Beyond FIBER

At the end of my recent piece on the Slippery Slope, I gave four recommendations that had helped me to keep my footing:

• Don’t repress yourself.
• Invest in your masculine identity.
• Don’t invest too much in your feminine identity.
• Spread out your significant gender events.

Some of it reminds me a bit of the old “FIBER” principles articulated by Tri-Ess over thirty years ago.

F – Full personality expression, in a blending of both our masculine and feminine characteristics. We do not wish to destroy our birth gender but to develop all our human potentials and be all we can be.
I – Integration of our masculinity and femininity to create a happier, more complete person as we use our enhanced understanding of ourselves in our daily lives.
B – Balance between masculinity and femininity in our total personalities.
E – Education of crossdressers toward self-acceptance, education of our families toward understanding, education of society toward the acceptance of crossdressers as ordinary people with a special gender gift.
R – Relationship – building in the context of crossdressing.

I’ve never been to a Tri-Ess meeting, so I’m mostly going off of the summary on their website. The “Don’t repress yourself” and “Invest in your masculine identity” principles echoes the TRI-ESS ideas of Full expression and Integration.

When I went to look up FIBER, the Tri-Ess website was down. The organization has been losing membership for years due to many factors, including their denial of membership to anyone who transitions or is not “heterosexual.” The heteronormative standards were extremely problematic, as Harvey Fierstein illustrated so masterfully in his play Casa Valentina. The restrictions on transitioning can justified by the different needs of transitioners and non-transitioners, but it certainly seems like the percentage of trans people who transition has grown over the past twenty years.

One major difference is what constitutes a proper Balance between genders. The Tri-Ess website doesn’t specify a particular mix, and the impression I have from what I’ve read over the years is that some people tried for a fifty-fifty mix, some went for the maximum feminine expression they felt their families and employers would accept, and others never chose a specific mix, just harboring a vague feeling that they wanted more feminine expression than they had.

From what I’ve seen, to be satisfied with your gender situation it’s not enough to have any old Balance. The balance needs to be heavily weighted to the gender you’ve chosen, and it takes some conscious work to maintain it. If you choose one that’s fifty-fifty or weighted the other way – or if you pay lip service to Balance without setting a specific balance – you’ll be forever off balance.

The other major difference is that I specifically recognize the contributing role of gender fog – wetting the grass on the Slippery Slope, if you will. This is a very tricky point to make, because so much of activism is about empowering people by proclaiming the essential rationality of all. How can you empower your group while acknowledging that you are not always rational? But we have to acknowledge it, or we will continue to have unwanted, ill-considered transitions.

This also gets back to the mission of Tri-Ess and its dwindling membership. If Tri-Ess is restricted to trans women who don’t transition, but they have never informed their members about an important factor that can undermine their decisions not to transition, they have sown the seeds of their undoing.