by Angus "Andrea" Grieve-Smith
I don’t have much to say about this now, but Sports by Brooks reports that sportswriter Mike Penner has detransitioned. I have very little interest in spectator sports, so I’ve never heard of this guy. Does that make me a true transgender?
Of course not; just kidding. (Or rather, it has no bearing on the trueness of my transgenderism.) Thanks to Kate at Deep Glamour for the link.
Sometimes trans dogma can be funny when it paints itself into a corner. Here’s an example from the current news about Thomas Beatie. Beatie is a transman who just gave birth to a baby girl. This Metafilter thread claims that he’s “first legally transgendered man to become pregnant.” This is just one of the many Bogus Transgender Firsts.
Back in 2004 there was a transwoman who claimed to be the first transgender delegate to the Democratic National Convention. A little googling revealed that there was a trans Carter delegate in 1976, and possibly a trans delegate to the 1968 convention. Ever since then I’ve been skeptical about Transgender Firsts. Some transpeople, despite paying lip service to the idea that transpeople have been around forever, seem to think that history began some time around 1998.
Metafilter user Grapefruitmoon managed to assert the notion that Beatie is the First Pregnant Transgendered Man even while linking to an article in the London Telegraph that contradicted this claim. A little bit of thought suggests that this Transgender First is highly unlikely.
We know that people have been cross-dressing and cross-living for thousands of years, and expressing feelings that could broadly be considered transgender for about as long. Many transgender people claim them as spiritual forefathers and foremothers, even though if Henri III were alive today they’d probably bounce him out of the support group for not taking hormones. If you want to claim that the Abbé de Choisy or Billy Tipton were trans, you’d guess that there have been transmen for as long as there have been men.
In the essentialist point of view, transgenderism begins in the womb, if not in the genes. Along these lines, if you accept someone as transgender they are eternally transgender, whether they’ve had any body modifications or not. This is always a source of laughs when people who were “heterosexual cross-dressers” last week all of a sudden become eternally transgender, provoking a desperate flurry of revisionism. More to the point, if you accept the notion of Eternal Transgenderism, not only was Beatie a man his entire life, but so was everyone who can be corralled into the Transmen Through History exhibit.
Reading through some of the lives of pre-testosterone-injection transmen, it seems that most of them began to live as men quite young. A cursory search doesn’t turn up any record of any of them having been pregnant, but there are plenty of transmen who are attracted to men, and plenty of others who’ve tried to conform and live as women for part of their lives. There are also, shamefully, transmen who’ve been raped. Whether or not it was something he desired or intended, it seems pretty likely that some transman must have become pregnant some time in the past.
I’d even venture to say that Beatie is probably not the first transman married to a woman who can’t bear children. I could imagine a transman who passed as a man for years, married a woman who knew his secret, and then found himself in a situation like Beatie’s. I can imagine this transman conceiving a child in one way or another, arranging to go on a trip somewhere with his wife, living as a woman for long enough to deliver a healthy baby, and returning as a happy father and mother.
Just because I can imagine something doesn’t mean it happened, and I don’t know of any documented case of a transman becoming pregnant before Beatie. Maybe it never happened, but it’s irresponsible to keep claiming “firsts” without making any attempt to actually check whether something is the first. Beatie was quite likely the first pregnant transgender man to be featured on Oprah, but history was old before Oprah.
Grapefruitmoon could possibly get around this by using the phrase “legally transgendered man.” But I don’t know of any legal certification for transgenderism. There’s clinical diagnosis, but I don’t know if Beatie has one. Beatie has legally changed his gender, but before the era of birth certificates it was possible to do that by simply passing for long enough to establish an identity.
There is a word for what Grapefruitmoon meant: “first known.” This provides some protection, at least.
I just looked at this package in my cosmetics collection. It says,
Jean-Pierre Cosmetics
Eye & Make Up Remover
Cleansing Towelettes
It’s not a short-term glitch; that’s the official name of the product.
I had already used it when I noticed this, but I double-checked, and it didn’t remove any of my eyes. Whew! I guess it must actually be “face & eye make-up remover.”
Of course, I bought this stuff months ago. I knew exactly what it was when I bought it, and didn’t even notice the superficially-inaccurate description until a few minutes ago. Just goes to show that language communicates well even when it doesn’t follow the rules of logic.
Incidentally, it seems to be very effective at removing eye make-up without causing too much discomfort or drying my skin. I’m satisfied.
I recently came across an interesting blog post about the MTA’s weird practice of having its commuter railroad conductors mark the gender of passengers on their monthly passes. My friend Donna has experienced this on the Long Island Rail Road, and last week a blogger named Bobby posted his experience from the conductor’s point of view. I posted a comment to Bobby’s blog linking to Donna’s post, but I couldn’t help adding a correction to another comment by someone named Laser72.
Laser72 had tried to gently correct Bobby for referring to his passenger as a “cross dresser,” saying that since the passenger had a monthly pass, she probably spent a significant amount of time as a woman, and therefore “transgendered woman” was more appropriate.
A crossdresser is a man or woman who dresses up as the opposite gender on a more temporary basis, usually just for fun, or as a sexual fetish. A transgendered person is someone who dresses and lives as the other gender on a much more permanent basis, usually full time …
In response, I considered linking to my Feelings and Actions post, but I realized that that was way too in-depth and detailed for a casual blog reader to digest in one sitting. I tried to write just a few sentences saying that I disagreed with Laser72’s categories, but Laser72 asked for clarification. So now I’m trying to write something that’s shorter than the Feelings and Actions post, but still says enough.
The main problem with Laser72’s categories is that the terms don’t always mean those things. They’re ambiguous, and that ambiguity causes problems. For example, when people say that they’ve “always been transgendered,” they don’t mean that they’ve always dressed and lived as the other on a permanent or full-time basis. They mean that there are particular feelings that they’ve always had, and it’s quite well documented that many people who say that they’ve “always been transgendered” have in the past dressed up as the opposite gender on a temporary basis, for fun or as a sexual fetish. If these people have really always been transgendered, then it’s not just possible but common to be transgender and a cross-dresser.
The term “cross-dresser” is also problematic. It was invented by people who cross-dressed but were uncomfortable with the term “transvestite,” which to them suggested cross-dressing just for fun, or as a sexual fetish, or even for prositution. It was originally used to refer to anyone who dressed as “the opposite gender,” regardless of motivation. Therefore, it could refer to transgender people, either before they start living full-time as their chosen gender, or when they dress as their birth gender temporarily, like Bobby’s passenger.
This is why I think it’s better to use terms like “transgender” and “fetish” for feelings and motivations, and terms like “cross-dresser” for actions.
Gothamist has summaries of the gossip that came out in 2003 about Larry Wachowski, one of the creators of the Matrix series. After learning that he was dating a dominatrix who was Buck Angel’s ex, and started appearing in public with more feminine grooming (clean-shaven, long hair, make-up, fancier clothes and jewelry), the gossip columnists figured that there was only one explanation. He’s getting a sex change (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!
Of course, in November of that year Wired ran a story with this quote: “One source who knows the couple and the scene dismisses the sex change rumor, explaining that Larry is merely a cross-dresser, not a transsexual.” But apparently this did not stop the rumors, and a Fox entertainment reporter was fully expecting to find a woman on the set of Speed Racer. He didn’t. He didn’t find Wachowski either, but everyone he interviewed said that Larry was still a guy.
If Wachowski wanted to transition four years ago, with as much money and power as he has I’m guessing that he probably would have by now, but he hasn’t. Maybe his girlfriend influenced his fashion sense. Maybe it’s some BDSM thing. Maybe he really is a cross-dresser. The idea that The Matrix was partly written by a transgender person makes a lot of sense to me.
Of course, it’s none of my business if he’s a transsexual, a cross-dresser, or something completely other. But geez, will some people get it now that being trans doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to transition?
This recent article from Virginia Postrel helped me put my finger on what bothered me about Christina Aguilera’s song “Beautiful.” Or rather, the biggest thing that bothered me; Aguilera’s show-offy vocal stylings grated on me from the beginning, but it was really the lyrics that annoyed me. I just found out, from the Wikipedia article, that the music and lyrics were written by 1 of the former 4 Non Blondes, Linda Perry.
I’ve only just watched the video that I linked, since I figured I should watch something before I show it to you. Up to now, my exposure to the song has been involuntary; it’s been forced into my brain by our local Clear Channel pod. Aguilera does get props for including a drag queen in her video, but that idea isn’t new; in the liner notes for a Go-Go’s compilation I have, one of the members writes about how their (much more insightful) song “Beautiful” was inspired by a scene from a John Waters movie featuring Divine.
So what really rubs me the wrong way about this song is the assertion that “I/We/You are beautiful, in every single way.” In other words, everyone is beautiful. I’d kinda agree that everyone has something beautiful about them, but is everyone beautiful in every single way? Well, no. Adjectives serve to distinguish people, and when there is no distinction, the adjective becomes meaningless. If everyone were really beautiful in every single way, then no one would be beautiful, and beauty would cease to exist. But beauty clearly does exist in people’s minds, and very few people really think that everyone is beautiful in every single way.
This is the third in a series of posts about gender categories. In the first post I discussed the categorization theories of Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff. In the second I took on the question of whether transgender people are men, women, some combination, or neither men or women, and discarded the idea that transgender people form some kind of “third gender.” In this post I will examine the idea that all transgender people are either men or women, and that there is no overlap.
There are two ways separating transgender people into men and women. One is to assert that each of us is either a man or a woman forever, and that this is determined before birth and unchangeable. The other is that our gender is dependent on a specific feature, and if that feature changes then our gender changes. I dislike the first approach intensely, and I find the second approach problematic.
In the first of these posts I discussed how there are two categories (man and woman), and it’s natural that people would prefer to be able to sort every person in the world into one of those two. The categories are so complex, it’s also understandable that people would prefer to have a single criterion for sorting. Sadly, the natural world eludes any attempt to pin down a single criterion. The most popular criterion is genitals, followed by chromosomes, since they’re the areas with the least overlap, but there are plenty of intersex cases that defy categorization on both criteria. There is also the difficulty that chromosomes are uncategorizable without special equipment, and genitals are also commonly kept hidden. Secondary sex characteristics like breasts and hip width are subject to a lot of overlap, and breasts can be developed with hormones.
In my recent post about gender categories, I focused on describing the way people tend to view gender categories, and why. In my last post I discussed the empirical basis for Eleanor Rosch’s theories of categorization. In this post I’m going to be prescriptive. Unlike cranky prescriptivists, I’m going to justify my positions in terms of my personal agenda and priorities. You will probably agree with my prescriptions to the extent that you share my priorities.
One of my priorities is honesty: honesty with yourself and honesty with others. Other priorities are freedom, fairness, safety, respect and caring. I also like consistency, but not foolish consistency. I dislike and distrust innatism (also called nativism). A good set of gender categories will balance these priorities, giving people the freedom to live their lives as they wish, while being fair and honest to others. It will be reasonably consistent and avoid innatist assumptions.
There are really three possibilities for the gender assignment of “gender-non-conforming” people, which would include not just transgender people, but also intersex people and other people who are hard to put into one category or another. A given person is either in one gender (a man or a woman), both, or neither. I’ll take up these possibilities in order of how I feel about them.
In this post I’ll start with the possibility I like the least: “neither.” Continue reading “The Sixteenth Gender”
In my previous post, I quoted some work by George Lakoff about the category mother, and extrapolated it to the case of gender categories. I have a scientific caveat to make. Lakoff was trained by Noam Chomsky, and although he broke publicly with Chomsky in the 1970s, he still uses Chomsky’s methods of introspection and grammaticality judgments. When Chomsky wants to prove a grammatical point, he invents sentences in English and classifies them as “grammatical” or “ungrammatical,” and builds his arguments on those judgments. When Chomsky’s students study languages that they’re not native speakers of, they invent sentences in those languages, find a native speaker and ask that person for grammaticality judgments. This method assumes that grammaticality judgments (a) are valid and unbiased, and (b) hold for every other speaker of the language, assumptions that are not justified.
Lakoff does something similar with his list of “but tests” that are judged as “normal” or “strange,” and I repeated this in my discussion. These informal judgments are useful for speculation, but they have the same problems as Chomsky’s grammaticality judgments. However, the notions of radial categories and prototype effects are based on more than this. Eleanor Rosch herself did reproducible psycholinguistic laboratory tests, and most of the Lakoff work that I’ve described can be accounted for with tests like these.
Continue reading “The Scientific Basis of Categorization Studies”
A while ago on the My Husband Betty message boards I posted an analysis of the category “woman” in contemporary American culture, and where transgender people fit into it. A couple of months ago there was another discussion about this issue, and since then I’ve wanted to rework my original post and make it available here. In my view, a lot of discrimination against transgender people has its origins in overly rigid views of gender. I have no illusion that posting my analysis here will suddenly enlighten bigots around the world, but I hope it will be helpful to some people. On the other hand, it’s not quite as helpful to the transgender movement as some might like.
It’s important to note here that this is a descriptive analysis. I think it’s a waste of time to present the way you want things to be before you figure out how they are. I am trying to describe the way that people understand gender, and after that I will talk about how it could be different. Please don’t take my description of an attitude or belief as an endorsement of it.
My analysis is based on the categorization theories of Eleanor Rosch, as presented in George Lakoff’s excellent book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. In Chapter 4, Lakoff shows how it is more useful to describe the category of mother with a “cluster model” than with the classical categorization model that uses necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, Dr. Johnson defined a mother as a woman that has borne a child; Lakoff calls this the “birth model” of motherhood. But Lakoff identifies four other models that are in wide use: a genetic model, a nurturance model, a marital model and a genealogical model. He invents a series of more or less plausible sentences with the phrase “real mother” in them, each one affirming one of the five models and rejecting the others.
Critically, mother includes mutually exclusive subcategories like surrogate mother and foster mother. Some people may try to be fundamentalist and dogmatic about the birth criterion, but most agree that both of these kinds of mothers are still mothers in the end. Continue reading “Describing gender categories: clusters and radii, Rosch and Lakoff”