The First Principle

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It’s been years since I wrote about principles of transgenderism.  It’s funny, when I think about it, how I was so deep into discussions of transgender issues at the time that I just wanted to get down the things that separated my thoughts from some of the prevailing ideas.  But now, I realize that I should add another principle that’s more important than the eight I listed, and I think it’s one that just about every transgender person would agree on.  It’s implied in all of my work in this area, but I want to come right out and say it:

No one deserves to be hurt or killed just because they’re transgender.

Pretty obvious, huh?  Well, I guess it’s not so obvious to the bashers and killers.  But to me it’s the top priority in anything transgender-related.  We can make it Principle One and move all the others down, or make it the Zeroth Principle like Isaac Asimov.  Either way, I can’t think of anything more important.

The Value of Being Out

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Tonight I came across this interview about GLB issues with Barack Obama, and one passage in particular resonated with me:

A college professor of mine helped me to see the lives of LGBT people from a different perspective. He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. And he was just a terrific guy.  His comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues.

I, too, had an experience like that: a fellow student of mine who was willing to tell anyone and everyone that he was gay.  Steve wasn’t an authority figure (although I would meet plenty later), but still an example of pride and self-acceptance who inspired me to reexamine and discard my homophobia.  I had known many closet cases and “don’t ask, don’t tell” gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, and their own shame and fear had given me license to judge them.  I just couldn’t do that with Steve, and after a while I realized that I couldn’t do it with myself either.

This is the reason why I think we non-transition-track transgender people (transvestites, cross-dressers, etc.) should practice some verbal hygiene on the term “out” and stop using it to describe someone who cross-dresses in public settings that are still anonymous, and who doesn’t disclose their transgenderism to their family, friends, neighbors or co-workers.  Of course there’s such a thing as too much information, but there are times when people need to know that we’re transgender.

Clearly our next president benefited from the information he got from his professor, and more importantly, from his professor’s own self-acceptance and self-respect.  The gay and lesbian communities have benefited from Obama’s acceptance and respect.  If transvestites ever hope to be accepted and respected, we have to accept and respect ourselves, and be out of the closet.  And this kind of “out” has very little to do with clothes: we can be out to our friends and neighbors without them ever seeing us in a skirt, wig or maid costume.  All it takes is these three words, “I’m a transvestite.”  Could you say them to Barack Obama?  Could you say them, with pride, to a student who might some day be president?

Update. August 2009: I just discovered that Steve’s husband died tragically in March.  Steve wrote for Americablog about how some of his experiences afterwards highlighted the connection between being out, marriage equality and respect.  Last week, he wrote about how it related to his lexicography work.

James “Cora” Birk on Transition and Regret

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In the light of the recent news that sportswriter Mark Penner has detransitioned, I went back and looked at an earlier post on regret. I noticed that I had linked to Cora Birk’s writings on her partial transition and subsequent de-transition, but that they have since been removed from the site.

However, Birk’s columns are still available via the Internet Archive, and since the last one, especially, is particularly well-written, I would like to share some excerpts:

It is still (and always has been) true that I want to be female. However, somewhere along the way, I appear to have convinced myself that this desire was much more than a simple, harmless wish — that it was a yearning, that if I didn’t get what I wanted I couldn’t possibly go on. I’m not exactly sure when this happened, though I do suspect an intense psychological imprinting experience sometime in 1998.

[…]

I embraced transsexuality, I think, because I was extremely uncomfortable with the other terminology I was hearing. If I was merely a crossdresser of one kind or another, I was nothing more than a largely misunderstood pervert with an extensive makeup collection. But if I was transsexual… then I was validated. I could be helped. I could go on hormones and one day have sex reassignment, all under the protection of politically correct GLBT activists who would see my condition as something to be proud of. I could hold my head high in parades, and everyone around me would put aside their native discomfort with the situation and use all the right pronouns.

My take on this is that the decision about whether or not to transition would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to deal with rigid categories and arguments based on destiny.  Over at the Trans Group Blog, Helen, Julie and Marlena all allude to the question of whether Penner is “really a transsexual.”  To their great credit, they refuse to consider it, but their use still implies that they believe it’s a valid question, and that people who are “really” transsexuals should transition.

Let me put this out there: if we assume that there are “true transsexuals” and “false transsexuals” out there, isn’t it possible that there are “true transsexuals” who would turn out to be happier in their birth genders, and “false transsexuals” who would manage to be quite content after transition?

New Celebrity Detransitioner

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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.

Magical Thinking

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A year or two back I came across Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and was blown away by the theory underlying it.  I have to admit that I haven’t read much more of it yet than the first couple of chapters, but the rest, from what I can tell, is details about particular beliefs.  What fascinated me most was Frazer’s division of beliefs into four categories, based on what is being related to and how.  He makes a distinction between science and magic, as follows: “The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence.”  Science and magic are both rule-governed, but magic misunderstands the rules.  Religion, by contrast, is personal:

But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal?

Things (rule-governed) People (relationships, prayer)
Empirical Science Society
Faith-based Magic Religion

Frazer does not really discuss the fourth quadrant of the chart, dealing with non-supernatural beings on a personal level, but it’s not very relevant to the main point, which is situating magic with respect to science and religion.

Glamor, Horror and the Trans Fatale

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A couple of years ago I recommended to you Virginia Postrel for her insightful discussions of glamour, and argued that they’re relevant to transgenderism and transvestism.  Now Postrel has started a new blog focusing on glamour, as part of a new book she’s writing on the subject.  This is definitely good stuff.

Growing out of a discussion of whether a McCain presidential campaign ad aims to present Obama as the Antichrist, Postrel has a great post about the relationship between glamour and horror.  She writes:

While horror comes in different forms, some decidedly unglamorous (e.g., Alien, Saw), a lot of horror, including vampire tales, depends on glamour: What starts out as beautiful and alluring is revealed to be terrible and life-destroying–and by then it’s too late. Witness not only the vampire but the femme fatale, especially in her 19th-century form. Glamour promises escape and transformation; horror replaces escape with entrapment.

(With regard to gross-out “horror” movies like Saw and Friday the 13th, I’d say that they’re more appropriately called “terror movies.”  Sadly, that term has now been appropriated by the terrorism frame, but before that there were some insightful discussions of the contrast between terror and horror.)

This explanation of horror helps me to understand some of the various “trans fatale” movies (Dressed to Kill, Homicidal, M Butterfly): if the idea of the femme fatale plays off of men’s fears of unexpectedly strong women, then the trans fatale has the glamour of being beautiful and alluring, but are even more threatening because they can be imagined to possess the physical strength and aggression (and ability to rape) of men.

Going further, it seems connected to the “trans panic” that some men have claimed: they believed they were kissing a vulnerable woman, and on discovering that the person was male they were overwhelmed with the fear that they had been seduced and would be raped or killed.  This is often, horribly, used to justify beating and even killing the trans person.  Of course, a male who is small or slim enough to pass as a vulnerable woman usually has no more strength than a woman that size, and any trans woman on hormones probably doesn’t have much ability or desire to penetrate a man, but reality plays very little role in any of this.

Deconstructing glamour with reality is actually an effective comedy technique, and this can explain why so many people find cross-dressing funny.  Since men have many of the traits that are considered unattractive in women (hairy, sweaty, big bellies), but more commonly and to a greater degree, a cross-dressed man can produce just enough cues to project the image of a glamorous woman (long wig, long legs, short skirt) before shattering that image with a hairy belly.  The humor is a bit broad for my taste, but it clearly works for many people, as shown by the enduring popularity of Benny Hill and Martin Lawrence.

The first pregnant man?

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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.

Be careful, you’ll put an eye out!

grvsmth

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.