering:
“I'm am a sexual assault survivor and I don't feel safe around
men,” or “Well, I'll say 'she' to be polite, but I think 'she's'
carrying a lot of male privilege into the space.” What I want to
talk about today is a new twist I've been running into of late in the
midwestern LGBT+ academic spaces I occupy: the pejorative label of
“transnormativity.”
Transnormativity
is a neologism born of the term “homonormativity,” which has been
bandied about in queer academic circles for some time. Usually, the
term “homonormative” as been used by queer scholars to diss gay
men and lesbians who have the aspiration or privilege of being able
to live almost heteronormative lives: getting married, buying a house
in the suburbs, raising a kid, assimilating. It's been used to
express the usual self-righteous disdain of the more radical for the
more normative. A few months ago, however, I was at a conference
where the term was being used differently. A young, white,
middle-class, cis, femme bi grad student presented on her masters
thesis about homonormativity. She employed the term as her nodding
peers apparently do as well: to critique the “homonormative
narrative” that a real queer person experiences homophobic
oppression. Apparently, when she met her girlfriend and came out to
friends and family as bi, nobody had a problem with it. The way that
this grad student felt oppressed was in attending meetings of the
queer students' group at her college, because people talked about
experiences of family rejection, being bullied at school, and other
traumas that attended their coming out. She felt that because she
had no such story, she was viewed as “failing to uphold the
homonormative narrative of coming out,” and that other LGBT+
students' stories were unfairly more valorized than hers.
It
certainly seemed to me that this grad student and her circle of
friends were recasting their relative privilege as a form of
oppression. If you show up to a support group, and your experiences
are much less traumatic than that of others in the group, are you
really oppressed by the other group members when they focus their
support on those who are dealing with more trauma? If members of the
grad student's queer college group had said, “Oh, your story shows
how bisexually-identified people never experience true oppression and
people like you aren't welcome here,” I'd agree with terming that
homonormative. But saying, “I am oppressed by the homonormative
narrative that queer people are oppressed” just strikes me as
bizarre.
The
conference where this paper was presented was a Wisconsin state
conference, and as is my general experience around here, there were
not a lot of people attending who were out as trans* people who had
medically transitioned. I met one other guy and one woman who were
out as having transitioned. There was also a woman from the local
community attending who sat by herself, ignored by the people around
her at all the panels we both attended, often with empty seats on
either side of her. Her trans* status was visible in her wig and the
hair on her hands. I saw her at lunch sitting at an otherwise
totally empty table, and joined her and invited some others to sit
with us. She told us her sad midwestern story: she wanted very much
to transition legally and medically, but her priest and wife had
forbidden it, so she “crossdressed” to attend a few conferences
every year in secret. It's always disheartening to me to see people
like her who are experiencing such difficulties in their lives come
to a community event hoping for some recognition and support, only to
face more social ostracism at the place they hoped to meet with
understanding.
Among
the people who stayed far away from the “crossdressing”
trans-identified woman at the conference were a bunch of young,
mostly white, female-assigned-at-birth (FAAB) students who identified
as as some flavor of genderqueer: as bois or androgynes,
genderflexible or genderfucks, as neutrois, as trans gender. On the
second day of the conference I asked to sit at a table of them for
lunch, but was told the two empty seats were being saved. So I sat
at the next table—but interstitially I heard bits of the
conversation at the table of genderqueer students, and that
conversation was about “transnormativity.”
I've
heard transnormativity come up a lot in such spaces of late. I'm
absolutely in agreement that there is a transnormative narrative, and
that it's problematic. That narrative is that a “real” trans
person is someone with a binary gender identity, who has known since
childhood that they were “born in the wrong body,” having a
medical disorder which if not treated with hormones and surgery leads
to suicide, which is cured upon completion of genital surgery and the
achievement of “passing” status. That narrative sets up a
standard for “true transsexuality” that most trans* people never
meet. I certainly don't, as I've had neither chest nor genital
surgery. Chest surgery I'd like, but finances haven't permitted it
(one salary for a family of three containing two gender transitioners
and two people with disabilities makes for a very lean budget).
Genital surgery holds no interest for me, as an intersex person who
knows all about the risk of loss of sensation and is all in favor of
genital diversity. So, even though I am recognized as a man at law
and socially, according to the transnormative narrative, I haven't
“really” or “fully” transitioned. That's silly and
irritating.
But
just as the grad student who presented on homonormativity used the
term differently than I'd heard it used before, the genderqueer
students at the table next to mine (and in other venues I keep
entering) used the term “transnormative” differently. Basically,
they used “transnormative” as a pejorative for any trans* person
whom they read as “reinforcing the gender binary.” In
translation, what that meant was trans* men they saw as “passing,”
and almost all trans* women. They viewed such trans* people as those
given social recognition, unlike the real gender warriors, the
genderqueer people who were breaking down the gender binary. They
presented the supposedly transnormative group as complicit with
cisnormative people in oppressing them.
Let's
unpack that a little. It is certainly true that there are some
transsexual people who dismiss genderqueer people as confused or as
dabblers. It reminds me a lot of how lesbian separatists in my own
youth derided bisexuals. It's cruel when people who are marginalized
draw up identity battle lines and tell people “you're with us or
against us—no sitting on the fence.”
But
I am
not doing that; in fact, I, like many people who make use of medical
transition services, reject the ideology of the gender binary. I'm
intersex, after all. I know the huge amount of violence that lies
behind the enforcement of the ideology of a sex binary—and my
spouse, with her loss of capacity for sexual sensation that doctors
sacrificed in imposing a male sex assignment on her in infancy, knows
better than I. I personally identify with a male place in the gender
spectrum, but fluidly so. I'm a genderflexible guy. But apparently
they can't see my genderquerity.
I
will tell you what I see from my perspective. It's not that
privileged transsexuals and privileged cis people are united to gang
up on genderqueer folks. It's much more like a reconfiguration of my
own college experience.
You'll
remember that back when I started college there were four of us first
year students who attended the “lesbian and gay” welcoming event,
and that two of us were really trans* identified, but given no way to
express that. The political focus back then for FAAB people was on
enforcing a presumed essential sex binary, and fencing in the
womyn-only space. I was forced into that space. The other
prototrans person was assigned male at birth, and “he” was kept
out—her request to be able to attend a meeting mocked and seen as
proof that “men” really did want to take over lesbian spaces.
Today,
the exciting queer political action for FAAB people is not in
enforcing the gender binary, but in rejecting it. But oddly, despite
this reversal, the end result is eerily similar. Welcomed to the
party are people perceived as androgynous but FAAB, while others get
the cold shoulder. Supposedly those informally enforcing this rule
do so to fight the oppressive ideology of the gender binary, but I
see a sex binary being reinscribed. I see these genderqueer FAAB
circles as working to keep the “men” out.
Let's
consider another conference that I was recently involved in
organizing as an illustration. Sitting in the back of the large
conference room for most of one day was a large contingent of young,
white, genderqueer-identified FAAB folks. They sported a fair
number of piercings, asymmetrically-bobbed hairstyles, and other
fashion signifiers that someone familiar with midwestern college
queer culture could identify as signs of genderflexible affilation.
But generally these individuals could walk around most places passing
as cis women without a second glance, facing no transphobic
harassment. Now, as someone who passed as a woman for decades
without wanting to, I know that that can be painful. If you want
people to recognize you as genderqueer and call you by a
gender-neutral pronoun and they never do, that hurts and makes you
feel invisible. Not wanting the group to feel marginalized, I walked
over to them before the first panel and invited them to sit closer to
the front. All I got were a lot of blank silent stares, however. I
felt like I was being perceived as The Man impinging on their space,
so I took my suit and beard away and left them in peace. As a trans*
guy who is fairly often taken for a cis man, I recognize my
privilege, and I try not to deploy it at people when I can avoid it,
but nobody likes a cold reception.
Later,
my wife arrived. An intersex trans* woman, she's very androgynous.
Seeing her feminine face and breasts on her very tall, solid frame,
her long, waving hair and her tough boots breaks binary sex and
gender for people all the time, and she's a magnet for transphobia.
She faces constant street harassment here in the midwest—laughter
and stares, people yanking their children away from her, spitting at
her, throwing bottles out of cars at her head. She's living proof of
the powerful enforcement of the gender binary, and you would think
that to any genderqueer person, she'd be a hero. But when she
arrived at the conference and was looking for a seat, she faced a
wave of hostile stares and mutters from the FAAB genderqueer
contingent in the back. This happens to her all the time at queer
events around here—even ones that say “all genders welcome.”
She's had FAAB gender-flexible-identified people call her “he”
many, many times, and treat her with disdain and/or fear.
The
apparent “logic” behind this mistreatment is the belief that FAAB
people transgress gender binaries while male-assigned-at-birth (MAAB)
people reinforce them when they act in similar ways. A FAAB person
in a tux is doing important gender-dismantling work. A MAAB person
in a dress? Amusing if it's drag, insulting or creepy if it's not.
This transmisogyny appears to be based on imputed motives. The
“logic” goes like this: a FAAB person is oppressed by male
privilege and so understands gender and wants to dismantle it, while
benefitting from male privilege blinds the MAAB person to how gender
operates, making trans* women actually nontransgressive female
imposters. This is pure Transsexual Empire transphobic reasoning. .
. Yet FAAB genderqueer circles can deny this by allowing in the
occasional trans woman who looks physically like a cis woman and who
“gets it” (meaning she shares the style of dress and cultural
interests of the FAAB genderqueer circle), as well as by celebrating
all of the trans bois in their midst who are visibly FAAB.
The
formal radical womyn's-only spaces of my queer youth seem to have
been replaced by informal radical FAAB-looking-only spaces around
midwestern college campuses. The two milieux even have a very
similar androgynous dress code.
So:
who's oppressing whom? According to the “transnormative” talk
I've been hearing recently, transsexuals join cissexuals in
oppressing the noble and radical genderqueers. In practice, I see many FAAB genderqueer people joining cis people in treating most trans*
woman like pariahs.
It
makes me sad that my genderqueer identity is as invisible to a
lot of FAAB genderqueer people as their own genderqueer identities
are to most cis people. But I can live with it. Not having your
identity validated is painful, but material oppression is a lot
worse. The levels of violence, bullying, sexual assault,
unemployment, and general social ostracism that people face when they
are read as gendertransgressive males or trans* women are appalling.
They are foundational to sexism and patriarchy, and we must fight
them.
So,
I say to my genderqueer siblings: we must dig out the roots of
Transsexual Empire reasoning born of gender essentialism if we are
ever going to see the gender spectrum flourishing and free. You
cannot queer gender unless you embrace all trans* people—not just
the ones who pass as FAAB. People with bodies of any age and race
and size, with any set of sex characteristics, must be equally
welcome to the gendertransgressing party. For decades I've watched
queer communities excluding some of their own—the most marginalized
cast as a danger and dumped on, and it's time to put an end to that.
You
cannot queer gender and police sex at the same time.
