Is this enough to establish my bona fides as a trans woman?
Like many trans women, I’ve worked for years to be taken seriously as a woman. But there’s a challenge: unlike many trans women, my gender expression is fluid, so I’ve chosen to live in the world as both genders. That means I also sometimes have to speak with authority as a man. Can I do both?
There’s an expectation in our society that people who belong to a particular category can speak from experience about what it’s like to belong to that category. This is true up to a point: lived experience is important, and some people can describe situations that are common and bring attention to them. But there are limitations as well: everyone’s experiences are different, and someone who can speak about some common experiences in their category have no authority to speak about others. One of the biggest challenges is that we may not even be aware of the limitations of our own experience, let alone those of other people.
Trans women are women, and have many critical experiences that are shared with women who aren’t trans. I’ve been patronized, catcalled, groped on the dance floor and sexually harassed on the street. I wear clothes, makeup and accessories that are marketed to women, and I’ve been to stores full of cute clothes and haven’t found anything that fits my body. I’ve also found solidarity and support with other women.
Other trans women share even more experiences: they may have similar levels of estrogen in their bodies, they may have bodies that resemble typical women’s bodies in other ways. They may be romantically and sexually attracted to men. But they don’t share some experiences that are typical of women, like menstruating and being potentially or actually pregnant. Of course, even some non-trans women don’t share those experiences.
This means that, generally speaking, trans women aren’t in a good place to talk about what it feels like to have a uterus, or to be in elementary school as a girl. Trans women who don’t take estrogens can’t really speak with authority about what it’s like to have the kind of breasts that grow with estrogens. We can be the messengers for others, but we can’t speak from our own experience.
When I decided not to transition to living full time as a woman, and not to take hormones or have surgery, I relinquished any right to speak about those experiences. At the same time I chose to continue living as a man for most of the time, to keep living with testosterone and the way it shapes my body, and to have experiences that are common for men. 29 year later I’m still satisfied with those choices.
I now have decades of experience living as a man, and I have things to share about those experiences. I have a lot more experiences as a man than as a woman, just because I’ve spent a lot more time as a man. I’m worried that talking about my experiences as a man will invalidate my experiences as a woman in some people’s eyes.
And yet I still have those experiences of life as a woman, old experiences in my memory and new experiences that I have on an ongoing basis. They don’t disappear, or stop happening, just because I’ve also have experiences of life as a man. And they don’t get invalidated just because I talk about my experiences as a man.
Recently I was talking to a friend about the question from last year’s Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, “Has living as a gender that is different from the one assigned to you at birth made you (more satisfied) or (less satisfied) with your life?” She said, “but have you really lived as a woman?” Many trans people would bristle at the question, but for me it’s a valid question, and it gets to the heart of one of the conceptual problems at the heart of the survey. It also provides important context for interpreting the results.
The survey question is important because it fits into a debate: some people say they’re unsatisfied with the results of transgender actions they’ve taken. Some reactionaries have seized on this dissatisfaction as an excuse to impose restrictions on trans people. Some transgender advocates have responded by denying that anyone is ever really dissatisfied with transgender actions in any way worth discussing.
The issue is important to me personally, even though I would say that the transgender actions I’ve taken have overall increased my satisfaction with life. One reason I think I’ve been so satisfied is that I have paid attention to experiences of dissatisfaction that others have shared, and to my own dissatisfaction with the results of particular actions I’ve taken.
So have I lived as a woman? If you add up the days I’ve spent interacting with people as a woman over the course of my life, you might reach half a year. The hours I’ve spent as a woman in online communities, by message and now video, would probably add more than a year’s worth of interactions.
In that time I’ve had many of the negative experiences that women often point to. I’ve been catcalled and groped by men. I’ve walked in uncomfortable shoes, and had difficulty finding clothes that fit me well. I’ve avoided going places alone out of fear for my safety. I’ve also had good experiences, such as women welcoming me or showing they feel at ease around me.
But we’re talking about a survey, so how did the researchers at the Washington Post and the KFF define “living as a gender”? And this gets to one of the major conceptual faults with the survey. Immediately before the satisfaction question, they asked, “Currently, how much of the time do you physically present as a gender (such as a man, woman, or nonbinary) that is different from the one assigned to you at birth?” Here are the responses:
Option
n
%
None of the time
82
16 %
Some of the time
175
34 %
Most of the time
103
20 %
All of the time
155
30 %
The pollsters describe how they used this question to decide who to ask the following question about satisfaction with living as a different gender. 16% of respondents said that currently, they never physically present as a different gender, and the pollsters did not ask those 82 people the question about living as a different gender. I was assigned male at birth and currently I present myself as a woman some of the time, so if I were part of the panel I would have been asked about living as a woman.
Even more serious: the responses to the satisfaction question were used for the headline of the main article reporting the study: “Most trans adults say transitioning made them more satisfied with their lives.” So the researchers asked about “currently … physically present as a gender … some/most/all the time”, then presupposed that that meant “living as a gender” and reported it as “transitioning.”
I’ve written about the conceptual problems with “transition” before: there are some who argue for an expansive definition of transition, but in practice the concept is so overwhelmed by its prototype that when people hear the word, they tend to think of permanent, full-time, binary gender transition with major hard body modifications, including hormones and surgery. The Washington Post and KFF researchers did not ask respondents about that, they asked about current physical presentation, including “some of the time.”
The way the surveyors asked this question, it would be possible for a respondent to think they were saying that it felt good to wear on a leather jacket in their bedroom for ten minutes every few months, and that gets reported as “transitioning made them more satisfied with their lives.” That’s why in my earlier post on the topic I interpreted it as “satisfaction with transgender actions” rather than talking about transition.
I know people who manifest their gender in ways other than physical presentation. Those manifestations do have an effect on their social lives, and these people consider themselves to have transitioned, but they would not have been asked about living as a different gender.
Similarly, the use of the word “currently” is highly problematic. For most of three years (1999-2002) I rarely presented as a woman in public, because I lived in places where I judged the culture to be intolerant of fluid gender presentation. If I had been given this questionnaire then, I would not have been asked about my satisfaction with living as a different gender, because I was not “currently” presenting as a woman at all.
Did any of the 82 respondents who said they didn’t currently present as a different gender do so in the past? We don’t know, because the researchers didn’t ask them.
The issue with “currently” is a serious problem because there is a debate over people who physically present full time as a different gender, but then stop. This is often called “detransition.” Some people say they stopped presenting as a different gender out of dissatisfaction with the results of that action, others because they fear violence or discrimination based on their actions, and others say they simply decided to do something different.
The Washington Post/KFF poll could have shed some light on the motives of people who present as a different gender and then stop. But by adding “currently” to the question about physical presentation, they excluded anyone who might have presented as a different gender in the past from the satisfaction question.
Did the pollsters do these things intentionally? I doubt it. I think they had a particular idea in mind, the prototypical full-time, body-modifying transitioner, but they were aware that there are people who didn’t fit that mold, so they tried to make the questions flexible enough to cover those people.
I think the researchers underestimated how many people would turn out not to fit their preconceived idea of a transition. They discuss that in some of the articles they wrote about the survey results, but they realized that after they’d finalized the questions. I hope they get a chance to clean up those questions and run another survey soon.
Has living as a gender that is different from the one assigned to you at birth made you more satisfied or less satisfied with your life?
That is the topline question from the first representative survey of trans people in the United States, released in March of this year by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The answers formed the main headline the Post ran about the survey:
A lot more satisfied
45
Somewhat more satisfied
33
Somewhat less satisfied
17
A lot less satisfied
5
In general I like this survey. I’ve got a number of thoughts about it, but I wanted to start by answering this question for myself: has living as a gender that is different from the one assigned to me at birth made me less satisfied or more satisfied with my life? I would have to say a lot more satisfied.
The biggest reason is that it helped me to find love. In 1996 I met up with some friends to watch the New York City Pride Parade. There was one friend of a friend who I had met at a party the year before. We lived near each other in Brooklyn and our mutual friend had already tried to get us together. Her reaction was “that annoying guy who went to Chicago?” and mine was that I didn’t remember her.
When I went to the parade, I wore make-up, jewelry and women’s clothes. She and I rode the subway back to Brooklyn, and we exchanged phone numbers. One thing led to another, and we’ve pretty much been together ever since. We’ve been married for almost 24 years and have a kid who’s now all grown up.
When this woman first met me, she saw me as just some annoying guy. When she spent time with me as a woman, she was more impressed and opened up to me more, and then I noticed her. Would she have been interested in getting to know me better without meeting me as a woman? It’s impossible to know – she says that maybe just seeing me at the Pride Parade would have been enough – but I had had limited success in dating up to that point.
In more superficial terms: when I was little, I admired a lot of things that girls wore (dresses, tights, barrettes) and things that they got to do together (dance, cartwheels, jump rope). I was told that I couldn’t take part in those things, and it all felt very arbitrary to me. By the time I felt comfortable enough to physically present as a woman in public I was too old for cartwheels and little-girl dresses, but I’ve been able to participate in some age-appropriate feminine practices, which has made me more satisfied with my life.
A bit less superficially: when I first started trying girlish things, I had been told very clearly that it was inappropriate, so I kept it secret for years and lived in shame. When I was in my twenties I decided to come out of the closet, but for many years afterwards I was afraid of being shunned or discriminated against, so I still avoided talking about my gender expression to some people. For just the past ten years I have been out to more people in my life, and that has made me much more satisfied.
There are also downsides to living as a woman, as most people who have done it will tell you, and downsides to living as two different genders over time. Owning two wardrobes, or a wardrobe and a half, is expensive. I have sometimes wanted to grow a beard or moustache, but I’ve felt that growing any kind of facial hair is not consistent with the feminine presentation I want.
I have no evidence that anyone has discriminated against me for being trans, but it may have happened. I have been denied services because people saw me as not trans enough, or not the right kind of trans. But overall I feel that living as a woman has made me a lot more satisfied with my life.
You may be able to tell just from reading this that I found some of the words chosen by the Washington Post and KFF researchers to be problematic. I’ve got a lot more to say about this, starting with the political context of this question, but I felt that it would be best to start by focusing on this question and what it means to me.
Most trans people who are older than thirty have considered themselves to be in more than one category of gender minority over their lifetime. I’ve talked a lot about the common path from not being in any trans category to cross-dresser to transitioned trans woman. I’ve observed other paths: from non-trans to nonbinary to transitioned trans man. Sometimes people move from trans woman or trans man to nonbinary, or to non-trans.
Some of these people would argue that they never changed: they were always the same category, but their understanding of themselves changed. I would say that I’ve changed relatively little, and my understanding of myself has been fairly stable; it’s the categories that other people apply to me that have changed.
I’m not the only trans person who’s seen the categories shift around us. The kinds of people we called “transsexuals” when I was in college were later called MTFs, transgender women, then transwomen, and now trans women, sometimes even “women of transgender experience.”
Categorizing people is notoriously difficult, because each one of us is a complex system of complex systems. One way to get some clarity is to go beyond categories for people and talk about feelings, beliefs and actions. I feel gender dysphoria, transgender desire and gender fog. I don’t have a strong belief about what gender I belong to. I’ve only modified my body in minor ways. Part of the time I choose my gender presentation to convey that I want to be seen as a woman; the rest of the time I try to convey that I want to be seen as a man.
When I was a teenager, someone who did what I did was called a transvestite. That was replaced by cross-dresser, and now there are people who believe that cross-dressers no longer exist. This is in part due to the common pattern that trans people who come out of the closet have tended to transition. The result is that most of the trans people who don’t transition are still in the closet.
For a while, there were a lot of people who didn’t know where to put me in their taxonomies. I have the same set of feelings as any other trans people, but I don’t share most of the same beliefs. I didn’t take any actions to transition, and I don’t want to.
When nonbinary identities became more common, I looked into them. I share beliefs with some non-binary people, in that I don’t think I belong to one gender or another independent of my cultural assignment and comfort levels. But my actions differ from those of many nonbinary people; in terms of gender expression I’m one of the most binary people you’ll meet!
After a few years of feeling isolated and neglected, I believe I have the millennial generation to thank for giving me and my transgender actions a new conceptual home. I’m genderfluid! Sometimes I’m one gender, sometimes I’m another.
There’s a fair amount of variation within the category of genderfluid people. Some actually have a belief in their own gender that fluctuates over time, while my skepticism about my own gender is fairly constant. “Fluid” is also not a great way to capture my gender expression, which again is very binary. I generally will stick with the same gender expression for at least a day, with no intermediate stages, at least not any that I share with people outside my family. So my gender expression fluctuates, but between the two binary poles.
Since I’ve talked about genderfluid beliefs and actions, it’s worth mentioning that feelings about gender fluctuate for everyone, trans and non-trans. Most people experience some feelings of gender dysphoria and transgender desire over the course of their lives. All trans people have times when our feelings are less intense, and times when they’re more intense, and times when we feel transgender desire but not gender dysphoria, or vice versa, and the intensity of gender fog varies over time. So in terms of feeling, we’re all genderfluid.
The best part is that when I tell people that I’m genderfluid, they don’t give me the kinds of baffled stares that I’ve gotten when I’ve identified myself as a transvestite over the past fifteen years or so. They have a sense of what to expect, even if they may not know why. After all, I’m not sure I know why. I’m not sure which millennials I have to thank for this, but I’m grateful!
Last year I wrote about my ongoing project to develop and explore my ability to express femininity with my voice. I discussed how important it is for me to create an auditory impression that matches the visual impression I create with clothing, makeup and hairstyle. I was a bit taken aback when I saw the word “feminization” in the name of a file prepared for me.
I want to be clear: I’m completely satisfied with the professional who used the word. I explained why I didn’t feel the word “feminization” worked for me, and they apologized and changed it immediately. I understand why they used it: “voice feminization” seems to be emerging as an industry standard word. I’m writing this to share my explanation of why that’s a bad idea, and why we should use a term like “feminine expression” instead.
First of all, having followed transgender discourse for over thirty years, my first mental association with “feminization” is “forced feminization.” I’m not out to yuck anybody’s yum, but forced feminization is not something I’m interested in, and I don’t think anyone wants to associate a service like voice training so closely with a relatively niche sexual fetish.
Beyond that, “feminization” implies a permanent transformation, that my voice would be changed from masculine to feminine. That may be an accurate depiction of what some trans people want. But as I discussed previously, I’m not transitioning from living as a man to living as a woman.
I’m genderfluid, which means that my gender expression may be feminine one day and masculine the next. I love the masculine parts of myself as much as I love the feminine parts, and I don’t want to give any of it up. I had as much fun singing “Sixteen Tons” today as I did singing “Manic Monday” a few days ago.
So please, don’t talk about helping anyone “feminize” their voice. Just say you’re helping them develop their feminine vocal expression. That’s inclusive: it applies just as well to people like me with fluid gender expression as it does to people who want to permanently abandon masculine vocal expression. What’s not to like?
A colleague recommended an interview on the French History podcast with Rachel Mesch, who is Professor of English and French at Yeshiva University, on her new bookBefore Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France. Since I’m trans and I’ve been studying nineteenth-century French literature, it’s right up my alley!
Of course, the big thing I noticed was that Dr. Mesch and podcast host Gary Girod kept getting stuck in the muck of categorizing people. Mesch profiled three nineteenth-century authors who were assigned female at birth, but presented a masculine identity to the world at times in their lives. Were any or all of the three authors transgender? Were they women? Were they men? Were they feminists? Were they gay? Were their husbands gay?
On the level of actions, Mesch makes it crystal clear: Jane Dieulafoy and Rachilde not only dressed in men’s clothes of the period, but obtained an official “permission de travestissement,” which apparently was only a thing for people assigned female. Rachilde and Marc de Montifaud wrote under male identities. In terms of beliefs, also, Mesch tells us that Rachilde wrote that she didn’t think of herself as female.
Mesch describes how all three authors wrote about the three major transgender feelings, as experienced either by themselves or by their fictional characters: gender dysphoria (when a person feels discomfort living in their assigned gender), transgender desire (a desire to live as a different gender from the one assigned at birth) and gender fog (an intense excitement connected to the anticipation, experience or memory of transgender actions).
In terms of gender categories, I’ve argued that it makes much more sense to treat “woman” and “man” as radial categories in the tradition of Wittgenstein (1953), Rosch (1973) and Lakoff (1988). Were Dieulafoy and Rachilde men? I’m guessing their tailors appreciated the business. Were they women? They were ineligible to vote. You can go on to various contexts where the categories mattered in their lives, and you can apply the same principles to the categories of “feminist” and “gay.”
Mesch describes her own conscious decision to refer to all three authors consistently with “she” pronouns, but as a linguist what I’m interested in is the gender of the pronouns and adjectives they use to refer to themselves. In particular, Mesch tells us that people regularly wrote to the two masculine pseudonyms of de Montifaud, Marc de Montifaud and Paul Erasme, under the impression that they were writing to someone who hadn’t been assigned female at birth or lived as a woman. I assume that when writing under those two identities, de Montifaud used gendered language consistent with their masculine names.
What I’m curious about is whether de Montifaud or the other two authors used masculine gendered adjectives or pronouns to refer to themselves when addressing people who knew they had been assigned female at birth and raised as women, and if so, at what points. Mesch did not address this in the interview, but she may in the book.
Mesch tells Girod that she felt a bit apprehensive writing about people who she considers to be transgender in some sense without identifying as trans herself. From the interview it sounds like she did a very respectful job. I’m sure some trans people will object to her use of “she” pronouns for the authors, but otherwise I didn’t hear much to object to.
One area where not being trans may have held Mesch back is in her respect for the dominant narratives in trans politics. As a trans person it’s easier for me to challenge those dominant narratives than it is for Mesch who needs to show respect for trans culture. Slightly easier, at least.
One way that it’s important to challenge those dominant narratives is in their insistence on categorizing people: as trans or not, as men or women or nonbinary. One of these narratives is that in the past people were confused about trans stuff and had weird categories. Often these categories were imposed on trans people by outsiders who hated or patronized us. Now we have these categories for people, and things are finally right with the world.
Mesch does not challenge this view of progress, and as she describes the ontological struggles that some of these authors went through as they tried to fit themselves into their view of the world, she seems to imply that they would have had an easier time if they had our 2020 categories for gender and sexuality available to them.
Sadly, as a trans person who’s lived through the past thirty years of categorization debates and who regularly talks to people dealing with trans feelings, beliefs and actions, I don’t see any evidence that people these days find it easier to understand what’s going on with their lives. As a scholar of the nineteenth century I’m sure Mesch knows that historical progress is rarely linear, and sometimes it goes backwards.
In this post I’ve already argued that the dominant trans practice of categorizing people is hugely problematic. I’ve laid out my own alternative practices, but it’s possible that the systems used by the authors Mesch studied were in some ways superior to the system she was taught, and even the one I’ve articulated.
A final note: Mesch says that “it was hard to find people who are French historians or French literary scholars who felt really that they knew trans studies enough to speak to these issues.” It’s been hard for me to be recognized as a scholar of French literature, language or history, or of trans studies. Like many people, I worked hard to get a doctorate and taught as an adjunct professor for years. I applied for many full-time jobs, and didn’t get called for a single interview. So now I work as a web developer.
If we really want to be able to find knowledgeable trans scholars, we need to give them work. And that may mean hiring a trans scholar instead of someone you went to grad school with, or yet another student of that famous scholar, or someone with a degree from a fancy university.
There are two great principles that a lot of us agree on: people shouldn’t have to have sex with anyone they don’t want to have sex with, and people shouldn’t be prejudiced. But what happens if someone doesn’t want to have sex with someone else out of prejudice? Arguments about this have been blowing up in my Facebook and Twitter for the past several months.
Fortunately, there is a way to combat prejudice without impinging on people’s right to say no to sex. All we have to do is separate structure from agency.
At the Lavender Languages conference in 2013 I attended a fascinating but disturbing talk by Brad Rega called, “‘No Queens, Chocolate, Or Fried Rice’: Anti-effeminate and racist discourse among gay men.” It was basically a depressing catalog of phrases used by gay men on hookup apps like Grindr to indicate all the categories of men that they are not interested in having sex with. Others have confirmed that this is common, as seen in the screenshot above, one of several posted on onehallyu.
The right to say no to sex is a matter of individual agency. The men posting these ads are exercising their agency. This may affect potential partners on an individual level, and that is unfortunate. On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that these effeminate and/or nonwhite men (and basically everybody else) are probably better off not having sex with such people.
If we think about why we really care that some guy doesn’t want to sleep with “fried rice,” it’s clear that we care at the structural level: it’s been shown that society benefits when people have contact with others who are different from them. People who aren’t prejudiced want to remove stigma from categories, and when people advertise their prejudices publicly, that contributes to the stigma.
Prejudices like these are also symptomatic of larger structural inequalities. These individual men may have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to sleep with “chocolate,” but the fact that so many men post these messages makes it clear that many of them are acting out of the same racist motives that lead real estate agents to lie to black people about the availability of apartments in some neighborhoods.
The tricky thing here is that structural problems emerge out of thousands, if not millions, of individual acts of agency. It can be tempting to push back on every single one of these; in fact, this is basically what we’ve been taught to do since Leviticus. But that’s not the best way to solve structural problems. Because human beings are complex dynamic systems, and human societies are complex dynamic systems of human beings, there are many other ways, some of them quite counterintuitive.
Here’s an example: as far as I can tell, none of these guys have a code word to tell Grindr they don’t want to sleep with Irish men (“No corned beef”?). This is not because they love Irish people, but because any remaining prejudice against them is minor and not particularly active in gay hookups. This suggests that if we can end general prejudice against black people, Asians and effeminate gay men, those phrases will disappear from Grindr.
Of course, ending prejudice against black people is great – it’s not like some of us haven’t been trying to do that for centuries! But that timeframe just shows how futile it is to think we can accomplish this by pushing back against “No chocolate” comments – at best it would drive the racism underground.
Is it wrong, then, to publicly shame people for posting their racist sexual preferences? No, I don’t think it is. It may impose a certain amount of decorum in these spaces. If that’s what you’re after, go for it.
On the other hand, we have to agree that these racist guys should be absolutely free to exclude anyone from their dating pool. Don’t think that shaming a bunch of gay men will make a big difference in the underlying racism. If that’s what you want to change, get in touch with others who are working on it, find out the true vulnerabilities of this structure, and put your effort towards things that are actually effective, like dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. We can absolutely honor sexual autonomy and combat racism at the same time.
And yes, I may be talking about gay men and racism here, but I’m also talking about transgender issues.
On Facebook someone posted a while ago asking where in Queens there were bars showing RuPaul’s Drag Race. The answer was a bar called Hombres.
At gay bars and other places explicitly marked as male spaces, you’ll often find not just drag fans but drag queens, transvestites and other non-transitioning trans people. You will also find that when we get home from these spaces we usually take off the makeup and falsies and look a lot like men. Sometimes we change into guy clothes before we leave the bar. Sometimes we wear guy clothes the whole time.
This guyness extends to other environments. We usually present as guys at our day jobs, when we’re doing laundry, and when we go hiking. Interacting with the world as women is a relatively small part of our lives.
This is often used by transitioned trans women to deny that we are trans, and thus to deny us a voice in transgender politics. In 2014 there was a heated debate over who had the right to declare words like “tranny” taboo. RuPaul and other drag queens saw the words as either not particularly offensive or ripe for reclamation, while a group of transitioners saw them as potent slurs.
The transitioners were used to having the upper hand in these verbal hygiene debates by virtue of ideologies of linguistic self-determination, in which only members of a group have standing to determine which words are appropriate names for the group and its members, and which words are offensive. But the drag queens had long been considered part of the “transgender umbrella” with equal standing to transitioned trans people.
The transitioners’ response was to redefine “trans women.” Zinnia Jones wrote a petition stating that “Cisgender male drag queens are assigned male at birth, and they neither consider themselves to be women nor live as women in their everyday lives. Unlike trans women, they are not the ones who regularly face the consequences of widespread transphobia and transmisogyny, and they are not confronted with the fallout of normalizing transmisogynist slurs.”
It’s highly debatable whether people who regularly go to drag bars face less transphobia than people who are out during the day, but victimhood wasn’t originally part of the definition of transgender, and it shouldn’t be.
It’s also not clear that drag queens don’t consider themselves to be women. I’ve never been to Hombres but if it’s anything like the gay bars I’ve been to, chances are that inside you’ll probably hear all the drag queens, and even some of the more masculine-presenting people, referred to with “she” pronouns and in Spanish, feminine adjectives.
This may occasionally be a mockery of femininity, but most of the time it is a response to a simple desire to be classified as women in a particular situation. Some people have observed that it is relatively common for people to spend months or years living as men and performing in drag shows, and then later transition to living as women, for a variety of reasons.
That is only part of the story. Many drag queens and other trans women have decided that we don’t want to transition. When people are allowed to be free with our genders, we choose what works for us, from one column or another. Drag queens go to bars called Hombres and answer to “she.” I buy nylons for women and razors for men. I have friends who buy jackets for men and bras for women. Everyone mixes and matches on some level.
So are we transgender? Are we trans women? The key fact in my mind is that many of us experience one or both of the key feelings of gender dysphoria (in our case, discomfort living as men) or transgender desire (wanting to live as women). The fact that we cope with these feelings without adopting a full-time identity as a woman or modifying our bodies does not mean that we don’t feel the feelings.
If you force us to choose one gender and stick with it, we will probably say we’re men, and there’s a good reason for it. We’ve got these bodies and we’re not changing them, and on some level we’re used to living as men. We probably also know, maybe from firsthand experience, that being a woman is no picnic either.
If you know that you’re not going to transition, and you’re going to spend eighty percent, ninety percent of your life or more interacting with the world as a man, and if someone forces you to choose whether to think of yourself as a man or a woman, it makes sense to choose man. That means your internal self-image and your external self-image match for most of your week.
So yes, we call ourselves men, but that is because our binary society pressures us to choose men or women. It does not mean that we’re always happy being men, and it doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t choose both if we could, or whichever one fits at the time.
I’ve written before about how I would like to find common cause with other people who are critical of essentialist transgender ideology, but I get alienated by the nasty rhetoric that many of them throw around. A case in point is this article by Taylor Fogarty. I follow some people on Twitter who post good stuff, but they also tweeted approvingly about Fogarty’s article, which is
Fogarty begins with a reasonable attack on the concept of gender identity, which I have also roundly criticized on this blog as a faith-based argument masking a prescriptive set of identity-based behavioral expectations. She also critiques the “cotton ceiling” claims of some trans activists, which are not entirely without basis, but still very problematic, and deserving of a more nuanced critique.
The rest of Fogarty’s argument is based on a flawed understanding of how the law protects people from discrimination. It goes something like this: The law mandates punishment for people who hurt others based on their sexuality. In order to establish hurt, we need to define protected sexualities, and in order to do that we need to define sexes, all based on “objective fact.”
I am not a lawyer, but I know this isn’t the way the law works, and with good reason. My father was actually gay-bashed in the 1970s. He was a skinny guy with long hair, and he was waiting to cross Sixth Avenue at Waverly Place when he heard someone yell “Faggot!” and something hit him on the back of the head. He was knocked unconscious, but got stitched up at the hospital. The police weren’t interested, because at the time there were no hate crimes laws, and they didn’t have enough to go on for assault.
My dad was not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, he just wasn’t. Neither was Ever Orozco, who was stabbed to death in Jackson Heights in 2013. But Orozco’s killer accused Orozco of blowing kisses at him, so he was prosecuted for a hate crime.
This is the way it should be, because the problem is not that these classes of people exist out there in some objective reality, and haters are picking one to beat up. The problem is that these categories exist in haters’ minds as threats, and therefore targets. They could construct a nonsensical category including Tibetans, Lutherans, plushies and maybe some Rotarians, and it would be just as destructive as any that Fogarty claims to be based on objective fact.
Fogarty’s logic is not the logic of the law. It’s the logic of fear, where the response to trauma is to divide the world up into the righteous, beleaguered Us and the nasty, savage Them, with strong laws and definitions protecting Us from Them. The idea that a straight man could be the innocent target of anti-gay violence has probably never occurred to her. She might find a way to say that they don’t deserve protections anyway, but maybe she’s better than that.
