Sarah McBride, Desegregating Hero

 

At a House of Representatives hearing yesterday on US relations with Europe, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Keith Self turned to give Delaware Representative Sarah McBride her chance to speak. (McBride is Congress' first transgender member.) Self called upon her as “the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”

Without a beat, McBride replied, "Thank you, Madam Chair." She prepared to give her speech, but first Rep. Bill Keating, the ranking Democrat from Massachusetts, asked Self to correct himself, and when Self again introduced Sarah McBride as "Mr. McBride," Keating asked Self, "Have you no decency?" Self said business would now continue, Keating said not with him until Self properly addressed McBride, and Self said "This meeting is adjourned!" and huffed out.

 Yes, Keating white-knighted Sarah McBride, but she carried herself with great aplomb. She was prepared to do Congressional business despite her being harassed and disrespected by her own peers. She has maintained this coolness in the face of other misgenderings, other attacks, and a federal law being passed by Congressional Republicans to ban trans people from using Congressional bathrooms that match their lived genders--something passed solely to discriminate against her.

On social media, we saw the following comments afterwards:

Self posted, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” citing Trump’s executive order of January 20th.

McBride posted, "No matter how I'm treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress. It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.

Mary Miller, Republican Representative from Illinois, who has also been misgendering McBride, threw in a gratuitous deadname: posting that Self "is right to state the biological reality that [deadname] ‘Sarah’ McBride is a man. Enough with the lies. As God ordained and President Trump declared, there are only TWO GENDERS: Male and Female!"

 And the vile Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and champion bigot, tossed in, "You know what’s indecent? A mentally ill man pretending to be a woman. Biology. Science. The Left should try it some time." 

As a reminder, the racists who fought against desegregation claimed that their Christian beliefs compelled them to do so. So did the bigots who opposed interracial marriage and later same-gender marriage. They always say God is on their side as they kick people in the face. And back when they were segregating bathrooms along racial lines, they claimed science proved this was imperative, citing eugenics.

Anyway, what really impresses me about McBride is her ability to keep her composure in the face of the provocations and bullying and disrespect. She knows--we all know--her attackers are hoping she gets angry and yells at them so they can paint her as dangerous and themselves as reasonable. And she certainly has justification to do so. (In fact, some trans people criticize her for not coming out swinging and getting in the faces of those harassing her, and for using the private bathrooms of Democratic colleagues rather than defiantly marching into the women's bathroom by the House Chamber.) But McBride is doing something much harder than punching back. She is winning the respect of average Americans watching these incidents on social media and the news. Her attackers look nasty and rude, and she looks reasonable, dignified, and unruffled.

We need all kinds of tactics to win battles for the rights of targets of discrimination. Some of those are confrontational, some of them are community building, some of them are legal challenges, and some of them are educational. But one of the hardest is to be among the first people desegregating an institution, be that baseball or a high school or the House of Representatives. Because all eyes are on you, and you have to keep your cool despite people screeching at you and harassing you and spitting on you, and show that you can play the game, or pass the tests, or do the job of legislating under that kind of pressure.

McBride's not rolling over! She calmly misgendered Self right back. But she was prepared to go right on doing her job representing the people who elected her. It was Self, the zero, who huffed out and left the business of Congress (which Republican Congresspeople seem oddly content to just abandon right now) undone.

Sarah McBride is an American hero.

The Extent of the Assault on Trans Rights in Florida

This is a status report for you on just how bad things are now for trans people in Florida. It is so much worse than most Americans are aware.

The school year is about to start up. Schools must implement HB 1069, which requires public K-12 schools to adopt the policy that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” They must also enforce HB 1521, which requires people in public buildings, including schools, to only use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for the binary sex they were assigned at birth, and a ban on trans girls and women playing sports in their lived genders.

For K-12 teachers, using a pronoun or title (like Mr. or Ms.) that doesn't match the binary sex assigned at birth is an offense punishable by suspension of their teacher's license. Using a bathroom that does not align with their sex assigned at birth is banned. What the punishment will be is determined by the school district. But the Florida State Board of Education has instituted a policy that state university professors who use a bathroom not matching their birth-assigned sex twice must be fired.

K-12 teachers are not allowed to mention LGBTQ+ issues. If a student talks to them about being trans, they have to report it to the student's parents. Students cannot use any name other than their full legal name on their birth certificate without signed parental permission. And parents are only allowed to give permission for students to use nicknames that are gendered to match the child's sex assigned at birth. Students cannot join a school gay-straight alliance without signed parental permission.

Passed but currently under litigation is a bill that goes beyond "merely" banning providing gender-affirming care to people under 18. It makes the provision of such care a felony and requires the revocation of the medical license of any doctor who provides it. As a result, many Florida clinics have ceased providing any trans care, including to adults. This bill declares a parent's bringing a child to a doctor for trans-affirming care to be child abuse, with the threat of taking children from their supportive parents. And it allows divorced parents in other states who do not have child custody, but who claim that the parent with custody is allowing or intends to allow the child to access gender-affirming care (i.e. that parent accepts the child's trans identity) to kidnap the child, take them to Florida, and have the Florida court issue a new child custody order taking precedence over the prior order in another state.

It is truly horrendous. This is segregating trans people out of public life, legally detransitioning educators, equating acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist with pedophilia, censoring knowledge, tormenting children, denying people healthcare, and fostering kidnapping. And a batch of states are right behind Florida in this evil.

People need to know how bad things are, because people they love are going to be burned by it.

 

When #MeToo Celebrities Fail Trans Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

TERFs of the Times

This week's Sunday Review section of the New York Times has as its headline article an opinion piece by feminist academic and film director Dr. Elinor Burkett, entitled "What Makes a Woman?" The tagline summarizing the post is "There is a collision course between feminists and transgender activists." This of course frames trans activists as antifeminists, making it clear at once that this piece is a manifesto of trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF, ideology. It's written with a sympathetic tone, and Burkett positions herself as someone who wants to support trans people. She claims she just can't because we are seeking to undo the hard work she and other feminists of her generation have done. 

(One way you can tell that Burkett is a TERF is that she calls the term TERF a "trans insult." In fact, the term was coined by radical feminists who are not transphobic, to distinguish themselves from bigots. But TERFs inevitably claim that the term is a trans slur and that they should be referred to simply as "feminists.")

Burkett's piece is the second-most emailed NY Times article at the moment I'm writing this, and the comments section shows it's struck a huge chord with transphobes. Since so many people are talking about the piece, and since it's such a painful read for trans friends of mine, as it was for me, I'm going to present a take-down of her arguments here, as a sort of public service. If you know people who are talking about or citing this article, you can just link them here rather than having to wade through and counter the key points yourself.

Expressing Femininity

First off, let me show you the official headshot of Dr. Burkett that appears on film festival programs. As you can see, she is wearing lipstick, has dyed her hair red, and is wearing a floral top. She clearly presents herself in a feminine manner to the media. But her "What Makes a Woman?" piece starts and finishes by critiquing Caitlyn Jenner for being presented in a glamorous feminine fashion in Vanity Fair. 

Burkett decries Caitlyn Jenner's wearing of "a cleavage-boosting corset" and "thick mascara," although such things are typical for those pictured in Vanity Fair. Burkett particularly focuses on Jenner's statement that a reason she wanted to gender transition was that so that she would be able "to wear nail polish, not for a furtive, fugitive instant, but until it chips off." Burkett concludes the piece by scolding, "I want that for Bruce, now Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a woman make."

Let's look at several of the key problems with this framing. First, there's the ridiculous assertion that Caitlyn Jenner believes in some way that wearing nail polish makes a person female, or is something only a woman can do. Were that the case, gender transitions to female would be extremely inexpensive, and thousands of unsuspecting dudes in bands would now find themselves women. . . Very few people over the age of four believe that putting on nailpolish literally defines a person as female, and portraying Caitlyn Jenner as actually believing this insults her by presenting her as having an infantile understanding of gender.

Looking beyond that obvious point, the tactic Burkett takes in this opinion piece is to critique Caitlyn Jenner as a means of critiquing all trans people. This presumes that all trans people are alike, so that what Caitlyn Jenner does and thinks represents what all trans people do and think. By this logic, all cis women think and act like Kim Kardashian--something we can presume Burkett does not believe. But Burkett ignores the fact that many trans people have spoken about how Jenner's experience is not at all like theirs. She does not acknowledge, for example, that trans people have expressed concern that the way Caitlyn Jenner is presented in Vanity Fair perpetuates the idea that to be "successful" in a gender transition, a trans person must want and get a ton of plastic surgery to make them look just like a cis person, and must appear conventionally feminine or masculine.

Not only is Caitlyn Jenner not representative of all trans people, her experience is representative of vanishingly few. Rare is the person who has the kind of money to be able to access such medical and aesthetic transition services. Jenner also enjoys privilege as a white woman. She's a Republican. She has a binary gender identity where many trans individuals do not. And she is conventionally feminine in her post-transition gender presentation. Many binary trans women and men are tomboys or feminine men. But by presenting some interview quotes and fashion photos of Caitlyn Jenner as representing us all, Burkett frames all binary gender transitioners as walking gender stereotypes.

Another thing you may have noticed that Burkett does in her concluding scold is to refer to Jenner as "Bruce, now Caitlyn." While better than refusing to acknowledge Jenner's transition at all, throughout the piece, Burkett makes sure to refer to Caitlyn as Bruce, Mr. Jenner and "he" as often as possible. The phrasing, "Bruce, now Caitlyn" also puts Jenner's deadname first, centering it while giving lip service to acknowledging her as Caitlyn. To use a trans person's former name and to use the wrong pronoun when speaking of a trans person's past are classic tactics used to belie our gender identities and presentations. It's cruel, it's rude, and it's against the NY Times' own style guide, but Burkett is allowed to get away with it.

Brain Sex

Moving on, the next thing Burkett does is to present trans people as having as a core ideology the belief that we are born with binary male or female sexed brains. Burkett frames us as having the goal of convincing society that brain sex requires people to act in a gender stereotyped manner--for example, that being born with a female brain makes a person bad at science and math, good at nurturing, and into frilly dresses. 

Now, it is true that Caitlyn Jenner makes sense of her identity as a woman by saying, as Burkett quotes, "My brain is much more female than it is male." There are many binary trans people who use this sort of language to try to explain what it feels like to have a gender identity that doesn't match one's assigned sex. But please note that the reason trans people do this so often is because cis people constantly demand that we explain how we know we are trans, and where our trans identities come from. 

Thirty years ago, when I was in college, straight people were always asking gay men and lesbians how they were sure they were "homosexual," and what made them gay. Back then, lots of LGB people were very interested in brain studies that claimed to show that gay men had brain characteristics similar to those of women, while lesbians had brain areas that were similar to those of men. Today, that just sounds silly, and scientific exploration of the idea that lesbians think like men and that gay men have girl brains has largely petered out, because people no longer demand to know what biological factor could possibly explain sexual orientation. With the depathologization of same-sex attraction, the search for some biological basis to explain it has faded away.

But when it comes to gender identity, many cis people still refuse to accept a person's self-report of how they feel. They demand that we "prove" our gender identities, and explain our "compulsion" to gender transition. There are scientists studying this question by examining brains, and so some trans people turn to this idea when asked to justify themselves.

What Burkett does not acknowledge is that there are many trans people, myself included, who are quite critical of the idea that there is some simple brain center that determines gender identity. There are many, like myself, who discuss how so much of the neurological research into "brain sex" has been deeply flawed, and used to bolster misogyny. What we argue is that gender identity is a deeply complex matter, that gender varies over time and between cultures, and that while you will find minor sex differences in specific parts of people's brains, the brain is a plastic organ that is shaped by our lived experiences. 

What the differences found in the brains of deceased men and women show is that we die with slightly different brains, not that we are born with our gender identities stamped in some simple way on our hypothalamus or some other brain center. The fact that trans women's brains resemble those of cis women's reveals shared identity and experiences, but the factors being studied as differing between women and men are tiny. "Brain sex" is a complex and subtle thing--not some matter of pink brain centers that are obsessed with makeup and blue ones that refuse to ask for directions. In any case, neurologists' understandings of sexed brains are still very limited and contested, and ordinary people can't be expected to parse their scientific articles.

What we urge is that cis society stop requiring that we somehow prove that our gender identities have some biological basis, and just respect our self-report of what our gender identities are.

So later in the piece, when Burkett goes on to report on the work of feminist neurologists who say that sex differences in the brain develop over a lifetime of experiences, she is actually arguing the exact same thing that many trans activists argue. But Burkett is oblivious to this fact, because she has stereotyped all trans people. She presents us as all as believing men and women are both with vastly different brains, that we were born with female brains in male bodies (or vice versa), and that this requires us to act as hyperfeminine trans women (or hypermasculine trans men).

I suppose Burkett must believe that nonbinary trans people believe they were born with androgynous brains. But she doesn't say anything about this--probably because she sees androgyny as a morally good counter to gender stereotypes, so has no motivation to bring up the topic here.

Hormones and Emotions

OK, next. Burkett takes a moment to sneer at Chelsea Manning, saying she "hopped on Ms. Jenner's gender train on Twitter, gushing, 'I am so much more aware of my emotions, much more sensitive emotionally (and physically)'." I do find it ironic when a feminist seeks to discredit another woman by accusing her of "gushing" overemotionally. . .

Chelsea Manning recently started hormone therapy, after much struggle with the military. Apparently Elinor Burkett believes that hormones produce no effects, or only affect physical things like breast or beard growth, so that to say hormones influence one's experience of emotions is an antifeminist delusion. This is just silly, because you don't have to be trans gender to see that sex steroids influence emotions. Tons of cis women are familiar with the emotional lability of PMS. Sure, this fact has been used by misogynists to frame women as too moody to take seriously, and this is ludicrous. But you can put your fingers in your ears and go "La-la-la" all you want to when people report that they cry less easily after having their ovaries removed, or cry more easily now that they are taking estrogen and progesterone to gender transition--it doesn't make the fact that this happens go away.

It seems from this section of her screed that Burkett believes any discussion of embodiment in relation to gender is evil sexism. Saying "I cry more easily with high levels of estrogen and progesterone in my body" is equivalent to saying, "A woman can never be president because her hormones make her too irrational." Burkett frames Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning as representatives of all trans people, and as what they are saying as evil. They are voicing "hoary stereotypes" that have been "used to repress women for centuries." And worse, they are convincing progressives that this is a good thing, undoing all the hard work of feminism.

Trans Women as Sexist Men

Next, Burkett comes out with a truly vile and nasty paragraph, which I will replicate here so we can unpack it:

"People who haven't lived their whole lives as women. . . shouldn't get to define us. That's something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman."

Notice what Burkett is doing here. Trans women are called first "people who haven't lived their whole lives as women," and then flat out "men." Trans women are "men" who are trampling on the rights of "women," and "women" of course here means cis women. "Transgender people" are in this paragraph all trans women. And by asserting their dignity as trans people, trans women are proving themselves to be really men in that they are seeking to control (cis) women.

Now what, exactly, are trans women trying to force cis women to do? Burkett states that trans activists are not just asking for equal treatment as are "African-Americans, Chicanos, gays and women"--instead they are "insulting" (cis) women by "demanding that women reconceptionalize ourselves." Apparently Burkett believes that trans women not only assert, but demand all women agree, that gendered behavior is not socially constructed at all but is inborn and fixed. Gender roles are eternal and innate, and thus biology compels that all girls love playing dress-up, and all boys love sports!

This is ridiculous on so many levels it's hard to list them all. First off, since we have to think about gender a lot in order to figure out our own identities, most trans people I have encountered know a whole lot more about what social construction means and how it operates than do most cis people I encounter. The chances of a random trans person--be they a man, woman, nonbinary or agender--being a feminist is also much higher than that of a random cis person being wiling to call themself a feminist.

I know hundreds of trans people. Of the binary trans women I know, some--a minority--have the narrative of having been very feminine children who constantly wanted to play dress-up and house. But exactly zero of those individuals would say "real girls must only want to play with dolls and not chemistry sets."

Compared to the cis people I know, my trans acquaintances are much more likely to admire and support gender-transgressive children and adults, whether the gender-transgressive individuals are cis or trans. (And studies show this is true of trans people generally, not just my personal friends.)

I have no idea where Burkett gets her bizarre idea that trans women demand hyperfemininity of cis women. (Except I do--it's a common slander perpetuated by TERFs.)

Gender Socialization and Brain Sex Revisited

Burkett underlines her positioning of trans women as men by repeating the old TERF saw that gender is determined by socialization, not identity. Burkett claims that Caitlyn Jenner and nameless other trans women have not experienced sexism in their lives as Burkett has, and that therefore "their female identity is not my female identity." This implies a trans woman doesn't know what a "real" female identity is, while Burkett does.

Burkett either doesn't understand what gender identity is, or pretends not to. There is immense diversity of experience among people who identify as women, by age and race/ethnicity and sexual orientation and a wide variety of other factors. But this doesn't mean some categories of women have a less truly female gender identity than others. For example, Burkett says that part of what creates a female identity is being relatively poorly paid at one's job. Now, since white women earn more than African American, Latina or Native American women in America, does this mean that as a white woman, Burkett has a less real female identity than do women of color?

I don't imagine this parallel has occurred to her.

Anyway, what Burkett says is that trans women live with male privilege: male earnings, male freedom from fear of sexual assault, the male privilege of being treated as a subject and not a sex object. And, she says, this socialization shapes their brains. So in fact, trans women must have male brains, not female ones.

I'm struck by the illogic of framing trans women as "having a male brain" while simultaneously claiming that saying there's such a thing as brain sex is a sexist act being perpetuated by trans activists. But beyond that, there are two fallacies here. The first is that Burkett ignores how we are active participants in our own socialization. In fact, socializing messages are received quite differently by different people. And a person who identifies as a girl or woman will attend to socializing messages about girls and women.

The second fallacy comes from framing all trans women as being like Caitlyn Jenner: as living for many decades being perceived by others as masculine men, and as having started their transitions very recently. In fact, trans women who have been perceived as feminine boys or men will have dealt with lifetimes of bullying, harassment, and unequal treatment at school and work because of their femininity. And whatever her past experience, once a trans girl or woman comes out, she gets to experience all the (uniformly negative) social things Burkett lists as female socializing experiences at levels typically much higher than those faced by cis women. Getting stared at by men. Fearing sexual and physical violence. Job discrimination. And socialization doesn't end in young adulthood--all of us are always having our behavior shaped by the socializing messages we receive from those around us.

What Burkett would say about the socialization experience of binary trans individuals who come out as children in supportive families and are treated as their identified sex from a young age I do not know, because she doesn't address them. In her NY Times piece, all trans women are Caitlyn Jenner.

Is a Woman Defined by a Uterus?

Another topic which Burkett treats with eye-popping logical inconsistencies is the issue of whether a woman is defined as a person with a vagina, uterus and ovaries. On the one hand, Burkett asserts that trans people who say they were "born in the wrong body" are offensively "reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas." In fact, many trans people critique understandings of us as "born in the wrong body." I am one of many who has written about how it's not my body but society that is the problem.

And Burkett is part of that social problem, because while she sometimes asserts biology is irrelevant, she also states that trans women can never understand what it means to truly be women because they have never "woken up after sex terrified they'd forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before." Suddenly, in a scenario where it can be used to discredit trans women, having a uterus and ovaries becomes definitional to being a "real woman." This implies that cis women who were never fertile are not real women, and is offensive and absurd.

In fact, most trans people argue that bodies do not determine if we are really women or men. It's gender identity that is determinative for us, not genitals or reproductive organs. A cis woman who has a hysterectomy or mastectomy does not become unwomaned by the surgery. A trans man does not need genital reconstruction to deserve to be respected as a man. And a nonbinary person is not "really" a woman or a man because they were born with a vagina or a penis.

Can We Speak Differently About Genitals?

Eventually, Burkett gets around to talking about trans people other than binary trans women. It's two-thirds of the way into this diatribe that centers transmisogyny, but in the end, those under the trans umbrella who are not trans women finally get called out as oppressors as well. The reason? We don't want to equate women with vaginas.

One of the things that makes life difficult for trans people today is the way that so many people, organizations and institutions treat genitals as synonymous with gender. Most trans people in the U.S. have not had genital reconstructive surgery, and many of us have no interest in it. Many of us are uncomfortable talking about our genitals with others (and really, so are most cis people, even though the stakes for them are lower).  Often, we use terms other than vagina or penis or clitoris to name our genitalia in private discussions with partners or friends, because those terms are so loaded with gender expectations by our society. 

Burkett mocks the use of alternative genital and reproductive terms in her piece as "politically correct" nonsense.

But what gets Burkett all riled up is that there are people who were assigned female at birth--genderqueer, agender, and transmasculine--who are trying to raise consciousness about more trans-inclusive ways to talk about anatomy and gender in pro-choice organizations. Not everyone seeking an abortion identifies as a woman, and the difficulties of seeking to terminate a pregnancy are compounded for such people by constant misgendering, and ignorance of the very idea of using alternate terms to describe anatomy. To Burkett, an effort to raise consciousness about these individuals' experience and shift the language employed constitutes some kind of war on women and attack on feminist leaders that will endanger reproductive freedom.

Burkett is apparently in love with the word "vagina" and using it as a synecdoche for "woman." She is indignant that many trans people of all sorts have gotten tired of the play The Vagina Monologues, performed annually at colleges and women's centers all over the country since the late 1990s. Yes, trans people critique performances that equate vaginas with womanhood--but not because we are antifeminist, as Burkett frames us. It is because we too are feminists, and we expect more of our feminist cis siblings.

When trans activists critiqued the choice to call a feminist event "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas," the goal was not, as Burkett believes, to turn back the clock on feminist progress. It was to urge feminism forward toward greater inclusiveness.

Do Trans People Oppose Women's Institutions?

Another source of panic for Burkett is the idea that trans people are doing damage to institutions such as women's colleges. She notes that there are students at some women's colleges who do not identify as women, and that that some individuals at women's colleges use the term "siblinghood" as an alternative to "sisterhood" to acknowledge them. And she reports that there are some trans male students who ask their professors to stop using the pronoun "she" to refer to a generic, abstract student at the college.

The thing is, the focus of most trans advocacy has been on convincing women's colleges to admit trans women, which is as it should be. Most trans people are fine with the idea of there being women's spaces and institutions, so long as they don't exclude trans women. And many of us have in fact written critically of trans male students who decide to continue to attend a women's college after coming out, and then want the colleges to center their experiences as men. That's male privilege--not young trans women daring to assert that they should have a right to be considered for admission by woman's colleges.

Who Owns Feminism?

The last segment of Burkett's diatribe before she concludes by recapping her dissing of Caitlyn Jenner is both infuriating and smarmy. In it, she discusses who is moving feminism forward, and whether trans people should be welcomed to that project. The smarmy answer is, in her words, that "we'll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight" if "they" do the right thing. The feminist "we" is cis gender, and the "they" seeking admission are trans people.

In this section of her piece, Burkett writes as if trans people didn't exist until a couple of years ago, and up until then, all the good work of seeking gender equality has been done by cis women. She goes on for a while about the revolutionary nature of the amazing work people she describes as "women like me" have done in advancing equity and freedom. She describes this as including "smashing binary views of male and female well before most Americans had ever heard the word 'transgender' or used the word 'binary' as an adjective."

Apparently it has not occurred to Burkett that many trans people have been involved in feminist advocacy for much of their lives. That some of those who have been fighting gender stereotypes as long as she has did so because they had or have nonbinary identities. That some did so fighting side by side with cis women in organizations like NOW, and that others fought from the margins, because they were excluded from mainstream women's organizations, either because of their gender presentation/gender identity/sex assigned at birth, or because those organizations excluded them for other reasons, such as their race. In fact, a multitude of young and old people with all sorts of identities other than cis gender are involved in gender activism and scholarship at this very moment, without noticing that they do not carry Burkett's seal of approval.

Burkett doesn't even acknowledge that among the people fighting gender stereotypes, there have been, and still are, cis men.

In any case, Burkett posits that cis women own feminism, and they have the right and the power to decide whether to admit trans people.

What most underlies Burkett's stance in my mind is cissexism: the belief that cis people's gender identities are authentic and real while trans people's are questionable, coupled with the belief that cis people have the right to sit in judgment over trans people's gender expressions, and decide whether to acknowledge a trans person's gender identity. Burkett has positioned herself as having the right to decide who is acknowledged as a woman, or as a feminist, or as having a "real" gender identity.

Fortunately, Burkett and her fellow TERFs do not in fact get to own feminism or to set the rules for gender authenticity. All of us are collectively involved in these projects, and the number of us coming out under the trans umbrella is rapidly expanding. The number of young cis people who are trans allies has been expanding in the same way. 

Burkett and her ilk can make our lives more painful and difficult, but they can't make us disappear.

What Does Burkett Want?

The really ironic thing is that trans advocates share a good deal of what Elinor Burkett at least claims that she wants. And that is that we agree that confining people to gender stereotypes is bad, that gender roles are socially constructed and change over time, and that we can and should work to change things about contemporary gender norms because they disadvantage women, cis and trans. As I've noted, the percentage of trans people who agree with this is higher than the percentage of cis people who do.

The other thing Burkett says she wants from trans people, before she and her cis compatriots admit us to the club, is that we affirm this statement: "So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be 'assigned' [binary sexes] at birth." This one a lot of people might just shrug at, but that I reject. 

I am intersex by birth. It's vital to me that we stop naturalizing the idea that sex is a binary, when it is a spectrum. It's important that we acknowledge the medical violence done to thousands of intersex children every year, in an attempt to make our sex variant bodies conform to this ideology. And it's high time we stopped putting imposed gender markers on birth certificates, as we've stopped having doctors chose a race marker for birth certificates. Burkett wants us to acknowledge the social construction and cultural variability of gender, but denies that sex is socially constructed and culturally variable. This betrays an ignorance not just of intersex experience, but of the fact that many world societies have divided the sex spectrum into three or more sexes, and that the binary sex system we see as natural is in fact ideological, only one system among many.

It seems to me that what Burkett really wants is to stop the progress in social acceptance trans people have been winning, at least in more progressive social circles, by framing trans people--especially trans women--as regressive and antifeminist. I don't know what motivates her to want to do this any more than I understand what motivates any sort of bigotry. Usually there's some combination of personal insecurity and a fear that one is losing social power.

What Burkett frames as triggering her whole opinion piece is that she wants to critique Caitlyn Jenner for presenting herself in such a gender-conforming manner, but feels she must bite her lip and stay silent, lest she be viewed as transphobic. Of course, she hasn't in fact stayed silent in the least. Having this op-ed critiquing Caitlyn Jenner as a representative of all trans people published as the headline piece of the NY Times' Sunday Review is about as opposite from staying silent as a feminist author gets.

So apparently what Burkett wants is to be able to say transphobic things and not be called a transphobe ("TERF is a trans slur").

Sorry, Dr. Burkett, that's not going to happen. 

However, that's not to say people shouldn't be able to critique Caitlyn Jenner because her trans status is some sort of magical shield and she can do no wrong. Critique her all you want, so long as you do it in the same way you would were she a cis woman. And if you're going to attack her for her conforming feminine self-presentation, then you should also publish diatribes about how Vanity Fair cover model Scarlett Johansen is undoing the work of feminism by displaying vast amounts of cleavage and wearing thick eyeliner, or how Jennifer Lawrence is a dupe of feminine stereotypes because the cover photo of her complaining about how nude photos of her circulated without her permission shows her apparently nude except for a diamond necklace.

Or you could stop framing all trans people as embodied by a couple of interview snippets and a photo shoot of one star in the Kardashian celebritysphere, and tying them to tired old claims about how trans people are all walking gender stereotypes.

And you could start reading the writings of transfeminists.

Testosterone Does Not "Work Better" than Estrogen

Hang around with trans people and you're bound to hear it. Testosterone, it's said, is more powerful than estrogen. It makes for a faster and more robust gender transition, while estrogen works a more subtle form of magic.

According to this reasoning, "trans men 'pass' better than trans women" because we win at hormones.

This is a load of hooey.

As trans people, we are fundamentally opposed to classic biological essentialism. According to classic binary sex essentialism, a person born with XX chromosomes is ever and eternally female, and a person born with XY chromosomes immutably male.  (Biological essentialists tend never to consider nonbinary genotypes like XXY or intersex people generally, because they're all about the ideology of the sex binary.)

Those who gender transition must reject chromosomal sex essentialism.  We live by the tenet that it is gender identity that determines who we really are, not our chromosomes.

But a fair number of binary trans people actually cling to a variety of sex essentialism--specifically, a biological essentialism that centers hormones, not chromosomes or genitals.  Hormone-replacement therapy is the most common medical transition service we access, and we are raised in a culture that treats biological sex as "more real" than gender identities or gender expression.  So many find comfort in framing both their bodies and their psyches as rewrought in nature by testosterone or by estrogen and testosterone-blockers.  Obviously, HRT has visible effects. Our body hair grows more robust or more fine.  Voices drop or breasts bud.  Our faces are gently transformed by the loss or addition of subcutaneous fat and the bulking or shrinking of facial musculature, rounding the cheek of the estrogen-employing, and chiseling the jaw of a person using testosterone. When you've been living with gender dysphoria, these physical changes are very welcome.

I've met my share of people who overgeneralize from the celebrated physical changes of hormone therapy into hormonal essentialism, attributing every change they experience to sex hormones. "Testosterone has made me less interested in talking, talking, talking." "Estrogen has made me a lot better at matching colors."  But sex hormones don't make us more or less verbal, or improve or deaden our color vision.  Those are social effects, and they are culture-bound.

That doesn't make them any less "real," mind you.  Just like hormones, socialization is a powerful thing.  Living as a woman in our society means receiving constant cues about appearance that unconsciously shape behavior, just as living as a man in our society means receiving social deference that makes a person act more boldly.  And these things affect us even if, consciously, we challenge them.  Estrogen doesn't make a person a better parent, nor testosterone make a parent a less-engaged one.  But caring behavior is so intensely socially reinforced in people living as mothers, while those of us living as fathers receive so many messages that we're not expected to know how to braid our kids' hair and should prioritize work obligations over family ones, that we are inevitably shaped by these socializing messages without our realizing it.  We can resist those pressures of which we are conscious, and socializing forces are experienced differently when one's gender identity conflicts with one's perceived sex, but nonconscious socialization is a real and powerful and ongoing process. From the moment we begin a social transition, our behaviors and inclinations are impacted strongly by socialization, which changes our perceptions and our behavior.  (This is one of the things that transphobic radfem "gender crits" get all wrong.  They treat socialization as something that happens when you are young, and then stops, rather than something that is happening to all of us, every day of our lives.)

But taking a shot or a pill seems much more real and concrete to people in our society than does being (re)shaped by social cues.  And one way this manifests that I believe is particularly damaging is in the belief held by many people that "testosterone works better than estrogen."

Here's the thing about gender transitions: it's indeed true that most trans men transition more smoothly and swiftly than most trans women.  But this isn't because testosterone "works better" than estrogen.  It's because of how gender policing works in our society.  Our culture values masculinity and the male while it devalues femininity and the female.

Let's examine how this works through the lens of facial hair.  I've often heard people use as "proof" of the greater efficacy of testosterone the fact that taking T makes a person grow facial hair, while taking E doesn't make a beard go away.  But it would make just as much sense to say that estrogen is more potent an agent of transition, because it makes a person grow breasts, while taking T doesn't make breasts go away.

Let's consider facial hair and transition in greater depth.  Often before even starting hormone treatment, transfeminine individuals seek facial hair removal via electrolysis and/or laser treatments. And many experience ongoing anxiety because some hair may be left behind by these procedures, leaving a trans woman constantly worried that she may have some stubble, as the social consequences of being seen as a trans woman with a beard shadow are high. Those who transition using testosterone, on the other hand, have a much less anxiety-ridden experience in the facial hair arena. Sure, most trans men wait anxiously for their peach fuzz to materialize, and for some, peach fuzz is all they'll ever grow.  But every whisker is celebrated--and not just by us, but by society.

Think about it.  For a trans woman, a few whiskers are seen by a cissexist society as belying her gender identity, and the stubbly trans woman is a figure of mockery. Meanwhile, for a trans man, a few whiskers are all it takes to get a pass from the gender police.  If there were actual parity in treatment, the gender police would be imposing some sort of 50% standard on either side of their gender binary.  But instead, a trans woman must remove 100% of her facial hair to avoid harassment, while a trans man only needs to be able to grow 10% of a full beard to be treated as one of the brotherhood.

It's not testosterone that is working so well to benefit trans men.  It's patriarchy.

Our society trains people, especially cis males, in patriarchal binary-gender-policing from an early age.  Here's how we can imagine the "logic" of this system as operating: (1) immediately upon seeing a person, classify them as male or female.  (2)  If you can't immediately do that, this is a PROBLEM and must be addressed.  (3) When your initial glance leaves you in doubt, always treat the person as male.  Calling a man "she" is a terrible insult--and is dangerous, since a man whose masculinity has been insulted may feel compelled to prove his masculinity by doing violence to your person.  Calling a woman "he" is actually a sort of compliment, since it confers status.  And if a woman is insulted or has her feelings hurt, it's not likely that she's going to punch you in the face as a result, because that would make her look even less feminine.  Anyway, she should work harder to appear feminine and attractive to men.  (4) Now that the immediate snap judgment about whether to say "sir" or "miss" has been made (when in doubt, say "sir"), study the person to figure out what's wrong with them.  Not being instantaneously classifiable into an M or F box is an affront, but maybe it was the last thing the person wanted (it's some really short cishet guy who is sensitive about his height).  Maybe it was "negligence" (a straight cis woman who isn't doing her duty to be attractive).  Or maybe it was intentional (the individual is an "effeminate" gay man, a butch lesbian, a genderqueer "he/she" weirdo, a transsexual).  Intentionally breaking the binary rule of the gender police means that the offender should be punished with disdain, mockery, harassment, or even assault/sexual assault.  And the harshest punishment is to be directed at those who could have had male honor, but are traitors to the brotherhood--the "swishy faggots" and "trannies" and "shemales"--dishonorable freaks all.

So those are the rules of gender-policing engagement.  Now, combine them with what we discussed earlier--the high standards for inspecting the suspected transfeminine body combined with the low standards of inspecting the suspected transmasculine one. Interactively, they produce a situation in which gender policing affects those assigned male at birth much more strongly than those assigned female at birth. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the fact that people perceived as female or feminine (whatever their gender identity or physical status, really) win as a prize the joy of being catcalled and sexually harassed. But think about it.  This means that for a trans man, once you've crossed that scraggly chinpatch threshhold, chances are good you get to avoid both catcalling and gender-policing harassment. The path to male privilege is pretty short. For trans women, the path to freedom from constant misgendering is much longer, much more fraught with danger, and doesn't end with the prize of relative freedom.

I know that nobody is safe from male street violence, even those deferred to as masculine men, but there's a huge difference in the regularity of the onslaught.  And believe me, I understand that the safety experienced by trans men is conditional, and that if we are discovered to have breasts and/or a vagina, the best outcome is usually disgust, and the worst assault or reparative rape.  But most of the time, these body parts are not seen.  Transmasculine individuals just need to show up sporting that minimal evidence of beard stubble (or its inverse, the receding hairline), wearing moderately standard guy clothes, with chest bound or bundled under a sweatshirt, and the gender policing inspection stops. Not for us the unavoidable requirement that every body part be inspected for "questionable" hand size and foot size, adams apple or hairline.

So, please, let's stop spreading the lie that testosterone works better than estrogen, and that this explains trans mens' advantage over trans women.  Patriarchy and the male privilege it produces explain the transmasculine advantage.  And as long as we naturalize this transmasculine advantage, we do our transfeminine siblings a disservice. What we should be doing is fighting gender policing, not treating it as a fact of nature--and doing that fighting from a position that acknowledges it affects trans men less severely.