The circumstances under which I first began blogging were very different than the circumstances under which I’m now leaving.

I began being invited to speak about trans and LGBTQ issues in a cis-dominated space. My role was, more or less explicitly, to simply be a trans voice in that space. The readership was cis, and didn’t understand much about those things.

And I was pretty new to all of it myself. I’d only been purposefully living as a woman for a few months.

So I focused in on the “basics” of transgenderism… what I believed it was, what I believed was important about it, how I believed our rights and identities and lives should be approached…. I tried to articulate the fundamentals of what set us apart and to address the fact of our mistreatment. I did it in a “trans 101” way, explaining a few basic terminologies and some easily grasped principles of etiquette, discussing a few of the more mainstream and visible political issues, that kind of thing. I did this because it’s what made sense, what fit the context and my (assumed) role within it… and because it was all I really knew about anything at the time.

A few months of experiences as a trans woman, and being read as such by a hostile society, are not substantial experiences. They don’t provide much to go on, and I was only maybe a year out from my initial confrontation with the discourse of gender variance… a year out from a time where I still spoke in terms like “natal female” or “GG”, where I was anxious about whether or not I’d be “passable”, where I would talk about “feminine features” as objective qualities and “girl mode” and “boy mode” as definitive categories of presentation. The evolution of my thinking to the point that it was aware of phenomena like cissexism and femmephobia and the difference between transphobia and trans-misogyny, the point that I understood the relationship between trans-misogyny and patriarchy and I’d come to be regarded as feminist (and arguably trans-feminist)… that process was mostly just all about reading.

I’d had minimal experiences, and minimal contact with other trans people. What contact I had had with them was with The Trans Community, the centralized, heirarchial and internally normative spaces that tend to be the only means of access, resources and information most people questioning, or not yet plugged into the wider discourse, have available. And the books I was reading were simply the ones that sell, the ones that are widely available and widely known, like Julia Serano and Kate Bornstein… authors who themselves benefited from affirming the concepts their audiences believed in or wanted to believe to at least the same degree that they challenged anything; authors who benefitted from being privileged within the standards, heirarchies and expectations of The Trans Community and who met the conventions established for what a trans advocate or community leader is supposed to be.

Consequently, the ideas of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender itself, even my feminism as a whole, wasn’t anything new. It was simply inherited. I just happened to be a trans woman in a specific place, at a specific time (trans news stories were very rapidly becoming increasingly prevalent in the news during 2011, and we were becoming an increasingly visible demographic), in a specific little niche (the skeptic community) who were, in that moment, increasingly concerned with questions of diversity and gender. And I was just articulate enough to be able to play the role of introducing this basic trans discourse into that specific context, through that specific lens of skepticism and critical thinking, with a pro-science slant. I knew just enough about the  related science, and had just enough understanding of the principles of skepticism, to be able to apply it, and talk about feminism and trans issues in terms of how misogyny and cissexism are products of cultural bias, how things like “scientifically, biologically male” are not actually more substantiated by science than trans self-identification. I t was Trans 101 with only the small shift of ditching the cultural relativism and somewhat anti-science attitudes present in most trans advocacy in favour of an approach like: “science suggests sex is actually complex and multifaceted, chromosomes aren’t particularly relevant to the process of differentiation, and applying critical thought, critical self-reflection and skepticism to social issues like gender is a more useful application of those skills than talking about Bigfoot and UFOs all the time”.

It seemed specialized and niche, but it really wasn’t anything all that new. It was just presenting established, and fairly “safe”, ideas about gender diversity in a way that would work for a specific kind of cis readership, in a specific niche.

That wasn’t an entirely bad thing. It had a point. I was probably a valuable initial reference point for lots of cis people to first start “getting” trans stuff, to a certain extent, and one thing many trans readers responded to was having been very happy to see a trans woman writing in a context and space that wasn’t specifically trans or LGBTQ. When those are the only places we’re “allowed” to write or speak, like when trans people are invited to a feminist conference but are only positioned on the “trans issues” panel, that makes us much easier to ignore and erase, and it reinforces the perception that the world is segregated into “trans issues” and everything else, with us not having value to the latter. It’s also a great and powerful thing just to be reminded that being trans doesn’t mean that that has to define you. You can be trans AND a skeptic, AND an atheist, AND a geek, AND… well, anything else at all that’s important you.

Relatedly, a lot of trans readers responded positively to the fact that Queereka was an LGBTQ space in which a trans woman was actually in a leadership role, rather than simply being tacked on to fill out the acronym while ultimately having to work within the frameworks established by a more privileged cisgender queer (probably a gay man, maybe a lesbian).

But as said, a few months isn’t much experience, and I didn’t have much exposure to the real diversity of ideas within trans discourse, within feminism and within trans-feminism. My life moved forward, and with it I was constantly navigating aspects of life as a woman, as trans, as a trans woman… and as sober… that were new to me, and learning from them. And doing my writing, being a trans woman in a fairly public, visible and accessible role, that resulted in my connecting to more and more other trans writers, other trans-feminists… including trans-feminists who weren’t part of that narrow, privileged range that get the book-deals and show up on television, trans people who weren’t dominant within the centralized Trans Community, trans people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, many of them marginalized, trans people with different kinds of ways of articulating, experiencing or expressing their gender, trans people with different kinds of narratives, etc… most importantly, I was increasingly exposed to the broad, diverse and much less safe and normative ideas and perspectives and ways of thinking that this “underground” trans discourse and trans-feminism presented.

And my role as a writer meant I was constantly thinking these things through, questioning things, questioning myself, trying to reconcile various concepts and perspectives I was exposed to and trying to understand, viewing things in new ways as a consequence of how my ongoing experiences as a trans woman either confirmed or challenged my expectations and concepts, trying to negotiate all these things in relationship to one another, and incorporating it all into my work and into my ideas, post by post by post, and in the process questioning and deconstructing all the Trans 101 basics upon which my ideas of gender and feminism were initially founded. My thinking went through a process of growth, and my posts gradually shifted from being explanations of the basic idea of transgenderism and gender diversity to a cisgender audience from being marking posts in my development; and efforts to try to shift the general conversation about transgenderism and gender variance from simply repeatedly  attempting to present those received, static basics towards instead reflecting and more widely disseminating the productive, dynamic, multi-faceted and evolving discourse of intersectional trans-feminism I’d been learning from.

As my thinking developed, my priorities shifted… instead of wanting to simply explain to primarily cis audiences what trans people are, what our experiences are like, why they shouldn’t treat us like shit, and how to treat us better, I wanted to be part of the trans-feminist discourse and try to redefine the entire frameworks of gender and feminism that had led to our explanations, and our fights against cissexism, to be necessary in the first place. I didn’t really feel like simply providing the oppressor class with a new set of vocabularies and concepts was going to be sufficient, and I began to regard the Trans 101 frameworks as themselves destructive.

Was it really all that beneficial to simply add a new set of terms or concepts for gender onto which people could apply assumptions and expectations? New categories of gender, new “roles”, new codified sets of behaviour and new codified sets of assumptions people could have about your history, identity, body and potential that people could misread, or misperceive you as, or misunderstand?

And those basic frameworks were themselves a product of a normavity. Yes, it was normavity internal to a marginalized category, but that didn’t really matter. All normativities are narrowed to a specific context. There’s pretty much no such thing as a GLOBAL normativity, except those incredibly few things which are related to, like, humanity itself, and are universally consistent to it. A specific system of privileges bred that idea of “what trans people are and want”, which was the same system of privileges that made that the concept of trans I was initially introduced to (and had to subsequently deconstruct), AND the same system of privileges that permitted me the role of introducing it to a specific cis audience.

The “basics” of trans issues weren’t simply perceived as such because they were the easier thing to understand. It was largely because it was what the trans people who had the luxury of defining trans issues wanted them to be seen as. The priorities that determined that set of things cis were supposed to understand about us, and ways they were supposed to regard us, were consistent with the priorities of the trans people in the  best position to control the trans discourse and therefore control what the “consensus” presented to external parties would be (and, ultimately, what people who were questioning would be presented with when they first began to understand themselves as trans and research what that meant, what the information available on the top google results for “trans” would be, and what books about trans identity, trans politics, transitioning, trans families and trans-feminism would be available at Chapters… even which would be available at “LGBT” bookstores, which would be published at all, and which would be anywhere outside of fully democratized or anarchic means of distribution).

All the while, even those privileged to dictate the nature of the “fundamentals” of trans issues were being privileged by a cissexist system that othered them, obliged to frame those fundamentals in ways that would appeal to the audiences and readership giving them that privilege and platform, ultimately mesh with the cis-centric frames and perspectives through which those fundamentals were read, leave other social concerns like race, class, disability or nationality out of the picture, and have “trans issues” remain a separate concern from gender and heterosexuality and patriarchy as a whole, such that it could be segretated out from wider social issues (even gender, reproductive rights, medical autonomy, etc), and investigated or ignored at the discretion of the cis reader.

The Trans 101, as defined by the trans people privileged by a cis system to speak for the “consensus” of a trans community, constructed our existence and its consideration as a choice: the cis person could choose to read and care, and thereby be validated in their self-perception as an “ally” and/or good person who cares about the well-being of others or as a down-to-earth, common sense type who likes to look at things rationally without worrying too much about ultra-minority concerns.

In its entirety, the framework, by being about “what trans people are and want, and the vocabulary to discuss or address us”, as a separate category from an addressed cis audience, positioned apart from the realities of gender as a whole, which reflected on the reality of that cis readership. It left the choice in THEIR hands as to whether to take it or leave it, in relationship to this fundamentally separate identity and segregated category of humanity. It defined us, but defined us separate from rather than illustrative of the human experience of gender, and in so doing gave them new and “sensitive” vocabularies to distinguish us. The Trans 101, in educating cis people as to our existence and “wants”, reinforced our existence as a separate category of being, a separate category of experience, a separate vocabulary, and a separate set of concerns. All the while working within the essentialistic model of gender as primarily an issue of what you are and how you should be understood, all the while specializing us as a subject of study and understanding (who you can, sensitively, ask to explain their OWN existence rather than asking “experts” to explain their existence… but still, explanations at the forefront)… all the while placing as its centerpiece the cis choice to be “educated” and to “understand” in contrast to how this an extension of the shared experience of gender.

And alllowing only the narrow range of trans voices who articulated their experience within this framework as an essentialized and inherent Different Gender, and who kept this “fascinating” and “exotic” knowledge discrete from not only the cis experience but from all other intersectional social concern.

Consequently “gender identity” was central. Things were consistently framed in inevitably heirarchial spectrum models. It was essentialized as “brain sex” and “gender identity” ( allowing the approach of sex and gender identity to be firmly distinct, and cis people “being a sex” / trans people “having a gender identity”). It defined trans as something you are rather than a way you express yourself, way you live, way you are treated, and way you interpret experiences and feelings. It segregated the experience of “being” trans from all other experiences, however much they modify it: race, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, etc. It delineated specific and comprehensible linear narratives and tied that to the definitions of the identities themselves (male-to-female, female-to-male, pre-op, post-op, early transitioner, late transitioner). It segregated “transphobia” from the oppressions, marginalizations and violences that are intertwined with it, or that attend it, like misogyny, racism, homophobia, americo-centrism and ableism. And it allowed certain political priorities to be considered the needs or causes “of the trans community”- like insurance coverage, legal recognition of sex, media representation, transphobic feminism, bathroom access, human rights declarations- without regard to considerations that are of more immediate importance, with more brutal consequences, that matter to those groups that could not be segregated, in accordance with the normativities and dynamic of Other/Audience, as BASICS of trans issues simply because these happened to coincide with issues that weren’t “just” the concerns presented along with the terms and concepts of Trans 101: homelessness, addiction, HIV, fetishization, rape, sexual assault, violence, incarceration, survival sex work, pumping, medical access, resource hoarding, inequal dstribution of violence, shelter access, cross-cultural realities of “gatekeeping”, exclusion from rape-survivor resources, police bias and profiling, immigrant experiences of the legalities, medical co-morbidity, non-binary experiences of gender, the validity of semantic distinctions between gender variant categories, etc. etc. etc.

Were the Trans 101 vocabularies and concepts even improvements over the narrow models most cis people inherit from the normative, binarist, essentialist, patriarchal culture? Does it actually make anything better to have these models with which to other us, and narrow “trans issues” down to the concerns of those they privilege? Does it make shit worse? Does it simply give them a means to REGARD themselves as allies for having made that choice to be educated, within the game they set up for us to set up for them to pick ? And does it give them a means to simply help out the narrow range of trans people who frame those vocabularies in exchange for absolving them of the need to pay attention? With the most privileged trans people appeased by this system of “politely explain to them the basics/priorities” / ”now I’m educated and an ally!”, only the most marginalized and voiceless remain in trouble, who aren’t heard anyway. So: “problem solved!” for everyone in a position to say anything.

Which is, you know… fucked up?

But none of that changes the fact that different audiences exist in different contexts and are going to understanding things differently. I can’t just, like, pounce on a random cis dude on the street and start talking to him about engaging in an intersectional analysis and deconstruction of the cissexist, patriarchal and white-supremacist assumptions implicit to the medical pseudo-science of “facial feminization surgery”. Different contexts, different audiences and different goals demand different kinds of language and approaches, and the fact remains that sometimes you have to deal with “beginner” audiences who have never really considered gender variance, or ever considered it outside the narrow frame they inherited from our shared cissexist, hetero-oppositional patriarchy,

So what does it mean to attempt Trans 101, to attempt explaining trans-variance, in a cultural context in which the “basics” of that question, and the systems of what does and doesn’t get defined as “basic”, have been overwhelmingly a means of our own marginalization, a means of externally limiting the range of our own voice, and a means of reinforcing the kyrarchy and privilege internal to our community that keeps it centralized and dominated by specific groups? What does it even mean to attempt to explain a category of experience precisely defined by its own variance, to define something that only exists by virtue of human defiance of having this aspect of human experience defined?

Any kind of statement of “this is what trans is” would be inherently reductive, but reductive statements aren’t necessarily always destructive. The problem is when the reductive simplification presents itself as a sufficient response to the question.

Like… recently, myself and a number of other trans-feminists have been challenging some of the assumed “basics” of trans that boil down to presenitn the frameworks of “gender identity”, “gender presentation”, “sexual orientation” and “sex” being THE four basic variables that can articulate the full range of human sexual diversity. This is a silly, simplistic, harmful reduction that, when framed as four “spectrums” (with both “masculine / feminine” and intensity varying by degree), all too many people are willing to happily buy into as an enlightened ally’s model of gender/sex/sexuality. Some of the ways we’ve been deconstructing that is by returning to the work of various feminists in illustrating the degree to which gender is a socio-culturally defined and interpersonal performance, the problematic essentialism of “gender identity”, the lack of hard distinction between “gender identity” and gender presentation, the multiplicity of variables that define sex, the lack of hard distinction between a neurobiological sexual differentiation and an anatomical sexual differentiation, the degree to which self-conception of gender even in relationship to physiological sex is going to be conditioned by socio-cultural models of what a member of a given gender “ought” be, and the degree to which sexuality and “sexual orientation” is gendered, experienced through and in relation to the body, and modifies self-perception of gender.

It’s some complicated shit, and we’ve been doing the hard work of pointing out that these seductively simple “progressive” models ultimately just present a new set of essentialized roles and categories for people to be sexist, patriarchal or cissexist idiots about. Or from which to make assumptions about people, and goad them into meeting expectations. But it took like all of a few months since deconstructions of that model started working their way into the general trans-feminist discourse for NEW little diagrams to pop up in the trans-blogosphere outlining a small set of similar variables and “spectrums”, just now making slightly different distinctions, and making small little qualifications about how gender is socio-culturally conditioned.

That. Is. JAW-DROPPING.

There’s a fundamental tension there that illustrates a lot of the crisis of “Trans 101” and the difficult push-and-pull between deconstruction and simplifications meant for comprehension by a normative, mainstream audience: the tension between the need to explain to the normative, mainstream audience that “it’s more complicated than that”, in response to their received notions about gender, sex and sexuality, while providing them with new notions and models that aren’t “too complicated” to understand. So we end up creating simplifications of our own effort to assert that the experience of gender is complicated. We created little reductive diagrams, outlining a small set of generalized variables, to explain that little reductive diagrams, drawing assumptions about people’s bodies and experiences and identities out of a small set of generalized variables, aren’t adequate. You see the problem?

We can try to have the simplification be direction towards the diversity of experiences, and towards the immensity of the discourse itself, but to where do we direct them? We can’t simply say “shit’s complicated, lots of people are arguing about it”, and we can’t direct them towards specific starting points without them interpreting their understanding that there ARE such starting points, or their understanding that it’s important to acknowledge the diversity of experience and the diversity of the discourse, as being itself the “trans 101” and the basic education that’s required to regard themselves as “good allies” and move on.

We could direct them into specifically paying attention to one particular perspective on the discourse, but that would again face the problematic issues of which perspectives are positioned as the “beginner” or “entry” points and how that relates to privileges, heirarchies and normativities internal to the trans community (we can’t say one trans perspective is more “basic” or “preliminary” or “general” than another without normalizing it and marginalizing another). Even if for this purpose we were to mark a perspective that’s specifically coached in intersectionality, designed to be some kind of aggregation of the diversity of trans experiences, having listened to and coalesced that diversity of perspectives into a single description, that STILL wouldn’t work because it would all be filtered through the original perspective, frame, priorities and values of THAT perspective. And we could then maybe make an aggregation of the aggregations, but then we hit the same problem again, just one stop removed: who’s doing the aggregating, and in accordance with what priorities and values? It would just be some sort of infinite, recursive loop, where we always, ultimately, eventually come back to a person from a specific background and perspective with particular priorities and values interpreting things for an audience who themselves have a specific perspective and set of assumptions and biases.

Even if the simplification gestures towards the diversity and complexity of the issue, it still simplifies, still erases and is still destructive.

What makes this an especially poignant problem is the fact that trans experiences and identities are all about new vocabularies and new narratives. In so far as we’re to understand gender as a semiotic system or language, transgenderism is the deviation from standardized language of the dictionary towards new words and new meanings for things that couldn’t be articulated in the previous dialect. Language is so important to us: our pronouns, our names, our titles, our forms of address, the semiotics of fashion and grooming and presentation, what vocabulary we have available for saying what our experience and existence is and what can meaningfully give voice to it. As children we were assigned the words “boy” or “girl” and their attendant definitions and concepts, and along with them we were assigned specific narratives, specific projections of what our future lives would be. In the act of redefining our gender we challenge the initial assignment of the word (say, “boy”), we challenge our naming (say, “Edward”), we challenge the definition of the word and concept we use to articulate, express and assert our self in opposition to those that proved inadequate (say, “women are XX and have vaginas”), and we challenge the assumed narrative that had been assigned, expected and laid out for us (Edward is a boy, so he will be my son and he will wear ‘boy-clothes’ and like sports and have sex with girls and be a man and get a manly job and raise a family and…). In so far as gender is a semiotic system and language, and what attends our assignment isn’t simply a categorization but a modeled and pre-determined, expected narrative for our lives, the act of ‘transition’ is all about challenging language and meanings and narratives. We mean something new, outside the standardized definitions, and we carve out a new story.

Language isn’t a one-way street, however. It’s one thing to say a word, it’s another thing for it mean something. It’s one thing to write, it’s another to be read. It’s one thing to express something, another to have it understood. Or misunderstood. And so it is with gender. So long as we don’t have a vocabulary with which to speak, we don’t get heard, and so long as our genders remain illegible or incomprehensible to, or misread by, the people around us we remain invisible… at best, something or someone else is seen is our stead. Consequently, translating our existence remains a fundamental part of our existence being heard and seen… in terms of it’s existence as part of the cultural field of gender, a fundamental part of our being there at all. If no one had ever translated the concept of “woman” beyond a narrow set of assumptions and expectations about biology and experience, I wouldn’t be a woman at all… at least not ever seen or understood as such (which is all that word and concept really means to me; that I be seen and understood as a woman, so I’m able express everything what matters about myself through it).

Where does that leave the role of the trans advocate, the trans writer, the trans blogger? Those who try to articulate all this to the audiences that don’t understand? Are we translators, there to offer meaning to the gendered self-expression of those who fall outside the conventions of gender’s normative definitions? How do we offer that meaning, provide definition and a link of understanding, without hemming in and narrowing exactly the range of experiences and self-conceptions and identities and feelings and bodies and sexualities that we’re there to convey? How we do operate as a means to lend new meaning to the lexicon of gender without reinforcing that lexicon as an imposition upon human experience, undermining exactly the potentiality, the versatility and the diversity that ultimately is the only inherent and universal experience of gender variance? How do we translate that variance without simply adding more codified roles, expectations, diagnoses and pathologies to the set we already have?

We can’t undermine the entire system of gender. We can’t. Utopian gender-abolitionists believe this, but I don’t. I believe it’s inherent to us. We perceive sexual difference, in others or in ourselves, and we try to understand and express it. That doesn’t seem harmful to me, it just seems human. And over time we develop heuristics for it… ways to make it easier; if one aspect of sexual difference is usually consistent with another, we guess that when we encounter the one in a person we’ll encounter the other. And that’s not itself harmful either, just… simple.

But we also have social orders and kyrarchy. We also have patriarchy. And we have diversity of experience. Things get complicated. Human diversity is complicated. I don’t think I’d want it to be simple.

Maybe it’s an inherently broken thing to attempt to articulate the trans experience at all, let alone articulate it to an outside perspective. We ARE the glitches, the new meanings, the problems, the hiccups in the heuristic, the diversity, the variance. Maybe that’s all we need or should communicate about ourselves beyond ourselves: You don’t get it. You won’t get it. We’re something else. We don’t fit. And wherever or whenever we do just means your system still isn’t broad enough, and you still don’t get it.  

But if that’s the case, then out genders are broken too. To speak, to have a voice… that only counts in so far as you’re heard and understood.

That’s bleak, though. I don’t like bleak. There has to be some kind of way to negotiate these things… in our experience, and those of us who, by luck or misfortune or effort or talent, ended up in the position of being “trans writers” and “trans advocates”. And for all of us, together, as the trans discourse itself. It can’t be the case that this process of understanding, questioning, deconstructing, rebuilding and understanding is pointless and ultimately chasing our own tails around the fact that what we are is a voice just on the periphery on comprehension. Because, we have moved forward. We do.

At least I moved forward. And can understand so much more, not just in ideas, but in the people I encounter, than I did when I first came to trans web forums asking if, after HRT, I’d be “passable” as a “genetic girl”. And if I can get from there to here, through the conversation, through being open to that seemingly endless cycle of new and broken ideas, then it can’t truly be alien to human experience to learn to read a language of illegibility, define a category of variance, or understand the experience of being outside understanding.

Is that weird little in-between space, hovering right between the need for comprehension and simplification, and the fact that those simplifications will always be misunderstandings and require complications… is that the battlefield? Is that where the meanings are negotiated? Is to be the trans writer to be right there in the position that counts the most in having our genders be understood, ensuring that they count?

No. Fuck no.

Where the battle is, where things matter, that’s in the individual lives. It’s in every single person who in contrast to everything they’ve been told about who and what they are, what that means, what defines it and restricts them to it… in defiance of every expectation that they were saddled with along with the M or F on their birth certificate, like what they’d wear and who they’d fuck and what they’d do for a living and what name they’d have and keep and how their bodies would develop and what they’d choose to do with their bodies… in declaring their own identity, their own body, and carving out a range of their own narratives-to-be… THAT’s where it is. That’s what counts. The fact that it happens at all is a living testament to everything about people that’s worth believing in. And it’s beautiful, every. fucking. time.

And it’s been my honour and privilege to just do my best to help it be noticed.

UPDATE: also, goddamnit, I am so so sorry, but I don’t think final post is going to be finished by midnight. Not unless I rush through it, and I really don’t want to fuck it up. -sigh- Tomorrow morning then, everyone. Goodnight.

Soooo…

Adding to an already weird week and a delayed conclusion here, I got ALL kinds of messed up sick yesterday (was barely able to eat solid food), and didn’t get much writing done. So I wasn’t able to finish up the posts I’d had planned for Saturday. One of those just went up (“How Do I Know If I’m Trans?”), but the other two aren’t quite ready, yet. They’re the second part to the “Privileges and Decoys” two-parter I started earlier this week, and a long-delayed conclusion to (and sort of refinement of) the Fourth Wave series.
If I have time, I’ll try to put those up today, but I’m not sure that’s very likely? I want to make sure I get the Final Post finished, and I don’t want it to look sloppy and rushed in parts.

(It’ll be finished tonight, hopefully before midnight)

If I can’t get the two Series-Concluding ones up today, though, I’ll make sure to have them accessible to you at some later time. This blog itself is going to stay active for a couple more weeks anyway, so people have time to read the newer posts, save things, read the archives, whatever. So maybe I’ll just pop them up later? But still, today is the SNR “Finale”, and I’ll be saying goodybe to this as my “priority” project. I know I’ve been slacking on it like crazy, but still… the idea that this was what I was “supposed” to be working on, even when I felt not really invested in it, was still acting like a bit of a weight on my shoulders and holding me back from getting properly invested in the other projects I’ve been wanting to do.

Like, every time I felt enthusiastic and ready to get some work done on something, this little voice in my head kept telling me that I should put that energy here instead. And that would end up being demoralizing, and making me feel bad about how little I’d been doing, and I’d feel like I’d let you all down and stuff… and then, yeah, no more enthusiasm.

So I have to move on. I’m sorry!

Before I do, I want to thank and acknowledge everyone who’s helped me out…

First of all, I owe a debt to Rebecca Watson and Amy Roth, through whom I first started blogging when they asked me to join Skepchick, and to Ed Brayton, PZ Myers and Freethought Blogs in general, who were kind enough to take me on and give me this space after I left Skepchick and Queereka. In particular, Ian Cromwell and Greg Laden were an enormous help in finding myself a home here.

I am, of course, leaving here on good terms, having been more than happy to have been a part of this particular corner of the web. It was a joy and pleasure to know my colleagues here. Greta Christina, Miri, Stephanie Zvan, Jason Thibeault, Brianne Bilyeau, Jenn McCreight, Dana Hunter… they’ve all been great to work with and chat with and everything. Zinnia Jones also deserves a special shout-out in that she helped me out a bunch way back when I was first starting out, and first trying to cope with the general weirdness of being a transgender “internet celebrity” (however minor) and being as such in the atheist/skeptic blogosphere in particular.

I’ve also had some amazing trans-feminist colleagues and friends who have informed my work to a tremendous degree, and who helped my thoughts and ideas grow as I worked here. SO MUCH of “my” posts and the concepts I’ve developed here can ONLY honestly be described as collaborative and born out of discourse with all these awesome people I’ve known. Erica Inchoate and Monika London were great close collaborators and friends who had at least some role in almost everything I did here. Conversations with Wm-Caylee Hogg, Ariel Silvera, Imogen Binnie, Ami Angelwings, Christianne Benedict, Lisa Milibank, Susan Derson, Nicholas Kiddle, Jen Richards, Emily Aviva Kapor, Savannah ‘Lefty T Girl’, Sarah Brown, JTR, Amy Winter, Mym, Toranse, Zoe Brain, Roz Kevany, Sadie Vashti, Andy Semler, Lydia Neon, Katherine Lorraine, Xanthe, Patience Newbury and Emily Aiofe Somers also all lent a great deal to various ideas I developed or wrote about, and sometimes just acted as inspirations or reminded me what (and who) I was fighting for. In that regard, I’d also love to thank Janet Mock, who is an amazing, awe-inspiring and consistently just-plain-inspiring woman, who in addition to all her great advocacy work is also someone who know that this is something we need to work together on, and who believes in the work of her sisters and takes time to let us know that she does.

There are tons and tons and tons more badass trans people I’ve gotten to know through my work here, or through the internet trans-feminist discourse in general who I’d LOVE to give shout-outs to as well, but there’s so many of you! So I mostly tried to restrict the above to people who’ve directly impacted my work here in some way. It’s not a “favourite people” list (there’s a couple with whom I’m no longer on good terms), it’s just a people to whom I owe a debt for this blog list.

Of course it wasn’t JUST trans people who were important to the growth and development of my ideas, my writing and my activism. I also have been blessed to know lots of amazing cis allies who’ve been wonderful to have around: Elizabeth ‘Quirk’ Goodman, Carolyn Hogg, Aiofe O’Rierdan, Hannah Wright, Sarah Moglia, ‘Jadehawk’, Maggie Mayhem, April Gardner, Angela Wells, Jessica Luther, Grace from ‘Are Women Human?’, ‘Feminist Whore’, Sophie Hirschfeld, Emily Dietle, Heina Dadabhoy, Liz Henry… these people are all great. And I’d like to thank Gail Simone for being an amazing writer and advocate for diversity in comics (and advocate in general!), for taking the time and energy to genuinely invest herself in making sure she really understands the kinds of experiences and lives she writes about, and for being so kind and generous, and listening to, this particular silly fan-girl and the details of my silly life.

And there are also lots of trans-feminists who I haven’t really had the privilege of knowing, or sometimes just not knowing terribly well, but who nonetheless have inspired or affected me and my work in some regard: Reina July, Drew DeVeaux, Monica Roberts, Julia Serano, Annika, Morgan M. Page, Morgan McCormick, and Paris Lees come to mind, but there are definitely many, many more.

Also a thank you to Autumn Sandeen for the consistent support and promotion of my work!

I also, of course, owe a great deal to the ENTIRE tradition of feminism, trans-feminism, and queer advocacy that preceded me. So I’d also like to thank everyone still fighting that fight.

I’d like to thank the people who’ve brought me out to conventions and conferences, and had me around to give talks or panels, and helped get me around town or offered me a place to sleep or just helped out with travel expenses and things… Chana Messinger, Ania Bula, Kate Donovan, Andrew Tripp, Seanna Watson, Teresa Jusino, Angela Wang, Jules Klassen, Bill Ligertwood, Fred Bremmer… there’s some people who’s names I’ve forgotten, but you’re all great. Thank you!

My fans and readers and supporters and commenters and followers have also been fantastic. Truly, I appreciate you all, and your comments and insights and criticisms and support have been invaluable in helping me grow along with this project, and keep me going. I absolutely wish I could name all of you, but of course I can’t. There’s just waayyy too many of you! Yes, there are a whole bunch of you in particular who do come to mind and stand out and who’ve been particularly awesome to know, but I feel it would be unfair to name just a few of you while leaving others unnamed. I’m sorry! But if you have the feeling that you’re one of the people I’d like to thank, you can probably feel pretty confident that that’s the case!

And enormous thank yous to everyone who ever donated to the tip jar to help keep me going with my various financial needs and housing problems and stuff over the past several months. In particular I’d like to thank the amazing generosity of Natasha Routh, Jeroen Kleijer, Jake Hamby, Elena Ginzburg, Joshua Woodbury and Katie Jerpseth. You’re all fantastic and have my gratitude. There are many, many, many more of you I’d like to thank, and I sincerely hope I finally find some time to send out individual thank yous to all of you. You’re all awesome and I wish I could better convey my gratitude.

(the Tip Jar will stay open for a little while longer, as I still haven’t gotten that whole medical benefits situation sorted out and could use the help. Any little “going away” donations or that, or just to help me land on my feet and keep me going for awhile as I get my new situation sorted out would be enormously appreciated, of course. I’d also like to point out this extremely deserving fundraiser as well, for a trans woman very much in need. Trigger warning for trans-misogynistic violence and medical abuse for that link, though).

And a thank you to Abbie Spracklin for taking me out for food, or lending me a bit of money, and things like that when I needed it. Likewise a thank you to Branwen and Mikayla for the help with housing these past few months.

A HUGE thank you to my long-suffering mom, who has consistently been amazingly supportive and understanding, even in spite of her daughter wasting her life and her potential yelling about stuff on the internet.

There are so so so so many more of you I’d like to thank, but I’m worried that if I try to be any more comprehensive, I’ll never get around to actually finishing that last post!

So.. if you feel left out, please remember that chances are pretty good I do remember you, do appreciate you, and do wish you the best.

…

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Oh, and a very special thank you to Cathy Brennan, for that hilarious and flattering “meme” of me.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUxcsbOtzQU

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“How do I know if I’m trans?”

This is, by far, the most common question I’ve gotten over the last year and a half, since I began blogging. I’ve gotten it in comments, e-mails, on Facebook, over twitter…sometimes even on dates with ostensibly cis men (which is annoying as fuck, by the way. I don’t go on dates for the sake of offering people free therapy and transgender life-coaching)… it’s a hard question. I want to help. I wish I could. Sometimes I try.

It’s so individual in nature, though. Everyone has their own reasoning and own denials, own sequence of events that have led to this point and rgwie own reasons for being scared and having doubts (despite how universal fear and doubt is to being confronted with this. Like, some of those fears and doubts are pretty consistent across everyone questioning this, but everyone’s got their own individual fears and doubts too). And in terms of the person asking that question, those individual experiences and even the unique context of where they’re at (emotionally, interpersonally, psychologically) when they ask it: Everyone wants or needs to hear a different thing, and it’s not uncommon for people to get SERIOUSLY pissed if you don’t say what they approached you to hear.

And more often than not, they’re not really looking for an answer to guide them, a response on which they’ll base their actions or reassess their thinking. Most of the time, they’re looking for affirmation of a very specific answer they’ve already decided upon, and just want to hear it from someone else they perceive as having some kind of authority (how anyone has that perception about someone as messed up as me is totally beyond me, though). Most of the time within that latter set of “most of the time”, if they don’t get that affirmation they wanted, they get kinda upset.

Especially if they’ve decided that, for some reason, they can’t make this choice and you remind them that they can. No matter how supportive you try to be about that, it’s still throwing their fears and conflict back in their face (which is not to say that reassuring denial is a better option).

Sometimes, though, the question is earnest. They’re scared. They’re in doubt. It’s a huge and terrifying thing to confront, with all kinds of implications, and they can’t cope with that on their own. They want or need someone who seems to know what they’re doing, or has at least been there, to let them know it’s okay, or help them figure this out, or help guide them towards the answer that’s right for them.

Of course they want guidance and help. No one wants to face something so terrifying and huge on their own. When you’re scared, sometimes you reach out for a hand to hold. That’s not cowardly, it’s just human (which is part of why I hate when people talk about how “brave” transitioning is… you have no idea how scared most of us are or were, and talking about this imaginary courage just erases and invalidates the fear we felt, rewrites our own stories… it makes the people who ARE still scared feel that much less secure in themselves, and it gives them more reason to doubt themselves and their feelings or choices despite how completely understandable it is to be afraid when facing this, no matter how “sure” you are).

So the question got asked, the comment got posted, and the e-mail or private message arrived in my inbox, over and over again:

“How do I know if I’m trans?”

I’m sorry, but the short answer is:

You don’t.

The long answer, though…

As said, it’s scary. And it’s huge. And that already makes it a hard decision to make, where you desperately want the security of some sense of certainty. Adding to that fear is the suffocating trans-misogyny and cissexism encoded into our culture as a whole… which in turn complicates its own oppressive nature by being positioned so thoroughly as a normativity: We assume that “cis” is the default state against which our identity needs to be defined, and our decision needs to be made.

I discussed this aspect in depth in an essay I once wrote (that, in contrast to the majority of thingies lurking in my archives, I’m still fairly proud of) called The Null HypotheCis. Basically, internalized cisnormativity leads us to assume that we need to PROVE that we’re trans to ourselves, but the being cis is simply taken as a given. Being cis isn’t held to anything even close to a comparable standard of “evidence”, and this skews us towards endlessly pursuing a “proof” that CAN’T ever be found.

If we work around this assumption of being cis as the default… like, for example, if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans, and instead consider the question in terms of whether, given everything we observe in ourselves, and everything we feel, and how strong our feelings are about this question of gender, which (cis or trans) is more likely for us… if we consider “is it really all that likely that I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis?”… if we reframe it, then the question becomes something very different, and more manageable.

The question is still never easy.

One of our usual impulses to is to attempt an “objective” analysis of what’s indicated by our histories, and comparing and contrasting our own experiences and feelings to what we assume would be indicative of some kind of condition of transsexuality that would merit transition or hormones or surgery or whatever as the appropriate course of action. But as much as it feels like the best approach, and feels natural to how one generally approaches questions of identity, this is just as self-defeating an approach as to ask oneself for “proof” of being trans against an assumed cis default (you can’t “prove” the existence of a subjective experience to yourself if you won’t acknowledge the experience until it’s “proven”…example: “yeah, but how do I know that this coffee is actually as delicious it tastes?”).

The first problem is simply the impossibility of objective analysis of one’s own experiences, feelings and memories, and attempting to use them to answer a highly loaded, highly terrifying, highly personal question.

Even at the very best of times, under the very best conditions, peeps looking into their pasts and attempting to construct narratives out of them are prone to misremembering things, forgetting some things, and selectively editing which memories are recalled and which are forgotten or simply not brought to mind (like it’s actually straight up IMPOSSIBLE for someone to remember EVERYTHING, even if we restrict it to a category like “everything relevant to gender”… we HAVE to selectively approach what we remember and what we don’t, because that’s just how brains work. This means drawing upon memory is always going to be an edited pool of “data”, no matter how hard you try to be objective). We also distort things by constructing those memories into narrative “stories” with little chains of causal links that are more likely to fit in with our understanding of and assumptions about narrative, what feels like a story and makes sense as a story, even though we just straight can’t understand what the actual causal links were, and what was a consequence of what (life is all busy and jumbly like that. Sorry!).

Especially in light of our cultural conditioning towards narrative and stories and what those read like, we tend towards retroactively understanding our “life stories” as sequences in which, IN HINDSIGHT, everything makes sense and “led” somewhere, even though that process, that sequence of events and consequences, simply arrived where it did because it had to arrive SOMEWHERE, and we aren’t IN the alternate timeline where we’d look back and make a different conclusion about how we got there and how “everything happened for a reason”.

For example, if I look back and think “if I hadn’t decided to drop out of school, I wouldn’t have gotten my GED instead, a year earlier than I would have graduated, wouldn’t have been looking at affordable ‘alternative colleges’, wouldn’t have been investigating during the same time I got really into riot-grrl music, wouldn’t have picked Evergreen and moved to Olympia, wouldn’t have met Trent and Nova, wouldn’t have gotten into skag…”. However, if an entirely different sequence of events had played out, I’d be constructing a similar narrative anyway, “If I hadn’t decided to stay in school, I wouldn’t have met Teresa, who wouldn’t have broken up with me after she caught me cross-dressing and outed me to my friends, and I wouldn’t have been forced to confront my gender issues, and wouldn’t have decided to transition before heading off to college at UNC, and wouldn’t have decided to majour in anthropology with a focus on gender studies, and…”. The reason I look back and construct a narrative that led me to this point in my life is only because this is the point in my life I arrived at. I have to be somebody in order to be anybody, after all, have to be somewhere in order to be anywhere, and have to have a specific sequence of events in my life in order to look back and think about THAT specific sequence of events in my life (y’know… the one that actually happened, because I can’t look back on shit that didn’t).

Every narrative of our lives we look back upon that has led us to the question of gender is going to be a construct, and can’t be contrasted to a life that didn’t lead you there, because you haven’t led a life that didn’t lead you there. This is where you are, and this is the choice you have to worry about. The backstory doesn’t change that, and can’t really guide it either.

Our constructed narratives of our histories are further distorted by the “creeping determinism” of hindsight bias, wherein things “make sense” and suggest causal connections or a deterministic, fated path only because we’re looking at them in retrospect, after already having experienced the (at the time, unpredictable) consequences. Add to that the problems of apophenia (perceiving patterns that aren’t there just because you happen to be looking for patterns… and looking through our memories to find indications of gender is exactly that kind of pattern-seeking most likely to lead to apophenia, especially given the selective nature of memory), and “Texas Sharpshooter” thinking (where you use the same data set, like “I didn’t start seriously wanting to transition until around adolescence, when I began having ‘forced fem’ sissy fantasies” to both construct AND confirm a hypothesis, like “therefore my desire to transition is just some stupid kink thing, born out of submissive fantasies and sexual frustration”)… you end up with a situation where analysis of our past and our memories in light of our current confrontation with the question of our gender is exactly the least “objective” method possible.

But so long as we insistently approach the question through the model of trying to “figure out” if we “are” trans, it’s pretty much our only method. We don’t have brain-scanners to check for some neurobiological variable that tends to correlate with transgenderism, and even so, such a variable would not be predictive, deterministic, OR an essential quality of “transness”. It would, at best, be something to help neurologists understand some of the vague, material process that relate to how gender manifests the way it manifests. It would not be, and COULD not, be gender itself in a nice tidy grey-matter package.

Whether your brain had the “trans trait” or not, the decision would still be your own, and would have to be your own.

(what terrifies me more than anything else about research into such neurobiological predispositions is that, if we definitively identify and describe even just a vague, generalized set of those factors, people will probably begin to perceive them as a deterministic thing, or use them as a diagnostic criterion, and would try to have them do all the “sorting” and decision-making for us. That would be a disaster on so many levels, and lead to severe undermining of human rights in relation to gender variance, and the right to prioritize self-determination of gender above biological-determinism/essentialism and outwardly imposed assignment of gender).

But assuming we could delineate a personal history of gender, maybe cobbled together from both memories and discussions with family, friends… comparing your own memories to theirs, testing out different interpretations of what those things meant… would that even be useful? Against what would this history to be measured in order to determine its relative “trans-ness”?

This leads us to another majour problem in the question: that it assumes there is a “trans narrative” that can be described and is observably different from a cis narrative.

What would that narrative be? What would define it? What is the life story that indicates “transness” and the life story that doesn’t? The very act of asking this question is to buy into the heavily problematic assumption of a Trans Narrative, which others us, hems us in, circumscribes our vocabulary for asserting our own existence and giving it voice, defines us by experiences that we may not all share, and diminishes our capacity to assert an existence and life outside of assumptions imposed on us on the basis of sex or gender. And perhaps most tellingly, it assumes the same model of measuring the validity (or existence) of our identities, genders and lives that was constructed by the medical institutions and cissexist systems that were there to “explain” us, pathologize us, minimize our threat to the dominant concepts of gender (patriarchy), and sort out which of us were to be permitted the right to make these choices for ourselves and which of us weren’t… who was and wasn’t “really” trans, and deserved treatment.

It is to approach your own history, your own experiences, and your own right to make your own choices for your gender, your body and your life the same way the Gatekeeper approaches them. You do the Gatekeeper’s work for him, validate the cissexist consciousness, and self-select out of your own rights and own gender and own potential life before even giving anyone a chance to deny them.

It’s the same thing: you confess your experiences in a linear narrative while gatekeeper weighs them against some arbitrary, decontextualized checklist of “trans experiences”. Just in this case, you play both parts.

There is absolutely no history you may have that undermines your right to make this choice, would undermine the validity of that choice, or would undermine the gender you assert.

Scary as it may be, the individual responsibility that attends this right to self-determination is that there is absolutely no history you may have that will make the choice for you, or deterministically define you as an gender that’s essential and inherent and somehow outside of your own choices. There is no history that can give you a gender or “gender identity” that’s outside your subjective experience of it.

And while I sympathize with all the different ways we try to negotiate this, even the irrational ones we pursue because we’re not ready to deal with the reality of things, the idea that a “trans narrative” can be observably, objectively different from a “cis narrative” is kinda shitty to all those trans people who’ve lived their immense diversity of experiences. Not every trans woman, for example, experimentally cross-dressed. Some trans women, for instance, grew up in strictly gender-segregated communities where that kind of experimentation, however clandestine, would have been fucking impossible.

If you wouldn’t say that the presence or absence of a certain experience in another trans person’s history (like playing with dolls, or liking sports) invalidates or defines them, then why you say the same of yourself? Why define yourself by your narrative history when you accept others as they’ve defined themselves, in their present, asserting for themselves their new, potential narratives?

To seek out a means of identifying yourself as trans, figuring out if you are, is also to essentialize it. But gender is not a condition we can figure out about ourselves. Gender is a performance we choose to make. And being trans is to determine and assert a gender, an identity, a self-expression, a potential life, CHOSEN in contrast to what we were assigned or the expectations people had for us.

I’ll return to this in a bit, but what I’m trying to get at here is that there is no “not really trans” and there is no way to simply “think you’re trans” when you’re “not trans”. To think that you’re trans, to subjectively experience yourself as trans, is exactly what it is to be trans (please no Descartes jokes).

Likewise, to subjectively experience yourself as a man or a woman, or something in-between or apart from them, to “think you’re X”, to experience those concepts of gender as the ones that work best for understanding or defining yourself… that’s all that it ultimately really is to “be” that gender, and all that’s really required for an expression of yourself as such to be genuine. Your “gender identity” can’t be discerned, because it can’t pre-date the act of experiencing and expressing it. Gender has to be experienced, understood or performed to exist at all, and “gender identity” or “identifies as” are constructs we build from that to more directly explain it to people.

A really common idea that gets espoused all the time in trans space, parotted from gatekeepers and cissexism and diagnostic criteria, is that “you shouldn’t do it unless you’re absolutely sure”. This is totally bullshit. I feel pretty confident guessing that absolutely no one, ever, anywhere, has ever been absolutely sure about transition. Even all the secure, confident “community leaders” you meet or read or admire were scared and confused and grasping out for answers at some point.

This doesn’t stop people from telling themselves (and others) that they were certain, though. There’s all kinds of emotional currency that comes with feeling secure in one’s gender, and all kinds of psychological incentive for trans people to convince themselves their genders are essential, inherent, immutable and real. And sometimes that requires contrasting it to an “imaginary” version of being trans that ISN’T real; even if such a thing is, as said, completely by definition impossible.

Related to this is the idea of “cheerleaders”, allegedly toxic trans people who will “push” you into transition when you don’t “really” want it. Again, kinda bullshit. We live in an overwhelmingly cissexist, transphobic, trans-misogynistic, binarist, patriarchal culture with constant, ubiquitous, oppressive denigration of gender variance (it’s exactly this that helps fuel so many trans people being so committed to convincing themselves of the validity of their own identity at the expense of someone else’s). Nothing any small cadre of trans people says to encourage you in exploring these things (especially given how their perspective is devalued by exactly the same cultural mechanisms that teach you being trans is the worst thing you can ever possibly be) is going to outweigh that, let alone outweigh it enough to override your own sense of self and sense of your needs to the extent that it makes you do something you don’t really want to do.

And “transitioning” is fucking HARD. It also hurts… physically (zap zap, slice slice), and emotionally. Almost no one doesn’t lose someone. You don’t really get through this just thinking “well, this one trans person I know said I ought to, so…”.

Nor do you get through it just on the power of “sexual frustration”, or being a “self-hating lesbian / gay man”, or “hating your own identity”, or “just having a kink”, or “being trendy”, or “being aroused by the self-conception of yourself as a woman”, or whatever other stupid theory you or some shitty therapist or sexologist came up with to explain it away and fit it into the basic framework of cis/het-patriarchal sexuality (and thanks to Null HypotheCis, we never ask these theories to prove or substantiate themselves).

There are people who back out, and people who detransition, and that’s okay. But here’s the thing: it’s okay for that to be where your choices lead you as well. It’s okay for you to try this, and try to work through things, even if maybe they don’t work out, or maybe they just don’t quite feel right the first time, or you take a wrong turn or attempted to go about it the wrong way, or to have felt one aspect was wrong for you but didn’t notice that other aspects were working (like how lots of trans women think they have to be very femme and like guys to “transition”, or how lots of trans trans men think they have to be masculine and like girls, and then mistake their discomfort with those things for discomfort with everything, including whatever aspects that were actually working for them).

It’s okay to have a non-linear experience and/or narrative of gender. You don’t have to let fear of that prevent you from ever trying anything, even if you aren’t quite sure what to try. Deciding to take some steps into transition doesn’t mean you automatically commit “fully transitioning”, to genital surgery (even if you may have to lie to a doctor and say that you’re committed in order to get hormones or something else you want in the short-term), to top surgery, or to a lifetime of having to present a certain way and go by a certain name and certain pronouns. You can make more than one decision, at different times, as you find new understandings of yourself. You can even make decisions that seem to contradict the earlier ones, and that’s also okay, because different points in your life may have different contexts, or different needs, or different understandings of yourself.

Sometimes trans people on forums and stuff will talk up detransition into being some kind of gigantic bogeyman of The Regretioner (The Friend Of A Friend Who Totally Regretted It). A common version of this story is a trans woman going into transition and somehow making it through ALL the various hoops, having lower surgery, then after the catheter gets taken out, getting up in the middle of the night and going to the bathroom and suddenly realizing the immense reality of no longer having a penis, then GOING IRREPARABLY MAD FROM THE HORROR OF THEIR MISTAKE.

Bullshit. Life isn’t a fucking Twilight Zone episode.

(It’s also a comically phallocentric myth… it’s kind of amazing just how much people, including trans women, act like e’rrrrrything pertaining to gender, sex and sexuality revolves around dicks, and act like they’re The Biggest Most Serious Deal In The World So Don’t Take Anything Penis-Related Lightly! or you might go IRREPARABLY MAD!)

The Regretioner myth just isn’t the reality of how this stuff works. It’s not even the reality of how detransition works (way more often than not, detransition plays out as negotiating a different kind of non-normative gender, not just realizing you were totally a “normal” dude/girl all along, and way more often than not is related to an over-emphasis on a particular path of being trans, gender variant or genderqueer… the kind of over-emphasis that gets reinforced by The Regretioner myth itself). People will trump this Warning Myth up with suicide statistics and stuff, but poor outcomes and regret for HRT, genital surgery and other medical interventions for trans patients are actually RIDICULOUSLY rare. It’s one of the most consistently beneficial treatments in the entire world of contemporary medicine.

The Regretioner is just another construct of cissexist, binarist, essentialist, patriarchal frameworks of gender; reinforced by cis people, cos that’s what most cis ppl are like (cissexist, binarist and essentialist), and reinforced by trans people cos of that stuff I mentioned earlier about wanting to feel absolutely secure in their own genders, having a lot of the same insecurities and hang-ups as cis people do, and having a psychological incentive to contrast their own genders as “Realer” than others.

Hence: “BEWARE! I knew this one friend who had a friend who had a roommate at the hospital who killed herself because she wasn’t ready and rushed into it!”, “Be absolutely sure”, “Distrust cheerleaders” and “Are you sure you’re really really trans, like really for real realz… really?”

You’ll never be sure, but you’re always just as real as you assert yourself to be.

There are also weird inverse myths, like this one: “Just start taking hormones. Then you’ll know for sure. Cos they’re AWESOME! and if you have dypshoria / ‘a (fe)male brain’, it will respond well to them”. I used to espouse this advice myself a whole bunch. It preeeetty much works, but not for the reason people claim it does. Dysphoria and male or female “brains” are irrelevant to gender (as I’ve been saying a LOT in this essay, your gender is what you make it, regardless of anything anyone claims determines it, like narrative, behaviour, socialization, certainty, chromosomes, biology or neurobiology). What matters with hormones is that they redirect your experiences and questions from being about who or what you are and “am I trans?” and “what’s my gender identity”, towards questions of “how do I feel about this?” and “is this making me feel better?”. “Is this making me happy?”.

What gender you “are”, whether or not you “are” trans (or “really” trans), your “gender identity”, your “brain sex”, your socialization, your genitals, your chromosomes and your doubts can all go fuck themselves if they’re not making you happy.

Questions like these, about your feelings, of whether or not transition is right for you, and how to go about it… should you take hormones? Should you get surgery? Those are far more personal and variable and complex, but those are questions that can have answers. They don’t, like “how do I know if I’m trans?”, make the whole thing impossible just in the asking.

They’re just answers you need to look to yourself to find.

The issue of “dysphoria”, unhappiness, your subjective experience of gender and how you feel about your body are a lot more important than a surface-level appraisal of whether or not your history or behaviours are consistent with the diagnosis of a certain “gender identity”. This isn’t because looking at dysphoria can work similarly to the pursuit of “gender identity” through narrative, instead indicating some “neurobiological predisposition” or “bran sex” that would have a deterministic relationship to gender or what you should do regarding transition (already got into this a bit with the hypothetical “brain scan”)… it’s more important because these questions pertain to the specifics of what you can choose to do that might make you feel happier and more comfortable with your body.

Gender comes later… more as a way of just saying whatever you want to say to other people and have them understand about that stuff, like your body and feelings about it and how you want to be treated and how you experience your sexuality through your body and all that. It’s mostly just about expressing whatever you feel is important express, and important for other people to understand about you.

Those questions about your feelings about your body aren’t any less subjective than anything else, though.  And they’re bundled up in all kinds of distortions and shit that can be totally misleading and confusing and weird: what do you want to do because you want to experience your anatomy a certain way, what do you want because it would make you feel more yourself, what do you want because it might be more pleasurable or more in accordance with your sexuality, what do you want because you want to be pretty or beautiful or handsome, and what do you want because that’s what your cultural context has taught you someone of a given gender’s body is “supposed” to be? See: confusing as hell.

But at least they don’t imply a false objectivity. At least it’s about how you feel and about what you want, not about what you are.

What you are, or what people say makes you this thing or that thing or whatever, is the absolute last thing that should matter to this.

So where does that leave anything in regards to that original question, “how do I know if I’m trans?”… well like I said, you don’t. I’m sorry. And I can’t say anything concrete to guide you throw that.

But what I can confidently say is that when you’re asking, don’t simply assume that “cis” is the given and “trans” needs to be proven. Be careful about different theories that explain why you think you’re trans (those theories don’t even go away once you know that you are). Make sure to bear in mind the different kinds of motives people have in the way they think about gender and sex, ask yourself if they’re really able to see things any more clearly than you can, and consider what they might have to gain or lose by how they see (and understand) you and your gender. Remember that memory is fallible, and you can’t use your own history as an “objective” source. Be careful about comparing your history to the narratives of other trans people… remember that their interpretations of their own histories are just as distorted and subjective as yours, and that the version they tell others is going to be even further from the truth. And understand that finding any similarity or dissimilarity in your narrative and that of another trans person isn’t going to really tell you anything (especially the narrow range of trans narratives that find their way into bookstores)… remember how much potential there is in this to carve out a NEW narrative for yourself.

Don’t worry too much about “dysphoria” or “brain sex”, or anything else someone tells you makes someone trans, or makes them a certain gender… remember that nobody actually really knows all that much about this stuff. But remember that the subjective experience of things like “dysphoria” is real, and sometimes things people say like “hormones will give you a better idea of whether this is right for you” can, on the level of subjective experience, by helpful, even if the premise is a bit wonky. Try not to worry about the premises and theories all that much at first, no matter how obsessed everyone else seems to be about them, but do pay attention to your feelings and needs, especially about your body… clothes and make-up and sexual partners and pronouns and names and stuff can be switched around pretty easily, it’s your body and feelings about it and how you experience your sexuality through your body that are most important to take care of and try to understand.

Remember that what you are isn’t as important as what you feel and what will make you happy. Remember that you’re exactly as real as you assert yourself to be. And remember that gender isn’t a thing that you are or discover, it’s an expression and self-understanding that you assert. Remember you don’t have to commit to some big, pre-determined, standardized path of “transition” all at once… you can take things in steps, and not only can, but should, work out for yourself as you go which things you want to do and which things you don’t and how you want to do them. Remember that doubts are okay, mistakes are okay, non-linear processes of gender where you have false-starts or have to back-pedal or have to renegotiate things are okay; zigs and zags and sideways steps are okay and, if you end up in a place where you feel its needed, detransition is okay. And remember that your right to make your own choices about your own body involves the right to sometimes make the wrong ones.

Remember that being put in this position wasn’t your choice, but how you respond to it is your choice. And nothing out there can or will make that choice for you. For better and for worse, it’s YOURS. As scary as that is, try to remember how much freedom and empowerment there is in that.

But also remember that you’re not making this choice in a vacuum. However old or young you may be, you’ve been through a lifetime of people telling you what “man” and “women” mean, what they’re supposed to be and look like and what kinds of bodies they’re supposed to have, what trans means (and it’s usually not good), and what kind of choices people should and shouldn’t be “allowed” to make for themselves. Remember those things, because you’ve internalized at least some of that, and if you forget about it it’s going to have more power over you and how you think about yourself and your gender. Remember that you have agency, but it’s an agency that lives in a world that conditions it, and sometimes tries to extinguish it. Try your best to understand what influences your choices and perspectives so that they you can negotiate that, work around it, and let your choices be more your own. But remember you’ll never be able to get rid of those influences completely. You’re a social critter, and gender is a social thing.

Likewise, remember that gender, and your understanding of it, is cultural, and lives in a certain context. That’s going to mean gender will never be something wholly your own, and it also means that other people’s understanding or experience of it, even when using the same words and concepts and ideas, might be different. Remember that what it is for one person to be a woman or a man or genderqueer or bigender or agender might not be what it is for you. And negotiate yourself, understand them, and take whatever advice (or declarations about what you “are”) someone offers with that in mind and a grain of salt.

And speaking of the advice of others…

As you make your way through this, and inevitably go to ask someone else, talk to someone else, read something else (of course you’re not just going to take this essay to be the full truth. It isn’t, and CAN’T be)… please, please don’t trust anyone who claims they can answer this for you. Don’t take any quizzes or “gender tests”. Don’t fill out any self-diagnostics. Don’t let anyone go through your memories with a clipboard and a checklist. Don’t let anyone tell you what questions you’re supposed to be asking yourself, or what experiences you’re supposed to have had, or how you’re supposed to dress and present yourself, or how much “effort” you’re supposed to put into it, or how much you’re supposed to want a certain kind of treatment or body.

If you encounter a doctor you know to be a gatekeeper and know buys into outdated models of WPATH and stuff, don’t feel ashamed about having to lie or bend the truth to get the medical care you need, but don’t believe their criteria define you, or ever allow a diagnosis to contradict you and your choices and self-understanding.

Oh, yeah… and be on guard any time another trans person approaches you with “a little unsolicited advice”.

Don’t trust anyone who claims they can provide answers to this, or claims they understand, or can understand, your gender better than you do. Even if you don’t understand it at all all.

Maybe especially then.

There is no answer I or anyone could ever give you for the question “How do I know if I’m trans?”, or “What is my gender identity?”, or even “Should I transition”?. I’m sorry. I would take all that fear away if I could, and offer you that security and assurance. But I can’t, and I won’t hurt you by lying to you.

However, what I can tell you is that you’ve asked. And that itself has meaning… enough to at least offer you a trailhead for navigating your way through this.

Good luck! The end of this path is wherever you decide to begin another.

From Super Queer Artsy Blog

Tell your story.

Speak your truth.

I’ve heard these phrases a lot. Trans women have heard these phrases for decades. We hear them from cis people, at a frequency up there with “have you had the surgery?”

And I don’t trust them.

When they ask us to tell our stories, we know what they mean. They want us to tell the story they want to hear, and often the story they wish to tell. They want us to confirm their expectations and understanding, and to provide them with the juicy, sensational, dark, harrowing, brave and inspiring narrative they’ve come to know, and come to understand as synonymous with what a trans woman is.

It is impossible to extricate the concepts of transgender and transsexual from the narratives we’ve built around them, and attached them to. Which has all kinds of brutal consequences. We ARE the stories and memoirs, and the genres that define them circumscribe our identities.

There’s absolutely a genre for the life story of a trans woman. The Traumatic And Inspiring Transition Memoir.

“We’re looking for a trans woman to write a first-person transition story for our magazine. Any takers? It will give you a high-profile opportunity to tell your story and speak your truth.”

I wonder what the ratio of first-person trans-oriented literature is to third-person? How dominant is autobiographical trans literature to fiction by trans people about trans people? Sometimes it seems like trans women are just straight up not allowed to write fiction about our own lives. Only cis people get to write fiction about trans people.

Genres are all about conventions and expectations, and the expectations built around what the life story of a trans woman is, deeply interwoven with cisnormative and cissexist concepts of gender and sex and the experience thereof, and the conventions established by which trans stories are published, disseminated, embraced, and which trans people make it so far as to be permitted to have their stories seen in the media at all. There’s a genre of the trans story, and consequently a genre of the trans narrative, and consequently a genre imposed on trans identity itself.

There’s a funny irony in “tell your story” and “speak your truth”, in that those two things are fundamentally at odds with each other. Stories and narratives aren’t, and can’t be, the truth of our actual lived experiences. Real lives don’t follow the structures of narrative, they don’t move in linear tidy sequences of causes and actions and effects and consequences. Real lives are big jumbled messes that are almost impossible to make real sense of, and the act of imposing a narrative on them, sorting out our “life story”, is always an act of editing.

Especially when the life story is expected to fit into a narrow range of expectations: either those of the doctor who won’t prescribe your hormones unless your narrative meets certain criteria, or those of the other trans women at the support group who won’t consider your gender and decisions valid unless they affirm the established rules of Really Trans and Not Really Trans, or those of the journalists, editors, publishers, viewers and readers who want to sell or enjoy a good Traumatic Trans Life Story.

Looking upon my own experiences it’s easy to see in them where the story is, or at least the story people would want. This makes me anxious as fuck about the question of Telling My Story or Speaking My Truth. I know how easy it would be to sensationalize it, and how that edited variation of my experiences would be embraced. I also know how difficult it would be to convey the truth and genuine feelings of those experiences without them being read, interpreted, misread and distorted through the genre of the trans life story, and the expectations, and the sensationalism, and the depth to which narrative is intertwined with trans identity, and the depth of personal investment everyone has in their frameworks for understanding gender and sexuality and the depth to which things are interpreted through those frames (“Aha! That’s an early sign for her!” , “Aha! That’s what made her trans!”), and the context established by every act of transploitation, and every act of the trans life story being told, that has happened before.

We, trans women, can’t even read our OWN experiences and memories without editing them through the lens of gender and what we want to see there, and want to have affirmed. We’ll find our signs of how we were always a girl just as readily as, in denial, we found our signs that we couldn’t possibly be trans and were really a boy. If I can’t trust myself to honestly understand my own experiences, how can I trust cis readers to do so?

Telling my story and speaking my truth can never co-occur.

Besides, even if I conveyed the truth of my experiences, and a reader were to understand them as I understand them, I could never convey the truth of what those experiences meant for me.

Adding to that anxiety of how my life can’t be anything but edited and misread, so many of the genre’s favourite elements are there in my experiences: rape, heroin, abuse, incest, childhood bullying, family conflict, broken home, stymied childhood desires to enjoy gender-incongruent things, suicide attempts, inpatient psychiatric treatment, poverty, sex with girls-as-a-boy, boys-as-a-boy, boys-as-a-girl, girls-as-a-girl, on and on and on. Lovely, yeah? All it takes is a little embellishment, and a lot of editing out of all the details that made those experiences the ACTUALITY of them rather than the IMAGINED CONCEPT most people have of them, and maybe making up a little something about having done sex work too, and I’m effectively a fucking Bruce Benderson or Dennis Cooper character but with the all-important, infinitely-embraced genre element of True Story to sell it even further. I’d be a Velvet Underground song. I’d be a slightly-less-fraudulent JT Leroy.

Let’s think about JT Leroy for a minute:

JT Leroy was a young transgender writer who was kinda big in the early 2000s. They wrote semi-autobiographical novels (in the sort of Jack Kerouac tradition of semi-autobiography) about their experiences with an abusive mother, addiction, sex work, etc. Leroy’s trans-ness was “caused” by their mother dressing the young JT up as a girl to do sex work to finance her addiction. Leroy was promoted by writers like Bruce Benderson (who himself is kind of an extreme and extremely messed up example of literary exploitation of sexual “outsiders”) who both took “pity” on Leroy, admired Leroy’s talent, and wanted to… well.. exploit Leroy’s existence. Leroy quickly garnered a pretty rare degree of literary fame, and was even, allegedly, chilling with people like Courtney Love and Billy Corgan (which suddenly seems weird in retrospect, given how shitty Corgan was to Devi Ever, the actual trans woman he worked with). Cis readers, especially those privileged, educated, literary types who are absolutely “fascinated” with stories of “outsiders” bought fucking TONS of those books.

And none of them, apparently, noticed the basic weirdness and implausability of the story. Like the fact that JT Leroy’s gender variance had a psychological “cause”, as a RESULT of socialization. And how JT Leroy apparently loved reading books by Benderson and Cooper instead of being triggered or disgusted by their exploitative nature and inaccuracies. And how JT Leroy’s life story seemed directly lifted from those plots.

If you’re surprised by what I’m about to parenthetically say (it was a hoax! JT Leroy was made-up by a very wealthy privileged white cis straight woman from Los Angeles who was a fan of Benderson and Cooper, and her very wealthy privileged white cis straight husband), then congratulations: you’re indicative of exactly the pervasive mentality amongst cis culture of desiring a certain story so much that the *truth* of experiences of transsexuality, rape, addiction, abuse and sex work are thrown by the wayside.

A culture in which a transparent, insulting, exploitative lie like JT Leroy is not only perpetrated, not only believed and not only published, but embraced all the way into a position on the New York Times bestseller list is a culture in which I can never feel safe “telling my story”, and *never* trust it to be read in its truth.

And in which I can never trust anyone encouraging me to tell it.

I wish, though, that it were as simple as that, and that I could simply walk away from the question based on that lack of trust and lack of feeling safe. But the truth is that yes, I do want to tell my story, I do want to be heard, and I do want people to understand my experiences. And I’d really love people who’ve shared those experiences to hear me and understand that they’re less alone. I want all of this so badly.

I live in a world where these exploitative, falsified versions of my life are constantly written and filmed, bought and resold, but in which their reality is consistently erased, silenced, marginalized or ignored. I live in a world where I can easily read a dozen trans memoirs by middle-class white binary-identified trans women with wives or ex-wives or kids or whatever; where I can watch a hundred exploitative and misrepresentative documentaries and a handful of disgusting and highly edited bio-pics profiting from telling the stories of trans people’s murders; where there’s a never-ending supply of “inspiring” and patronizing “profiles” of trans people in newspapers and magazines (they especially love kids); where there’s plenty of cameos of trans people in dramatic TV to add “edge” and “drama” and “maturity”… but in which it’s virtually impossible for me to find a single genuine work of art, literature or media in which I honestly see myself reflected, and feel a meaningful resonance with my own experiences. It’s like dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

I want to be reflected in our culture. I want US to be reflected in it. And I want to feel safe being able to speak and add my voice to it.

And so much of what being trans is and means is about trying to assert your own existence, wanting your truth to be seen and understood. If none of that mattered to me, if communicating and expressing myself, giving voice to the actuality of my experience and feelings… if none of that was relevant, there would have been no real need for me to ever “socially transition”. Being called “sir” wouldn’t sting, and I wouldn’t give a fuck what my name or my pronouns or titles were, and wouldn’t need to bother with the tangled, slippery concept of “woman” and “womanhood”. But those things do matter. Because I want to BE here. I want people to see me, I want to interact with them, I want to exist in this world and amongst the other people who populate it, and to do so in a way where who I am is understood and reflected and met. I want to be here WITH you.

The importance of the need to assert one’s own existence is a big part of why deconstructing the assumptions implicit in phrases, terminologies and narratives are so important. We don’t want to be erased. We don’t want to keep hearing, over and over, that most people don’t know we exist, or don’t consider our existence relevant. We don’t want to have people keep acting like its simply a given that women have vaginas, that everyone is either a man or a woman, that “transition” is a linear progression from one gender to another… because every time something like that happens, someone’s existence is erased. They’re pushed away, out of the “here” here. They’re treated like they don’t count. Sometimes, people don’t even HAVE a word to communicate their existence.

So, yeah… “telling your story” can be a meaningful, empowering, compelling and sometimes revolutionary act. Not just for what that means to the speaker, but for what it means to the entire conversation …and what it means for others who’ve felt erased and unacknowledged.

Even the simple act of disclosure, or being trans in a publicly visible way, can have this kind of meaning. Not so much just to add to the understanding that trans people exist and that there’s a bunch of us. It’s everything else BESIDES the fact of being trans that matters in this, all the OTHER aspects of that individual, especially those that aren’t already within the assumptions of what it is to be trans. It demonstrates the infinite variety of the kinds of trans lives that are led, the kinds of trans identities that can be expressed, and the range of meanings being trans can have for a person. It allows people to feel more able to construct their own understanding of themselves, and gives them more room to negotiate their gender and their lives and what those mean to them… and it expands the meanings and conventions of the genres and genders, and the frameworks and expectations of the readers.

But I’m walking away from this blog without having spoken much of my experiences… my story still all hovering in-between lines, painted in broad strokes. Much of it probably could have meant something to people. In the context of The Trans Life Story, the fragments of my experiences coalesce into something that can’t possibly be truthful, especially when disseminated into the framework of our culture as a whole… but the pieces themselves? Spoken just to my readers, in the hope of reaching out to people who’ve shared them? Who are already where of what the realities of those things are?

I wish I could have.

I wish I could have spoken more about my addiction… the resignation of it, the numbness, the sadness, the false sense of glamour, the shear monotony. I wish I could have spoken more about what it meant in terms of my gender and my trauma, and making sure I never ever felt anything, because successful as I’d been in living as though I was just a gay man, as though none of the abuse or sexual abuse or any of that had ever happened, as though I was okay, never allowing myself to remember anything for more than the two seconds between it entering my mind and repeating my self-obliterating mantras of “don’t think don’t think don’t think” or “shoot myself shoot myself shoot myself”… as successful as I’d been in all that, there was still the slow, creeping anxiety and the dawning realizations that always needed to be held back.

I wish I could have spoken more about the consequences. What I feel every time I look down at my left arm. What it means to still need daily doses of methadone to get by. What that means for my sense of who I am and where I am in my life. How hard it is to still have to negotiate those feelings, and to never really forget that it’s always still there as an option, and always will be.

I wish I could have spoken more about how I came to understand myself as trans. How I managed to gradually construct that understanding of myself. How I “first knew” at 14, then “first knew” at 17, then “first knew” at 19, then “knew” at 22, then DID something at 26. Wish I could have spoken about all the bits of the narrative that never fit for me… how NARRATIVE itself doesn’t fit for me. How looking back over my life, I can only put together a trajectory or arc of my gender by lying to myself, selectively approaching my memories, and editing everything.

I wish I could have spoken more about how my narrative wasn’t linear. About the intersexed aspects of my body and my struggles with that, and my struggles after the fact with the entire concept of intersex… how there doesn’t seem to BE a comfortable word for what those experiences were, what my body was, what that meant for me. I wish I could have spoken about how the first medical interventions I took to help me with gender were to masculinize my body, and what that meant for me, and what it meant when I realized it didn’t work, that I still wasn’t normal. And how much of all of this I felt I had to bury through the process of “transition”. How much of this history I erased just to FIT the idea of “trans woman”. How trying to be a trans woman was, at first, every bit as much a lie about my gender and history and feelings as trying to be a man was. I wish I could have spoken about how broken, how self-betrayed I feel, every time I think about my breasts, or see the little lingering scar to the side of my left breast.

I wish I could have spoken more about my rape. About how I don’t fit anywhere into the discourse of “male rape survivors” and “female rape survivors”. About what it is to be a woman who was raped as a boy. About how I blamed myself, and how my initial shame was for being “gay” rather than for having been raped. How I believed for so long that it wasn’t rape, despite the fact that I was 16 and he was in college, despite the fact that I was drunk and literally forced to drink more than I’d wanted (literally), despite the knife. How the fact that he asked me to top him nullified everything else in my head, because “I could have run” (I couldn’t have, not really). How Watership Down is a trigger for me, because the animated film was playing in the living room of the punk collective house when I woke up, on the living room floor, not remembering how I got there or got away from his bedroom.

I wish I could have spoken about how shitty it is, after years of not confronting something you’ve spent years pretending never happened, to discover that there are literally no resources for you. Nothing. That the entire discourse of rape does not acknowledge that your experiences exist.

I wish I could have mentioned how insulting and frustrating it’s been how, almost every time I’ve mentioned that there are no trans-inclusive recovery books for rape survivors, someone says “you should write one!”

I wish I could have spoken about the abuse, and the incest. I wish I were able to even speak about what I cannot speak.

But certainly about how the social workers and psychiatrists prioritizing certain kinds of abuse, and pressuring me to admit those particular things that didn’t happen, resulted in me shutting down and feeling unable to tell them about the abuse that DID.

I wish I could have spoken about the lingering consequences of that, too. How I tense up and shiver when exposed to loud noises like sirens. How emotionally debilitating it is for me to be around people shouting at each other, or shouting things…to say nothing of being shouted at. How it damaged my relationship to sex. How I can extricate these things from my sexuality. How they played into my efforts to negotiate my gender, and played into the “explanations” I made up to convince myself I wasn’t “really” trans.

And I wish I’d talked more about growing up in a small town Nova Scotia. About how much I loved poetry for awhile, and published it and edited journals and threw a conference and everything. More about my love of comic books, and which are my favourites. More about my love of punk and shoegaze and goth and house music. About my goth phase, my punk phase, my twee phase, my hipster phase and my dandy phase, mostly all iterations of trying to find a way to make male gender presentation “work”. About how much I fucking love Final Fantasy VI. About living in Olympia, Boise, Minneapolis, Norfolk, Durham, Montreal, Tucson, Halifax, Mahone Bay, Chester, Ludlow and Vancouver. About each of three times I actually cried between the ages of 13 and 26. About Oly artsy squats, and the skag dealer called Nova in Kent who looked exactly like a cross between Dave Navarro and a bad guy from a late 80s action movie, and introducing Robin Blaser at his final reading, and my Prince tattoo and what THAT’S all about, and the time I almost stepped on a Water Mocassin, and the time I lost the obsidian ring I loved that my dad gave me as a present after one of his trips at sea at the bottom of the salt-water-shoreside pool and how he went diving for it to retrieve it at night, and my stuffed collie Laddy, and my first kiss, and my first concert, and my first kiss-as-a-girl, and my first drink, and watching Sailor Moon in the children’s hospital ER (and how *GOD* I spent a lot of nights in that ER), and my favourite member of New Kids.

I wish I could have spoken more about how much more I am than a trans woman and skeptic, and how much more my life was than a Traumatic Life Story.

I wish I’d been better able to offer you a chance to understand yourselves as more, too.
I wish I’d given us more of a chance to recognize each other, in each other.

…

I’m putting up my last post to Freethought Blogs on Friday! To be kept up to date on where I’ll be going next, please follow my twitter, @nataliereed84. If you’d like to help me land on my feet, cover my medicine until I get my insurance coverage reinstated, save up for SRS, and invest in future projects, please donate to my Tip Jar!

And the main kinds of music I really loved when I was that age, that kicked off my being into music in general, that set my love of music in motion, were industrial music, gothy-stuff, trip-hop (and the pretty broad range of electro-pop that was classified as trip-hop at the time), techno, and a little bit of punk. Needless to say, most of it was all definitely very electronic-music-oriented, with lots of drum machines and synthesizers involved. And I pretty much just straight-up forgot about that until recently.

To explain: I sort of lapsed out of music for a few years, first on account of my addiction, never having money, and all my music and electronic-gadgety-everything getting hocked or sold. And later finding out I just didn’t care as much anymore. But these past couple months, I’ve been really interested again. And finding myself particularly interested in electronic music, dance music, house, disco… things like that. Which for the most part I considered new interests.

But they weren’t really new. A lot of it is the kind of music I first ever fell in love with, and about which I kept a little candle of passion burning for a long time.

The thing is, I was taught to prefer and prioritize other kinds of music. I was taught, and taught myself, to love rock and “alternative” and “indie” instead. Because, overwhelmingly, that’s what my culture, my parents, my peers, and the messages I saw everywhere around me, said was the right kind of music. And I actually edited my own understanding of my own history with music to think I’d always been all about punk and stuff, that that was my “home base”, and to just cold forget that I’d ever left the etechno and house from The Matrix and Trainspotting soundtracks on repeat, or how often I cried listening to Portishead, or how many arguments I got in with my various fathers about why drum machines are a completely legitimate instrument and it’s not like pressing the fucking “bossa nova” or “waltz” button on a $25.00 keyboard from Radioshack.

There were a few things that were very, very consistent about the early messages that I internalized telling me that electronica, and especially dance music, were illegitimate in contrast to “real” music like rock, and especially “classic rock”. First was that it was “repetitive” and “all sounded the same”. Second was that shit about believing it took no “real” talent to produce or create. Third was pointing to the ubiquitous critical “consensus” that The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Nirvana and various other white dudes with guitars and snare-kick-hi-hat-ride-crash drum kits were clearly, “objectively” the greatest bands to ever exist. And fourth was that it was “gay”.

Yep… this dancey shit is fucking gay. I mean, anyone who’s anyone knows that, right? Besides, it’s too much like disco, and there’s that whole ubiquitous critical “consensus” that disco sucks, right?

These messages didn’t simply come from older guys like my dad and stepfather. They also came from my peers and friends, from TV, from magazines, from the internet, from endless jokes in sitcoms and cartoons and stand-up… it was everywhere. The apparently universal belief was that disco sucks and is dead, dance is gay, electronica is cool but shallow and devoid of substance or talent, hip-hop was violent and materialistic and sexist and corrupting the youth, and, again, The Beatles and Nirvana are the best things ever to ever exist in all of the existence that ever existed… objectively. And if that was the universal belief, then clearly I was the one who had the shitty music taste, and I had to learn to like better stuff, and lean into the punk and more rocky kinds of goth stuff I liked, and from there learn to like alternative and “classic rock” and eventually indie and from there the whole all-consuming dark and hopeless void of trying to impress the hipster record store clerk with your totally perfect choices.

(My dad, by the way, while making fun of me for stuff like house and techno, would actually praise and encourage me for liking punk. And would *literally* tell me that that meant I was learning to like “real” music.)

It never, ever occurred to me to think about what kinds of cultural forces and biases might have been shaping those mainstream perceptions of what kinds of music counted and were “real”, and what kinds of music were constantly being denigrated, mocked, or used as an example of everything that was wrong with 90s youth. It didn’t occur to me even despite the overwhelmingly obvious bias towards music produced by, or at least for, white heterosexual men. It didn’t even occur to me the 700th time I was told that dance was gay or that pop was for girls.

Nowadays, it occurs to me.

Going back to “disco sucks”: this is a concept that’s so ubiquitous, so common, and so normatively embraced, that most people simply tend to just go ahead and assume that, yeah, disco sucks, haha, we ALL know that. People tend not to think about it any further than that, or ever question how this particular concept came to be (much less why we’re STILL making jokes about it, and declaring it as a universal truth, even though it’s been 35 years and “deader than disco” has ITSELF entered our lexicon as a cliche). The way that we unquestioningly take it at face value, as established fact, seems very bizarre to me in that it’s normally incredibly obvious that music is tied to cultural and sub-cultural niches and forms of expression, and their attendant tensions… and how the subjective, contextual, fluid nature of music’s quality is normally itself accepted as a completely self-evident fact.

Still, “disco sucks”. It says right there on the bumper sticker. Don’t think about it. Everyone knows it sucks and it’s funny how much it sucks. Haha. Fuckin’ Bee-Gees. Fuckin’ ABBA.

(I also find it weird how people seem to assume that somehow an ENTIRE GENRE was sustained entirely by the Bee-Gees, ABBA (who aren’t really disco anyway), and one Gloria Gaynor song)
But to pause even briefly and consider the cultural context in which disco emerged, and the cultural context from which the reactionary push against it emerged (“disco sucks” was a refrain embraced by the rock fans of the late 70s… specifically fans of the heavily white-dominated contemporaneous form of rock), and it’s very easy to see an underlying cultural tension, related to race, sexuality, and gender.

Disco was a scene and musical form primarily created and embraced by Black Americans, Latin Americans, Italian Americans and, yes, by the LGBT community. Most of the performers (the ones who DON’T get remembered like the Bee-Gees do) and producers were black, and the music itself was largely based on the conventions of other primarily black genres like R&B, funk, gospel and soul.

“Disco Sucks” was a statement that, in two words, summed up an entire universe of cultural tension: the cultural expressions of white male Americans, and embraced by white male Americans, was superior to the “shallow” cultural expressions of American minorities.

Let’s go back for a minute to that question of certain forms of music being “repetitive” and “all sounding the same”…

You know what all sounds the same to me? Black metal. Fucking black metal. Every single black metal band sounds completely indistinguishable to my ears, and they’re all equally boring to me. And yeah, I can tell the difference between black metal, doom metal, death metal and folk metal, but they all also, internally, all sound the same to me. And 80s Washington DC hardcore. Samey. And most Sad Indie Folk Guy With A Guitar And A Beard music. Samey. Etc.

But I also know WHY it sounds the same: because I don’t fucking know enough about those genres to know what I’m supposed to be I’m listening for. I can’t read them. The “sameness” is produced by MY ignorance, not any inherent quality of music.

Despite silly concepts of “music is the universal language”, music has almost no universal or inherent properties. It’s just temporally organized noise, really. The way we respond to music, emotionally, is primarily learned by cultural associations, associations with other music, and also associations with our own experiences of that music or similar music. A minor key sounds “sad” to listeners familiar with western music in contrast to a major key because that’s the cultural association we’ve been raised to understand. But there are forms of music totally foreign to the western structures and concepts, like Javanese folk music, that we can’t “read” the same way. Their sad songs won’t be comprehensible as sad to us, because we won’t pick up on the signifiers of sadness encoded into it.

Even within the broader language of a given cultural tradition, each genre, and sub-genre, and sub-sub-genre, and genre-that’s-only-recognized-by-this-one-tumblr-I-follow,  is built around a set of conventions and expectations. Because of the consistent conventions of a given music marked, say, “classic punk rock”, the listener approaches the music *expecting* a certain set of things to be there, like aggressive guitars and drums, a basis in simple rock/blues chords, a fast tempo, probably vocals, a verse/chorus structure, a 4/4 time signature (maaaaybe 3/4, but nothin’ too weird!), and that the song be pretty short, simple, fun and non-pretentious. The band then PLAYS with those conventions, using them, toying with them, bending them, breaking them, working within them, seeing how creative they can be within them and how far they can go without breaking them, etc. and THAT’S what marks out the music as distinct. The push and pull between the conventions and expectations, and the creativity of the musicians within them.

(Some music has broader ranges of conventions than others… “rock” and “pop” are both extremely broad ranges of music, while “hardcore punk” is very narrow in what you’re “allowed” to do while still being considered “hardcore punk”)

If you don’t really understand what the conventions are, and can’t relate to them on the level of expectation, you’re not going to be able to understand when and where the performers or producers are being creative, you won’t be able to understand how they’re playing with or tweaking around, you won’t hear the talent and ingenuity when it’s there… ALL you’re likely to hear is the conventions of the genre itself. Which, of course, are by definition consistently the same across every artist within that genre (though you *might* notice when an artist *overtly* breaks the conventions).

Imagine someone who’d never, ever seen visual art before and had no concept of what it was about walking into an exhibit of mid-20th century art: “I don’t get it. It’s all just, like, big two dimensional rectangles with colours and stuff on them. They’re all the same”. Or someone who’d never seen a sitcom before: “they’re all the same… half-hour segments where a bunch of actors just perform some kind of humorous conflict while making witty remarks”. Or someone who’d only ever been exposed to classical music encountering all those “objectively greatest” rock bands the Boomers love: “It all sounds the same and is so repetitive. Just 2 to 4 minute vocal songs with pentatonic blues progressions and verse-chorus-verse-chorus structures.”

See what I mean?

Now, if we think about this in terms of normativity and privilege, things start coming into focus. A HUGE part of the nature of normativity is that it positions itself as the cultural default, and therefore the assumed base of knowledge, while knowledge of a marginalized identity, experience, culture, becomes specialized. Every queer or trans person already knows everything there is to know about straight cis people’s bodies and sexuality and courtship and romance and everything not only by having it pounded into our heads by almost EVERY work of art, literature or media concerning love or sexuality, but it was even straight up taught to us in school. Straight cis people, though, can be HILARIOUSLY ignorant about trans and queer people. Every black American is taught all about the history of Europe, the white-dominated western Canon, and the history of white colonists in the Americas, but black history gets marked out as a specialized topic, with a specialized month. The normative, privileged group have the luxury of being allowed to be ignorant about the marginalized group, but the marginalized group are forced to understand the normative one. This is part of why concepts like “a conversation about race” can be absurd: white people don’t have anything to add to such a conversation that PoC don’t already know. There is no special insight into the “white perspective”. There barely even IS a “white perspective”. White is just the ever-expanding umbrella for ethnic groups permitted inclusion in that privilege and normativity.

Because of normativity, knowledge as to the conventions and history and styles and genres of cultural expression that’s created by, or embraced by, a normative, privileged group is held by almost everyone, while understanding of the cultural expression of marginalized groups is limited or specialized knowledge. Consequently, it’s WAY more likely that someone from a marginalized background is going to understand the normative genres of music, like rock in the 70s, than someone from a privileged background will understand the music of marginalized groups, like disco.

And because that understanding is central to being able to interpret the music, well… yeah, normativity conditions itself to hear minority cultural expression through music as “shallow”, “repetitive”, and “all sounding the same”, regardless of the creativity that actually exists within the music.

Did you ever read that xkcd cartoon where the dude is taking a girl who (apparently) loves house/techno/electronica to “teach her some culture”, and they go to a classical concert? That is like, THE stupidest fucking…bullshit…grgh…horrible… AGH! Like NOBODY HAS EVER NOT BEEN “EXPOSED” TO CLASSICAL MUSIC. Classical music is TOTALLY part of the normativity!!! Nobody has “never heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” because they spent too much time listening to Wolfgang Gartner!!! But I guarantee a bunch of y’all reading this are now going to go to wikipedia to find out who the fuck Wolfgang Gartner is!!!

*breath*

Okay…

Normativity doesn’t on its own, however, explain the ferocity of the dedication to the “disco sucks” mantra, or why it’s been handed down so consistently through history. It doesn’t explain how a murdering rapist prick like Phil Spector receives so many accolades for his production genius, while the fact of Larry Levan being black and gay results in the vast majority of our culture willfully forgetting he ever existed. To understand that level of things, we have to look to straight up bigotry, and the insistence on dance music sounding “gay”.

The thing is, when my peers and friends in the late 90s would complain about the gayness of dance music, they didn’t mean in the catch-all pejorative sense. They meant it much more directly. They meant it genuinely sounded to them like something that gay people would listen to. And they wouldn’t be wrong. What this was about was direct antipathy to the cultural expression of a stigmatized minority…and one that, at the time, could not be exploitatively embraced, like, for contrast, hip-hop could be (though in today’s world of Lady Gaga and Glee, that’s no longer the case).

The cultural expression of a marginalized group, or one associated with a marginalized group, naturally, inevitably, and usually intentionally, comes to signify that group’s values, needs, experiences, frustrations, etc. That’s part of the whole point: creating cultural expression that reflects you, in which you can see yourself and your experiences, because the normative culture sure as fuck isn’t going to bother. But this association, positive as it is, means that the cultural expression works as a stand-in for the group whenever the dominant and privileged want to attack. Like racists talking about the alleged violence, sexism and materialism in hip-hop (while ignoring the violence, sexism and materialism of, oh, VIRTUALLY ALL MAINSTREAM MUSIC OF THE LAST 70 YEARS) as a way to, by proxy, vent their bigoted racist feelings towards black people.

(also conveniently ignoring that by far the primary audience and consumers of mainstream hip-hop is actually young WHITE middle-class men. They’re who the music is “for”, in terms of demographics and the interests of the major labels, and they’re whose tastes dictate what tops the hip-hop charts. NOT the black community.)

House music and techno were genres that built off of the “abandoned” tradition of disco, as well as its predecessors of R&B, funk, soul and gospel. Part of the point was DJs remixing the dance records that used to be hot in ways that would make them fresh and hot again (along with some new influences from Europe), for a now smaller but more dedicated and passionate audience. Most of those early DJs were black, but the audiences were pretty ethnically diverse. And very quickly, it also appealed a lot to queer audiences.

(I sometimes wonder if part of that might have been about how so much of the lyrics and refrains and culture and even dance moves of house music, and disco, were focused on freeing oneself, being happy and finding pleasure within your body, throwing aside constraints on your body and identity, embracing your gender and sexuality and love and experiences, feeling loose and open, feeling a positive and accepting sense of community and togetherness, things like that… messages that were, intentionally or not, very directly queer and trans positive, or at least very easy to read as such)

So yeah… house music, and other genres of dance and electronic music to emerge throughout the 80s, came to be culturally associated with LGBTQ. And consequently despised or ridiculed by anyone who felt threatened by the existence of a queer cultural expression or sub-culture or… you know, existence of queer people themselves and stuff.

“Disco sucks” didn’t exactly recur. But lots of other reactionary responses did, and they occurred in response to almost EVERYTHING that wasn’t rock…and/or wasn’t within the normativity (increasingly defined by the interests of boomers, who increasingly were THE demographic with the greatest spending power to dictate the discourse of music). Over time, a new perennial meme developed, wherein “real music” was constantly under “threat” by the much smaller genres that appealed to minority audiences. Even while the “Rock/Pop” world continued, of course, to be the dominant and normative cultural expression, there were, and continue to be, constant hysterical fears (especially amongst the boomers) that it’s about to be extinguished by the latest shallow/all-sounds-the-same “fad” like hip-hop or 90s rave techno or boy bands (where the bigotry in question is misogyny and hatred of youth) or whatever.

It’s a very boring kind of perennial bigotry.

And HOLY FUCK does the “is real music going to be extinguished by boy bands/rappers/techno?” concept sound EXACTLY like “Are whites becoming a minority? Is Christianity being outlawed? Are the gay elite going to take away my Bible? Are the trans cabal going to give a sex change to my kid?”.

Disco never sucked. It just wasn’t white enough, straight enough, male enough and cis enough. And most dance music IS kinda gay. And that’s awesome.

And I’m done claiming I was always punk, and done telling myself it’s my taste that was shitty. If you’re unable to learn to understand and appreciate anything outside what the mainstream culture has already, by default, taught you to understand as The 100 Greatest White Dudes WIth Guitars Of ALL TIME, it’s not MY taste that has a problem, and not me who needs to “learn” to like “real music” or be “exposed” to culture.

Expose your own selves to some cultureS.

…

I’m putting up my last post to Freethought Blogs on Friday! To be kept up to date on where I’ll be going next, please follow my twitter, @nataliereed84. If you’d like to help me land on my feet, cover my medicine until I get my insurance coverage reinstated, save up for SRS, and invest in future projects, please donate to my Tip Jar!

This seemed totally not true to my experience.

Maybe as much as half of everything I write is at least partly based in deconstructing such specialized concepts, or investigating mistaken assumptions about them. To challenge or deconstructed specific ideas within specific communities, spaces or discourses, like feminism or the trans community, it helps a lot to be able to address those concepts specifically, and not have to flit about with defining them for audience’s who aren’t yet familiar. After all, an audience who isn’t familiar with the concepts of “gender dysphoria”, “detransition” or “passability” aren’t the audience I’m speaking to when addressing misconceptions about or problematic elements of those concepts.

And knowing a term does not necessarily mean you understand it.

Take for instance the idea of intersectionality. Someone commenting on the video panel I did with Crommunist, The Anti-Intellect, Robert Reece, Jamila Bey, Edwin Hodge and Paul Fidalgo stated that until seeing the panel, they’d been under the assumption that “intersectionality” simply meant to compare and contrast various forms of oppression and marginalization with the hopes of coming to new insights about them. But that’s not really the key point of looking into intersectionality… it’s much more about investigating how different forms of oppression, marginalization and privilege relate to one another, and how they overlap to create new, specific experiences.

In the video I also tried to address an even more common misunderstanding of intersectionality. In attempting to understand what occurs when someone is positioned at the intersection of multiple lines of oppression, a lot of people adopt a fairly simplistic idea that these various oppressions simply stack on top of one another. Such as that a black gay man has to deal with homophobia AND racism. People might also imagine privileges operating similarly, with the more different “kinds” of privilege you have -like male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege- all stacking up too; and maybe that all your oppressions and all your privileges sort of balance against each other, like stones being dropped into dishes on the ends of a scale, to ultimately determine some kind of overall quotient of privilege and oppression.

But it doesn’t really work like that. Intersectionality modifies the ways in which privileges and oppressions operate. They relate to each other and interact to create wholly unique forms of marginalization or oppression, or make a privilege operate in a different manner than it normally does, or one marginalized aspect of your identity removes certain advantages a privileged aspect of your identity normally entails. These relationships are very nuanced, and very complex, and there simply aren’t any basic, general statements you can make about them.

This is the reason intersectionality is so key to the discourse of privilege and oppression. Because it creates an extremely diverse range of unique experiences relative to the (comparably) smaller range of factors in play. The racism and homophobia experienced by a black gay man are different than the racism experienced by straight black men or the homophobia experienced by white gay men. The experiences of cissexist medical gatekeeping for a trans woman with disabilities are going to be different than the experiences of an able-bodied trans woman attempting to navigate that same system. And the manner in which a woman’s reproductive and sexual choices are going to be policed by her society will be directly affected by her economic class, and her choice of work.

As a more in-depth example: trans-misogyny, while directly a result of more generalized sexism and misogyny, and existing at the intersection of misogyny and cissexism, and ultimately inextricable from the overall relationships between misogyny, binarism, oppositional sexism, heterosexism, femmephobia, and cissexism, operates as a discrete, independent form of oppression, with specific qualities, producing specific experiences that trans women have to endure.

Recently I was sexually assaulted as a McDonald’s. I had gone in, ordered a coffee and muffin, and asked to use the bathroom while they prepared my order. While heading towards the bathroom, an older drunk male customer called out “male bathroom! male bathroom!” (the bathrooms were, in fact, unisex). I was in a sort of punchy take-no-shit kinda mood, so after I finished peeing and got my food, I approached him and asked “what were you saying on my way into the bathroom?”. He then got up, got VERY VERY close to me, saying “how you doing tonight, ‘chick’? You feelin’ good, ‘chick?”, and then grabbed my hand. I pushed him away. He then got angry, swooped around me, and started doing a little dance while grabbing his genitals, and with his other arm grabbed me around the waist and pulled me towards him. No one was doing anything to intervene, and while this was going on, he continued mocking and invalidating my gender.

I struggled away, closed the door in his face, and began walking off. As I got to the corner, I heard him stagger back out of the McDonald’s and began shouting out “it’s a maaannn!!! it’s a maaaannn!!!”

I was being sexually assaulted (as a woman) with a man exerting sexual power over me (a woman) to threaten and intimidate me and put me back in my place (as a woman), but the confrontation was based in an effort to invalidate my gender and describe me as a man, he used the misgendering as a further means of exerting power and humiliating / intimidating me, and it’s likely that the fact of my being trans played a key role in the staff and patrons’ collective choice to not intervene, and be complicit in the assault.

In short, it was an intersection of misogyny and cissexism that produced a unique and uniquely effective means of marginalization and intimidation. It was a hostile act of trans-misogyny, not simply sexism and transphobia stacked on top of eachother. This is the nature of intersectionality. Different oppressions modifying each other, and usually amplifying each other, by means of their proximity, and producing new oppressions.

A related, equally complicated, but lesser talked about (and requiring considerably more care to talk about), is the fact that privilege is also modified by its intersections with marginalization and oppression. How a privilege normally operates can, in specific contexts, become very different, sometimes radically so.

Male privilege, for instance, does not mean the same thing for a trans man that it does for a cis man. A trans man certainly does have male privilege, but may not have many of the advantages usually associated with it, such as the benefits inherent to what normative male-socialization offers that normative female-socialization does not. They may likewise lack certain medical benefits, may be effected by numerous laws targeting women’s reproduction, and may not be able to assume most benefits cis men receive from being culturally positioned as the “default” within the dynamics of sex and gender.

Able-bodied privilege is something else that, in a trans context, doesn’t mean the full extent of advantages it normally offers. For instance, trans people do not have the benefit of being able to assume that any given doctor will understand their body and understand how to treat them. It’s not uncommon for trans people to be barred from medical access as a consequence… and trans people’s access to non-transitioned-related medicine is actually a pretty serious issue, with pretty serious consequences. Able-bodied privilege does, however, certainly exist for trans people… and as noted earlier, the intersection of ableism and cissexism can produce unique oppressions. Ableism is also a very serious problem extant within the trans community as a whole.

But while able-bodied privilege and male privilege operate differently in trans context, they absolutely still operate, and trans men and able-bodied trans people have a lot less shit to worry about than trans women and trans people with disabilities. However I feel there are many cases in trans context where a perceived privilege is not actually functioning as a privilege, and that these “dummy” or “decoy” privileges end up actually being used as an extremely destructive means of further marginalization.

(I’m using the terms dummy and decoy because if I started talking about “fake privilege”, it would be all of five fucking seconds before some privileged asshole started using that concept to deny the fact that they’re benefitting from a very real privilege, and derail someone’s effort to discuss it. This way, with these terms, I feel it might take at least a solid twenty minutes before that happens.)

Something that has troubled me a lot lately about The Trans Community and most of its more centralized space has been a tendency I’ve observed for most dominant members of those communities and spaces to claim such a decoy while excluding, marginalizing and mistreating other trans people, sometimes in ways with serious consequences like barring someone from access to needed resources, and using the decoy privilege to justify that exclusion. The claim runs that the people they’re excluding are, in fact, the privileged trans people. The ones who “have it easy”. Common targets for this form of exclusion are trans youth, trans women perceived by others to be “passable”, straight trans women and femme trans women.

An older example of this tactic that was very common until relatively recently was trans men leveraging the accusation of privilege towards trans women. This would be based in arguments that trans women at least had representation, that trans women were the ones that got on TV and stuff, while no one even noticed trans men existed. This argument would be maintained even after a space had come to be wholly dominated by trans men, and the rationale would conveniently ignore the massively disproportionate harassment, ridicule, violence, sexualization, objectification and policing directed towards trans women, focusing exclusively on the questions of visibility and representation.

This latter issue, focusing on an extremely narrow range of questions, even visibility and representation specifically, in order to mark out a given group as “privileged” or “having it easy” while ignoring clear evidence of their oppression, marginalization or vulnerability, is startlingly consistent even in the forms of internal marginalization we’re continuing to see in trans space today (and amongst trans women, certainly).

There’ve been a number of kinda bitter articles circulating lately in response to the rising  media visibility of trans youth (and pre-adolescent trans kids, in particular). A recurrent element of these articles, written almost entirely by older trans women, is a perception that these youth won’t suffer at all, that they’ll get to live more less wholly normative lives within their identified gender. After all, trans girls won’t be subjected to physical masculinization, so they’ll be totally, completely “passable” and no one need ever know that they were ever trans. So, the claim goes, these kids aren’t really trans at all, since they’ll never know the experiences of suffering and oppression that have defined our lives.

Except no. That’s not true at all. Someone who begins medical intervention in early adolescence is still going to have the experience of a medically different body, is still going to have to go through the hassles and humiliation of doctors and gatekeeping and for the rest of her life will have to deal with all the same issues of awkwardly filling out their cis-centric paperwork and explaining to them how her body works and how to deal with it. She’s still going to have to spend the rest of her life dealing with all the legal and bureaucratic and procedural bullshit, and all the same additional consequences should she be incarcerated or run through the punitive “justice” system. She’s still going to have to spend the rest of her life navigating the complex issues of disclosure around sexuality, with the same doubts and fears and vulnerability and risks hovering over her head every time she meets someone interested in her. If she discloses, or is outed, she faces all the same potential consequences, all the same kinds of dangers and risks, that the rest of us do. She will still be living a trans life.

And where this gets especially jarring, and dark, is when one takes a look at the actual realities of trans youth. The statistics are grim and harrowing, with trans youth at staggering risks of homelessness, unemployment, violence, addiction, rape and sexual assault, harassment, discrimination, survival sex work, and HIV.

But none of this matters to the constructed narrative of the easy, happy, privileged life of trans youth. Because passability, visibility and representation, are ALL that matters. The assumption going that the ONLY axis along which trans people are discriminated against is the issue of street harassment, of being visibly identified as trans and penalized for that. But it is, paradoxically, an indication of extreme privilege on your part if your concept of trans-misogyny and cissexism, and what they entail, is limited to the issues like being called “sir” at your local Starbuck’s, and you operate within a mentality that being spared from being read as trans by strangers would equate to being spared from oppression entirely. To believe that the only avenue of trans oppression is being read as trans by a stranger is indicative that you’ve had very few experiences of all its other avenues.

Adding to this is simple idealization; a basic, cheap, grass-is-greener perception. The trans people marking out other’s have never lived their experiences of being trans, only their own, and in the absence of meaningful dialogue, they can therefore project whatever experiences they want onto that other person. If that other person has one thing you wish you had, or regret not having had a chance to have, like “passability” or youth-as-your-own-gender, it’s very easy to project all your own idealized assumptions about how great your life might have been or would have been or should have been onto them, and simply ignore any of the actualities of their experiences, or even the possibility that other factors may have been there. The thing you regret not having becomes the only thing that matters, and every other possibility of experienced gets subsumed within it. Like “How could you have had abusive parents? They let you transition, didn’t they?”, in which the regret that their parents didn’t “let” them transition nullifies consideration of every single other aspect of parenting.

In the mean time, the actual fact that older transitioners (and, outside of the context of trans men-dominated space: particularly white, middle-class trans women who sought intervention at older ages and previously lived/identified as straight men) are the privileged and dominant group relative to trans youth within centralized trans space and our community as a whole, with the most resources and power to throw around, and less other shit to worry about, allows them to dictate the terms of the discourse (away from other considerations), dominate the conversation (and erase the voice of trans youth and their capacity to set the record straight), and to dictate the priorities of trans activism and advocacy, towards their own concerns, like visibility and representation and media and insurance coverage at jobs and rights legislation and what Imogen Binnie perfectly calls The Theatre of Inclusion (like making sure everyone says “trans*” instead of trans, instead of actually doing shit to make spaces more accessible and welcoming), and away from issues like homelessness, shelter access, sex work, trans-friendly/educated addiction resources, HIV amongst trans people, universal medical coverage and access, trans-friendly/educated resources for rape survivors, and trans-oriented sexual health education.

While this process unfolds, however, older trans women continue to define themselves as less privileged.

This phenomena repeats in a very, very similar pattern within the construct of “passing privilege”, wherein again the issue of harassment and visibility is treated as the sole means by which trans people are marginalized and oppressed, and thereby someone perceived by other trans people as having the mythical, fleeting, mercurial quality of “passability” is immediately assumed to live a life benefitting from the entirety of cis privilege, with no problems to speak of.

(I accept that conditional cis privilege is a useful term and concept, but this is a very meaningfully different framework from the destructive, bullshit concept of “passing privilege”. It is, for instance, NOT a privilege in and of itself. What it is is that you are, in certain contexts and situations, read as cis, and therefore granted a few conditional aspects of cis privilege, which are temporary, highly contextual, and may be revoked at any time if the situation or context or conditions change in anyway. It is not an aspect of the person, but an aspect of how they are, occasionally, treated)

Over and over and over and over again, I have seen young trans women, “passable” or normatively-attractive trans women, femme trans women and trans women who lived or identified as queer while they were presenting as men, be hounded out of trans spaces; by being repeatedly, frequently talked over, by being sexually harassed or solicited by chasers, by having their problems or experiences or histories or concerns dismissed or invalidated, by being sexually assaulted by other trans women who assume that “we’re all girls here!” means there’s no such thing as physical boundaries between women and that consent is no longer required before touching intimate parts of a woman’s body, by being treated with overt resentment and jealousy, by being consistently told they have it easy and have no right to complain, by constantly being judged on the basis of their appearance… all while being told that they’re somehow the privileged, dominant group. Because “passing privilege”. Because “femininity” (I guess they never read up on femmephobia, or ever bothered taking a single look at how femininity in CAMAB people is treated in our culture). Because “straight privilege” (our culture does not perceive trans anyone as straight, and no trans anyone ever has the luxury of navigating their sexuality all easy-and-default-and-normative, with no fear of repercussions or consequences or risks or legality. Trans is queer by default, no matter who you like to fuck, because whether or not you see yourself as straight, or your friends see you as such, cis-het-patriarchy don’t). Because it’s so GREAT and ENVIABLE to have your womanhood validated by straight men’s demeaning cat-calls. Because, in some fucking alternate world I’ve never had the luxury of visiting, being deemed sexually attractive by the standards of our culture means no longer being subject to body-policing (seriously… in what fucking world?!?). Etc.

Visibility and representation are not the sole issues in cissexism, transphobia, cisnormativity and trans-misogyny. That’s just one avenue produced by a specific unique intersection of marginalization and privilege… a marginalization that happens to target those most privileged to dominate the discourse, and ignore the other experiences of oppression by trans people at different intersections… intersections leaving them, less able to assert themselves, less able to assert their experiences, and less able to assert their needs.

Cis-het-patriarchy isn’t, independently, picking the kind of trans people it thinks are okay. At least not yet. It still thinks we’re all pretty gross. Our heirarchies are being primarily produced internally, intertwined with all the OTHER kyrarchies (of gender, of race, of class, of ability…) that we’ve brought along with us, failing to unpack at the door, and all the echoes of old privileges we’re unable to give up, still feeling entitled, still feeling what we have to say is extremely incredibly ultra super important and everyone else owes us their attention and respect, regardless of their own needs. The result is our Trans Community, self-selecting the incredibly narrow range of trans people we’re positioning to be our leaders and representatives… the narrow range of trans people dictating our priorities and discourse.

And one of the ways we keep doing this is by claiming some of the most vulnerable and marginalized amongst us already have it easy, and don’t need the benefit of a voice. And so they’re never able to correct our mistake.

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I’m putting up my last post to Freethought Blogs on Friday! To be kept up to date on where I’ll be going next, please follow my twitter, @nataliereed84. If you’d like to help me land on my feet, cover my medicine until I get my insurance coverage reinstated, save up for SRS, and invest in future projects, please donate to my Tip Jar!

So let’s start with me making some, perhaps entirely groundless, assumptions that we’re already on the same page about some stuff.

Like how the debate between a bio-essentialist “evolved behaviours” view of gender and sex, and the social-constructivist “blank slate” view of gender and sex, is a harmful false dichotomy, that presents a lose-lose choice for anyone who needs or wants actual, lived transgender experiences, in all their diversity, actually accounted for in whatever theoretical framework of gender and sex they sign on for. Or at least wants them accounted for without a lot of bizarre mental gymnastics and convoluted, flimsy theories.

Okay. Agree? Cool.

And how there’s more than one kind of gender-essentialism. There’s the obvious binary, bio-essentialist view, where most or all observed behavioural differences between men and women are “evolved”, and the definition of the terms “man” and “woman” is based on a simplistic “biological” distinction (penises and motive gametes and XY = male, vaginas and ova and XX = female, and everything else is either a disorder, or simply “cosmetic” and not “biological” or ‘scientific”), but a gender-essentialism is any theoretical framework that ultimately boils down to saying men are men and manhood is an inherent, essential quality of such people, and women are women and womhood is an inherent, essential quality of that category of people, and there are other kinds of gender-essentialisms.

For instance, you can have an essentialist version of the “social construct” view. And this actually pops up a lot in some of the justifications some cis feminists provide for trans-exclusionist policies or attitudes. This is where you state that socialization is the root cause of maleness or femaleness, but it nonetheless defines you, and “man” or “woman” is still an inherent, essential quality of the person, that isn’t fluid or contextual, and cannot be transcended or complicated. In this view, if you were raised and socialized as a man, that is what you are, and what you always will be, all other considerations not being relevant.

There are also theological or spiritual essentialisms, like where an Abrahamic God ordered the world into a division of gender and sex, ordains certain roles and behaviours for those sexes, and being a man or a woman is an immutable aspect of yourself that was God’s will, and any beliefs, identities or behaviours contradicting this divine order are simply mortal folly. Or where men and women are respectively two different aspects of a cosmic “balance” of complimentary “energies”, fitting into a cosmic order of other “opposites” like sun and moon, reason and emotion, order and chaos, light and darkness, aggression and passivity, science and art, Apollo and Diana, etc. Or where men and women exude male or female “energies” or “auras”, and only one or the other is capable of performing certain kinds of magic.

And lots of other gender-essentialisms. Gender-essentialism isn’t just an overly rigid, biological view in which gender is a behavioural consequence of (binary, dimorphic) sex. Gender-essentialism is any view based on the idea that being a “man” or a “woman” is an innate, inherent, essential trait of a person. Gender-essentialism needn’t even be necessarily binary.

Okay. Agree? Cool!

So… the framework of “gender identity”, where the quality of being a man or a woman is based on subjective experience of your body and sex, subjective experience of gender roles, and how you identify within them, is the best approach, and totally better than all these other frameworks, right?

Agree? Actually… not okay. Not cool.

“Gender identity” is still gender-essentialism. It’s just a gender-essentialism where we get to continue thinking men are men, and women are women, and these are inherent parts of who you are, but we also get to ignore the uncomfortable demand of DEFINING “man” and “woman” and what we mean by that, and thereby dodge the uncomfortable fact that any such definition within any essentialist framework necessarily invalidates, undermines, insults or excludes at least some trans or intersex people. It’s a way to go right on believing that our womanhood, or our manhood, or whatever “gender identity” we have, is an immutable and intrinsic quality of ourselves, and thereby maintain the comforting belief that it’s concrete and stable and unassailable, but without having to deal with any of the difficult implications of that, without having to interrogate our definitions, without having to worry about what we mean, and without having to really think about gender beyond the generally received notions. It’s a way to be transgender but still think of our genders the way cis people do.

I’d say it’s about trying to have our cake and eat it too, but I never really understood that expression. Why wouldn’t I eat my cake? Isn’t the whole point of cake to eat it?

It’s like trying to have our fireworks display, box of puppies and golden robotic dance troupe and EAT THEM TOO.

The “gender identity” framework is extremely common amongst trans communities, allies, and “social justice” discourse in general, both as an independent concept and framework as well as a means of defining the relationships between gender, sex and sexuality in general. We’ve ALL seen the “genderbread person”, and the idea that human gender/sexuality defined by four “spectrum” variables (sometimes with a secondary spectrum of intensity) of “gender identity”, “sex”, “gender presentation” and “sexual orientation” is quickly becoming THE assumed nature of what makes a person cis, trans, gay, bi, asexual, male, female, whatever.

I myself subscribed to the basic “gender identity / gender presentation / sex” view for a very long time (although I increasingly would qualify it with statements of “this is a bit simplified, but…” as more and more troubling implications occurred to me), and it was extremely tempting to lean on, given how many cis and straight people have trouble dealing with even basic issues, like how they tend towards the notion that the entirety of human sexual/gender diversity is a single spectrum of male/masculine/gynephilic to female/feminine/androphilic, or how they struggle with the distinction between issues of sexual orientation and issues of gender (like that being a trans woman isn’t simply a matter of being “really really really gay”).

I defined “gender identity” in my glossary as follows:

“The inner conceptual sense of self as “man”, “woman” or other, as divorced from issues like gender expression, sexual orientation, or physiological sex. It is a subtle and abstract, but extremely powerful, sense of who you are, in terms of gender, independent of how you dress, behave, what your interests are, who you’re attracted to, etc.”

That’s still useful to have in there just in terms of clueing people into to what is generally *meant* by “gender identity” even if I don’t agree with the concepts behind it (sort of like how I might also define “passability” or “autogynephilia” despite finding those concepts extremely problematic). But that’s not the way I was thinking of it when I wrote the glossary. I was thinking “here’s a useful concept to help us think about and discuss gender and sex in less problematic ways!”.

My thinking has changed. And although I sometimes cringe with embarrassment looking back at the ways I approached these concepts when I first started this blog, I feel like it’s a sign of success that I’m leaving this blog with new ideas, new experiences, new insights, and new ways of thinking. Ways of thinking that, I hope, have grown. Leaving this blog as a different woman, different trans-advocate and different feminist than I was when I began suggests to me that I did a good job, and stayed honest, critical and open-minded enough to learn from my colleagues, my readers and my own investigations as I went. That I wasn’t simply trying to hammer a particular view into everyone else, but that I was sharing in a discourse, sharing in an effort to bring us all to a better understanding of these issues.

To get back to the topic at hand, though, notice how in my definition I position “gender identity” as an intrinstic “inner”, “powerful” quality of a human being. That’s, you know, essentialism… in a nutshell, anyway.

The term, at least, “gender identity” could be meaningful and justifiable if it were restricted to the description of a subjective experience. If it were simply a means of describing how we experience our relationship to the concepts of “man” and “woman”, an argument could be made to its validity, and that it doesn’t need to mess around in the tricky business of saying what “man” or “woman” means, or even what the basis or function of “identifying as” actually is. But that’s NOT how we use it, and the position of “gender identity” as a quality immediately leads us away from such use (much like the way “passability” is described as a quality of the individual immediately leads us away from conceiving of it in terms of other people’s perceptions placed on us. To speak of “gender identity” and “passability” as traits or qualities immediately abandons their nature as contextual, fluid and subjective in favour of describing the individual as having a specific gender identity or passability, so defending those terms as ways of describing contextual or subjective experiences is disingenuous at best).

Behild the problematic fact that “gender identity”’s definition as an intrinsic fact of a person’s experience is an even shakier world of implicit assumptions about where the “deep-seated sense of self” comes from. Although the definition itself says nothing about the cause, the conceptual frameworks we build with “gender identity” as the scaffolding are much less reserved in the assumptions we’re willing to make about what causes a person to have one gender identity rather than another. And it’s hard, sometimes, to see where these ideas of the nature of gender and sex build from the assumption of an inherent “gender identity”, and where they’re merely justifications put in place to keep the assumption of “gender identity” from collapsing.

Gender identity has always been deeply connected to the “Born This Way” concepts of gender and sexual orientation. The qualifiers of “deep-seated”, “intrinstic” and, often, “immutable” added onto “sense of self” typically seem far more connected to saying “We can’t help it! This is fundamentally who we are! It’s totally completely inherent! Seriously! We were born this way!” *as a response* to social pressures suggesting that being trans or being queer is only permissible or understandable if it can’t be helped, or that cissexism and heterosexism only count as bigotry and unethical if they’re targeting an inherent, immutable, non-fluid aspect of someone’s being that was present from birth and they have no control over. Which is, to be frank, not only a totally ridiculous attitude to have about bigotry and why it’s not okay, but also a mentality that lends strength to the idea that trans and queer identities, bodies and behaviours are less preferable than cis and straight ones (and helps validate the underlying misogyny that fuels a great deal of cissexism). “GOD NO, of course no one would CHOOSE to be queer, or transsexual, or a woman. That would be repulsive and insane! But we simply can’t help having this tragic, deplorable condition.”

What if I did choose to be a trans woman? What if I refused to play along with social demands that I justify this, and the only explanations I offered was that this makes me feel happier, more secure and confident, more comfortable with how I dress and present myself and more comfortable in my body, and that it makes sex more pleasurable and fun for me? Is that not reason enough? And who the fuck are cis people to say it isn’t, and that I need to provide a better explanation?

How about, instead, you provide me with an explanation for why there’s anything wrong with the choices I’ve made and why they should be denied to me (or anyone), and justifications for your hatred, discomfort, disgust, fear, bigotry and violence?

This framework of “born this way” justifications for being trans is based in the related concepts of “gender dysphoria”, theories of neurobiological “cause”, and the idea that human beings can have a “male brain” or “female brain” or “androgynous brain”. Not everyone investing themselves in “gender identity as essential, inborn trait” shares precisely the same assumptions or views about these things, and don’t necessarily all sign up for the more extreme binarist, bio-essentialist, sexist ideas about “male brains” and “female brains”. Nonetheless, the idea that there’s some intrinsic part of you, almost always assumed to be neurobiological, that establishes your gender identity is overwhelmingly consistent in the hypothesis, and shows up almost immediately after you get past the basic definition (as subjective “intrinsic, deep-seated sense of self”) and start asking people where that sense of self comes from, and why it’s so intrinsic and deep-seated.
The basic theory runs like this: brains and the nervous system are not distinct from other aspects of the body in being sexually differentiated by hormones, particularly in utero. Sometimes hormonal fluctuations at various key periods in fetal development can result in shifts in how the nervous system is ‘sexed’, and this results in the neuro-biology being structured, or disposed towards instincts and behaviours, “meant” for the “opposite” sex, even where sexual development of simpler, more macroscopic anatomy, like genital configuration, is unaffected. This, so the idea goes, is what “causes” variant sexual orientation and gender dysphoria as innate, inherent qualities.

The basic concept is fine, makes sense, and the basics on which the theory is built have a certain amount of sound scientific evidence. There is, for instance, ample evidence that neurobiology is a factor in sexual behaviour, that this is strongly related to development in utero, and that this neurobiology can be affected by changes in pre-natal hormones. It’s possible, for example, to *nduce homosexual behaviour, or “lordosis behaviour” (the arched spine position adopted by most female mammals for intercourse) in anatomically male mammals, by messing around with their prenatal hormones.

I have no problem with the assumption that there are underlying neurobiological factors in sex and sexuality, and that these are related to gendered behaviours and perhaps affect the relationship between an individual and their sexual anatomy. What I have a problem with is how many assumptions, and leaps, are made from this. For instance, seeing neurobiology not as a factor, but as determinant or cause… or as an explanation for the entirety of gendered behaviour and gender variance. Those kinds of leaps seem really really iffy to me, and I don’t at all trust their motives. We also seem to have fallen seriously short of actively questioning them.

Gender, as the series of behaviours and modes of presentation we adopt in relationship to our cultural roles and understanding of sex and sexual difference, seems clearly to be at least partly socio-cultural in nature. This is rendered pretty apparent in the degree to which things we used to assume (or often still assume) to be inherent qualities of the sexes are in fact culturally arbitrary, and can dramatically shift from context to context. And study after study emerges telling us that things we saw as inherent, and even came up with elaborate evolutionary theories to explain, are also arbitrary and shift along with shifted context (for instance, if you reverse the “seated” vs. “moving” roles in speed-dating, the “passive, selective” role and behaviours typically seen as inherent to female sexuality, and the “aggressive, promiscuous suitor” role and behaviours typically seen as inherent to male sexuality, immediately reverse along with the shifted roles).

Needless to say, there is no part of my brain telling me to grow my hair long and dye it magenta. There’s no “long colourful hair” lobe. Those are ways I relate to my culture and its codes of gender, and means of expressing and asserting myself as “woman” in relationship to my cultural “field” of gender (by field of gender I mean the overall system of meanings and assumptions a culture or subculture assigns to various behaviours or modes of presentation when gendering them).

The model that I’ve recently found to be by far the most useful and consistent means of looking at gender is to see it as basically a semiotic system for understanding, expressing and communicating sexual difference. In its most basic sense, it’s about communicating to each other what our bodies are like, how we relate to those bodies, what our sexual desires are, and how we engage those sexual desires through our bodies.

Things do become more complicated, though, in that gender ultimately also communicates and expresses one’s relationship to the field of gender itself. We inevitably form various “shorthand” heuristics for reading these things in each other, so we develop codified sets of meanings grouped under a single discrete concept of gender, like “woman” or “man”. When someone uses the system of gender to express herself as a “woman” (via things like long-hair, skirts, certain pronouns, body language, certain types of name, certain kinds of language, make-up, etc) that is meant to simultaneously express and assert various aspects of herself: her body, her relationship to her body, how she expresses and experiences her sexuality through her body, and how she relates to the concepts of “man” and “woman” and understands herself within them, etc. Someone reading her as “woman” will make a number of heuristic assumptions about her in response (which may or may not be correct: the assumptions he makes about “woman” might include “vagina”, whereas she does not have a vagina, and does have a penis, and doesn’t consider this relevant to her gender nor is it something she’s attempting to express through it. Just like with all semiotics, it’s always possible to be misunderstood).

Under this model of understanding gender, we have to view gender itself as being pretty much entirely, by definition, socio-cultural. Gender is not, and CANNOT, be inherent. It is only a system built around certain aspects of ourselves and one another which might be inherent, and around certain aspects of our culture which certainly aren’t.

The neurobiological factors which might influence, for instance, our relationship to our anatomy and how we experience our sexuality through our bodies do not, and cannot, determine, predict or “contain” our genders, which are definitively social as a means of relating to other human beings. “Woman” is not contained within my brain. “Woman” is a social and cultural construct that is more useful and meaningful than other options (like “man” or “androgyne”) for understanding, expressing and communicating what goes on in my brain, the relationship between my brain and body and sexuality and body, and what’s going on with my body itself. And also a bit about how I position myself within, and feel about, the field of gender I’m in.

Any inherent quality, like a certain neurobiological structure or whatever, cannot be “gender”. It is an aspect of sex, which our gender responds and adapts to and tries to negotiate. And what kind of gender is constructed around those more “inherent” qualities like sexually differentiated neurobiology varies from culture to culture, time period to time period. Field to field, and even from individual to individual. One person might find the construct of “woman” to be what works to best their navigate their culture landscape and social / interpersonal relationships, in response to certain subjective experiences related to her neurobiology while another person who has the same neurobiological trait might respond differently, through expressing a different gender, like “femme” or “dandy” or “genderqueer” or “Hjira” or “kathoey” or “cross-dresser”. Consequently, a “gender identity” cannot be a fixed, identifiable trait. And it can’t carry any definable meaning beyond the subjective experience of that subjective experience naming itself.

Trying to define a “gender identity” as a personal trait is like trying to objectively quantify pain. Since there are no reference points, or bases for comparison, other than one’s subjective experience, it’s impossible. A person can say that their stubbed toe hurts more than a papercut they had and less than a broken leg they had…. but they can’t say their stubbed toe hurts more or less than someone else’s stubbed toe, papercut, or broken leg. We can develop a scale of subjective experience of pain, and we can even make some objective judgments about how much pain someone is in on the basis of their behaviour, but we can’t make an actually objective, quantifiable scale of pain. My pain isn’t your pain. My experience of my identity as “woman” isn’t your experience of your identity as “woman”.

Also, more often than not, the way we express and understand our own gender in relation to whatever inherent qualities may affect it fluidly changes and shifts over the course of our lives. Even though it might be workable to describe “gender identity” as a personal construct designed to understand our position in the dynamic between our field of gender and our experience and understanding of who we are, this is still problematic in framing it as a fixed quality of a person. It’s an interpretation of ourselves that is constantly recreated, only retroactively producing an illusion of continuity, at best.

Maybe that’s part of why we get so hung-up on telling and retelling our narratives, and why our narratives take such a central position within how transgenderism is understood and discussed.

Within the wider Gender-As-Semitocs model it might be tempting to view “gender dypshoria”, at least, as a consistent phenomenon. It seems like it could reasonably be considered one of the signifieds (like the frequency of visible light to which the arbitrary word “red” refers), and to say that it, at least, is a “born this way” experience; something that exists as an inherent, essential quality of an individual, and correlates strongly to transgender identities, even if not necessarily determining them. Well…

One of my favourite things is when a close friend I strongly respect and trust tells me they disagree with me, but don’t tell me why. It’s annoying, but it’s also extremely productive, because if I respect them enough, I just sort of assume they must have a good point, and so I start unpacking and sifting through my own thinking on a subject to figure out what my mistake was. This happened to me recently in relation to “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria”.

I’d said to my friend that I found “gender dypshoria” wasn’t quite as ridiculous as “gender identity”, because it at least describes a certain kind of subjective experience we know to be real (and yes, I know it to be real, at least as a subjective experience, because I’ve, you know, experienced it. Palpably). I’d said that yes, people really do experience intense, consistent feelings of discomfort about sexualized or gendered aspects of their anatomy, and that these feelings are usually dramatically improved by medical intervention.

She said no, she disagreed, and hinted that she might find the framework of dysphoria to be more problematic than that of “gender identity”. But we didn’t have time for her to tell me why. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I might be missing with this lately.

One of the immediate issues I have with “gender dysphoria” is that it falls into the very common pattern of people taking a varied range of things and variables and stuff related to gender, sex or sexuality and acting like they’re all one single variable. Sometimes as a binary (“man or woman”), a spectrum (like the Kinsey Scale), or one component of a simplified combinatoric thingy (like the Genderbread Person). And sometimes it’s just one giant stupid spectrum between two poles “I don’t see men and women as binary, really. I see it as, like, a spectrum. You’ve got manly straight men on one end and girly straight women on the other, and then you have gays, lesbians, transsexuals, guys who wear berets, and women who wear jeans, in between” (this, including “guys who wear berets”, was an actual conversation I had when I was 14 with an adult artist from Montreal, a friend of my stepmom’s. It was shortly after I’d tried coming out to my family as trans, and during a time when my body was rather obviously intersexed, so my guess is that she was trying to be supportive and helpful after my stepmom told her I was “struggling with gender” or “confused” or whatever.)

But much like “sexual orientation” is NOT as simple as a spectrum between liking girls and liking dudes (involving other issues like intensity, asexuality, romantic love, dom/sub, gendered aspects of sexual behaviour, how sexuality is expressed through anatomy, top/bottom/stone/etc, kink, body types, gender in objects of desire, the fact that the sex of a partner is NOT itself a clear-cut issue, straight men specifically interested in women with penises, how “sexual orientation” will directly overlap and interplay with one’s own “gender identity” and “gender presentation” as in sexualized cross-dressing, etc.), and much like “sex” is not as simple as a spectrum between male and female with intersex “in the middle” (involving a variety of genital configurations and types with genitals themselves consisting of a variety of features like gonads and clitoris/glans and penile shaft and vaginal canal and vulva and descent of gonads and so on, chromosomes, secondary sexual characteristics, dominant hormones, scent, body hair, adipose distribution, musculature, skeletal build, prostate, uterus, etc.), it’s absurd to describe “gender dysphoria” as a single quality that simply varies in levels of intensity.

It’s easy, for instance, to notice separate “categories” of dysphoria, like dysphoria related to genital configuration, dysphoria related to endocrine regulation and dominant sexual hormones, and dysphorias related to secondary sex characteristics like breasts or absence thereof. Allowing for a variety of different dysphorias is a much better model than the One Gender Dysphoria To Rule Them All, and viewing how we experience it as being a sort of “combinatoric” process of different aspects of our relationship to gendered or sexually significant aspects of our body in different ways goes a long way towards being able to more successfully account for (and describe) the diversity of trans and gender variant experiences, as well as accounting for the different priorities any given trans or gender variant person may have for they approach medical intervention, how they present, and how they choose to articulate and name their identity, sex and gender.

But those “different dysphorias”, of course, can themselves be sub-divided. “Genital configuration”, for example, itself isn’t simply a “spectrum” between penis/testes and vulva/clitoris/vagina/ovaries. It involves numerous organs, each with different configurations, shapes, sizes, functions, sensations or types.

Additionally, dysphoria may or may not be present not only in relation to every individual aspect of our body that are physiologically significant to sexuality and reproduction, but may also be present or absent in relation to individual physical characteristics that are *culturally* gendered, like feeling dysphoria about leg hair, wearing male clothes, or being forced to cut your hair short. These are aspects of gender that vary in meaning and significance  between different contexts, different fields of gender.

This latter point indicates that dypshoria does NOT strictly belong to sexual anatomy, which is what we’d expect from the theory of neurobiology being “wired” for a different kind of body. The fact that dysphoria also occurs along lines that are socio-culturally (and variably, contextually, arbitrarily) gendered creates an *extreme* complication of our assumptions about it. If, for instance, I suddenly feel dysphoric about the way my public hair grows only in response to happening upon some pictures of naked ladies on the internet, and that that dysphoria feels very similar to the dysphoria I have about my penis, how do I know that the latter dysphoria is strictly a product of neurobiology and not simply a product of cultural conditioning to “know” that a woman’s body is configured without a penis? Like how it was only the sudden “realization” that  a woman’s pubic hair is “supposed” to grow in a certain kind of pattern that triggered my dysphoria in relation to it?

This raises some pretty intense and uneasy questions, and leads us right back to the initial question transsexuality posed to feminism: is this a response to cultural conditioning about what women and men respectively are and are supposed to be within our patriarchal culture, or is it a response of adapting the body to a pre-existing “womanhood”? (or, per my theory, adapting the body to make your relationship to it more comfortable, with “womanhood” slotting in after the fact as a concept that best expresses that relationship to your body and how you negotiate that… but “womanhood” was already, and generally, an after-the-fact means of expressing sexual difference, meaning that a trans woman’s “womanhood” is a social construct but not any more so than a cis woman’s. And these are helpful, reasonable, meaningful, and inevitable constructs anyway. A trans woman’s “womanhood” is a construct responding to a different experience of sexual difference, but it’s no more or less valid and meaningful than a cis woman’s construct of “womanhood”).

Trans discourse, even trans-feminist discourse, is consistently, overwhelmingly uncomfortable with exploring, or even accepting, the fact that there are blurry lines between the experience of “dysphoria”, to which a trans woman’s response is engaging in quite understandable measures to feel comfortable within her body (given that she can’t simply accept her body in its male configuration) and the desire for “passability” and cultural standards of beauty, femininity and what a woman’s body is “supposed” to be, to which a trans woman’s responses might be seen as internalized sexism or internalized cissexism.

Given how intensely conditioned our concepts and standards of women’s bodies are under patriarchy, and how strong and meaningful and personally significant the need to assert a gender that feels “right” to oneself is, is it even *possible* to draw a line between these things? If the best gender available that feels “right” for expressing and asserting one’s understanding of her sexual self (regardless of whether neurobiological, psychological, or socio-cultural in cause) is “woman”, and the cultural concept of “woman” not only consists of “easy” semiotic signs like presentation and language, but also is DEEPLY tied to a certain kind of body consisting not only of a basic  sexual anatomy but also intense standards of beauty and desirability, it’s unavoidable that the distinction between feelings about your body based on the “original” anatomical discomfort (if it exists) will end up functionally indistinguishable from the effort to express and assert the gender “woman” through your body.

Nonetheless we end up not only *assuming* a hard line definitely exists between “dysphoria” and the effort for meeting cultural standards of what a woman’s body should be (despite the evidence of the overlap *constantly* staring us in the face through the obsessiveness of The Passing Industry and the mentalities of trans space), but also we refuse to even *broach the question*.

We believe the line MUST exist, because without it, our entire framework for asserting the validity of our gender within cis-defined standards (“gender identity” and “born this way”) falls to bits and requires being re-assembled. And in the mean time, all the cissexist feminists will say “told you it was all in your head!” (for the record: fuck you, cissexist feminists. This essay is not a defense of their attacks on us. Social constructs, culturally conditioned experiences, and shit that’s in your head are STILL REAL THINGS. And the facts of transphobia, the intense personal need for “transition”, and how sex/gender-related medical intervention makes a significant improvement in people’s quality of life, are fucking clear as day as REAL THINGS).

Basically, we assume an inherent “born this way” dysphoria and internalized cultural ideas of what a woman’s body “should” be are distinct because, politically, personally, they HAVE to be.  Opening up that question makes us vulnerable to the arguments of transphobes, cissexists and trans-misogynists from every facet of our society, who believe that gender can only be valid if it is inherent, that there must be a concrete essential “maleness” and “femaleness” (they’ll accept that it’s in the brain rather than your underwear as long as you agree that it’s there), that bigotry is only wrong if it targets something innate, and that we assure them that of course we would never willingly choose to so defy their sacred systems of gender and sexuality. And opening up that question means we might have to confront the same existential threat we pose to cis people: our gender, that central aspect of our identity on which so much of our social structure and sense of ourselves hinges, might not be concrete, might not be stable,and  might not be as much an intrinsic part of us as it feels.

The degree to which the framework of “gender identity”, “gender dysphoria”, and the neurobiological-cause hypothesis used to justify them, are largely based in a sort of need to continue thinking about our gender within the same basic models, values and heirarchies as cis people use is noticeable in the bizarre way that the gender identity framework assumes an oppositional, binary, spectrum approach despite a lack of evidence for it, and a lack of it being at all necessary for the basic hypothesis to work.

The model is typically based on a basic assumption of “female brains” and “male brains”, that every sexually significant aspect of our neurobiology, or every aspect pertinent to sexual behaviours, is sexually dimorphic, structured as one of only two possibilities. Lots of people, cis and trans alike, also love assuming that parts of the brain that aren’t related to sex and sexuality are also “male” or “female”, based on whatever *tendencies* may have been observed, like capacity for spatial or linguistic reasoning (usually essentializing these differences while conveniently ignoring things like neuroplasticity, how brains will structure themselves in response to the tasks they’re “trained” for during development, and how young girls are socialized differently than young boys and expected to play in different ways). Usually, the “maleness” and “femaleness” of brains is oppositionally defined (meaning that any aspect becoming “less male” makes it “more female”, and vice versa).

These aspects of the neurobiological-cause hypothesis can be seen in how the traits that hypothetically predispose us towards behaviours and identities classed as queer or trans are assumed to be a *flaw* in sexual development that “wires” us for the “opposite” sex. For example, it’s assumed that the cause of male homosexuality is the “sexual orientation” part of the brain developing like a “female brain”, or failing to develop like a “male brain”.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that defining these neurobilogical predispositions as “opposite sex-like” is itself an act of gendering, imposing our concepts of gender on something after the fact of its existence. This is similar to how we gender sexual acts and positions, believing that “top” is a “masculine” role, that to be attracted to men is a “feminine” orientation, that penetrating is the “male role” and being penetrated is the “female role”. This is important to bear in mind, given how it shines a light on the socio-cultural systems of gender will seek our justifications in our “inherent” sexuality by gendering that sexuality. It’s a sort of circular logic, wherein the gendering of things as feminine is justified by the “inherent” femininity of a sexual role or inherent trait, and then we justify the “inherent” femininity of the role or trait by gendering it.

Part of this assumption that all queer or trans predispositions are variations upon a hetero-oppositional, binary template can probably be chalked up to general ignorance as to how evolution works, of course. People think that anything that isn’t immediately obvious in how it benefits survival and reproduction must therefore be a flaw rather than adaptive trait. So, since human beings with an exclusively homosexual predisposition are less likely to reproduce, we assume a biological “cause” of homosexuality MUST be a maladaptive variation on something “good”, like predisposition towards heterosexuality. Even though there’s not really any substantial evidence for this (homosexual behaviours in men and women, for instance, seem to be correlated to very different things, so what little evidence we have so far suggests entirely different mechanisms for that predisposition).

This bias in our assumptions about the neuro-biological cause hypothesis is also probably a lot about the way we, ironically, project an anthropocentric view of sexual differentiation and reproduction in life and evolution while simultaneously projecting a hetero-centric, cis-centric, essentialist, binarist, culturally-conditioned view on ourselves and our own sexual differentiation. Even HUMAN life isn’t as binary and hetero as we assume life in general to be. In the animal kingdom we can observe several species where behaviours we might (anthropocentrically) describe as homosexual or transgender are actually an adaptive part of that species’ overall reproductive strategy and/or social structure. Rats, bonobos and cuttlefish, for instance. And that’s not even accounting for the degree to which heteronormative, anthropocentric bias in biologists leads to adaptive non-“het”/”cis” behaviours in animals being intepreted as maladaptive.

As many of us know, evolution works in mysterious ways.

So why the assumption that human sexual and gender variance must be maladaptive, and deviating from heterosexuality, cissexuality and a binarist, essential model of gender as the “optimal” human condition? Why the refusal to consider the possibility that whatever traits might predispose us towards being queer or trans are actually an adaptive aspect of human sexual differentiation, and that who we, as a species, *actually are*, is not necessarily heterosexual, cissexual and binary-gendered? Why immediately build our hypothesis from the assumption that the most COMMON experiences, and socio-culturally conditioned manifestations, of sex, gender and sexuality must be the BASIS of human sex, gender and sexuality? Why not consider that there are more than two “natural” variations upon the human theme?

This is not to argue that queer or trans people actually ARE some kind of “third gender” (or fourth, fifth, etc.), but simply to point out that despite the fact that *we don’t really know* what’s going on with the brain’s relationship to sex, sexuality and gender that we’re nevertheless chomping at the bit to find “explanations” for our existence that fit the same binary, oppositional, essentializing mould cis people have imposed on us. We spent decades fiercely arguing that biology was not destiny only to turn around and just as fiercely convince ourselves that neurobiology was.

“Vagina isn’t what makes someone a woman!”, we argue. “speculative, ill-defined ‘female brains’ do!”

(“male/female brains” = also a bit of a dick move to genderqueer people)

Besides, if it were to be determined that the neurobiology associated with transsexuality is not a case of “female brains in male bodies” or vice versa, but rather that the neurobiology, or many variations of it, are distinct in their own right (and this is, btw, where the evidence seems to be heading; studies with magnetic resonance imaging have so far tending to indicate that the brains of transsexual women not yet on HRT tend to NOT resemble the brains of cissexual women, but DO have unique structural properties inconsistent with the brains of both cissexual women and men)… this wouldn’t mark us out as a “third gender”, it merely marks us as sexually distinct- just like every human being already is. Our gender would still be whatever we’re positioning ourselves as within our cultural field of gender, its meanings, and the concepts it makes available to us.

After all, we’re already familiar with the phenomena of physiological intersexuality, and we don’t mark intersex people as immediately a different “gender” by consequence. That’s their biology… they’re just, in some way or another, differently sexed… and it would be enormously insensitive to say they don’t “count” within the concepts of “man” or “woman” because of that fact (an intersex person might, however, find that neither of those concepts works for them, and assert a gender outside the binary. But people who are totally normatively sexed may also do so.) The way someone’s biology, or neurobiology, is sexed doesn’t force them into any particular gender, so unless we believe that it does, there’s no reason to insist that our brains are somehow objectively sexed as consistent with our gender out of fear that someone will swoop along and take our gender away if they aren’t.

This is very much connected to why it’s problematic to assume, and insist upon, a model of “gender identity” pre-determined by our biology. It being the brain and central nervous system instead of genitals and chromosomes doesn’t make a difference. You’re still postulating a system where gender is determined by something *innate*, where someone can still be “wrong” about their gender, rather than it being something subjectively negotiated between your society and friends and partners and family and yourself, as a human being possessed of agency, and possessed of that right.

And, of course, whether it’s “male brain” and “dysphoria” that “makes” you a man, or penises and Y chromosomes, or male socialization and privilege, or the Will of God or “male energy” or a lack of menstrual blood magick, it’s all still essentialism.

The reasons that cis people lean into certain kinds of ways of looking at gender and sex aren’t too hard to glean. Gender is the very first thing ascribed to your identity, from the very moment you’re born. “It’s a boy!”. Often before. It feel central, it dictates SO much of your role in life, it is interwoven with social status, and career, and sexuality… even the clothes you’re “allowed” to wear, the toys you’re “allowed” to play with, the career you’re “allowed” to pursue, and the food you’re “allowed” to like. It dictates so incredibly much that yes, it is legitimately a terrifying, threatening concept, that induces a sort of existential vertigo, to be confronted with the possibility that maybe it isn’t so fixed, maybe it wasn’t as pre-ordained, sacred, all-consuming, powerful, and immutable as you were led to believe.

An enormous amount of our societies and culture hinges on gender. And therefore hinged on the dominant perspective of gender as innate, immutable, binary, oppositional and essential.

Cis people consequently have a social and cultural investment in the dominant concept of gender that extends *well* into the personal, and this gives them a personal stake in its maintenance.

Trans people aren’t all that different. We were raised in the same culture, and taught the exact same importance of the concept. We inherited the same intensity and sanctity of the binary, oppositional concept of gender, and of patriarchy. We were taught it no different than cis people. In almost all meaningful senses, we all lived as cis for at least a little while, and we were never meant to disinherit their frameworks of gender and sex. Nobody ever taught us a means to understand or value or reconsider gender outside their frameworks and heirarchies. Even feminism, while teaching us to question patriarchy, would not (could not?) teach us to step outside the cis-normative frame of gender.

We’re not outside those hierarchies, and so we inherited from everyone around us the same sense of “value” tied to the degree to which an aspect of gender is essential and immutable. We have the same biases, the same personal stake. And our perceptions are distorted similarly, only allowing for the minimum flexibility to account for our existence with as little disturbance to that system as possible.

Thus, for a trans woman, the “best” definition of “woman” becomes the one in which we’re most consistently able to say we’re the exact same thing as cis women.

(I mean, I maintain that there’s no genuinely consistent, non-tautological definition of “woman” that includes ALL cis women while excluding ALL trans women, but that’s besides the point. My point is about our motives.)

We’re no better than cis people. We’re not above the obsessive investment in gender as a sanctified and essential characteristic. Maybe we’ve even got MORE riding on that than most… we’re the ones upon whom a hostile, essentialist world has placed the impossible demand that we consistently, unwaveringly insist it’s what we ARE; we’re the ones who are pathologized and marked against the “default” normativity, and need to develop means of naming and describing our shared experience of this; we’re the ones carrying the burden of never flinching, never blinking, while staring that genocidal system in the eye and saying what we can never be anything BUT what we are, that this is something unavoidable and instrinsic and pre-ordained about us… because how else can we defend this aspect of ourselves when our culture as a whole is threatened by it? And how can we defend it to that secret, dark, self-hating part of ourselves that has internalized their hatred, and our marginalization? That part of us that agrees that it would be immoral, sinful, disgusting, absurd and abominable to have chosen to be this… to be trans in a world where where cissexuality is the natural order, to have adapted our biology where that goes against the optimal human condition, to be a woman where men are the ideal human form, to be feminine where masculinity is strength, to be queer where healthy sexuality is strictly for the purposes of genetic reproduction, to have indulged our unnatural desires against the Will of God…

We couldn’t help it. We were born this way.

But to turn out backs, for a moment, on the gravity of that shame… isn’t the beauty of being trans in exactly that we’re not simply as we were born? That we, relatively speaking, CHOSE…

We chose despite the intensity and persistence and depth of these messages, despite the temptation to supplicate ourselves before them presenting our hypothetical justifications and excuses and explanations, all within THEIR terms and frameworks, despite the need to validate our gender as being just as good as theirs despite the fact that there was never even any real reason to see their’s as the standard… that despite ALL that, we chose, we created this, our bodies, our lives, ourselves.

We didn’t do it as the result of a reasoned argument of speculative science and hypothetical biology. We did it because it was what we needed, because it was what we needed to DO… fuck what we WERE.

It was agency. It was self-determination. It was assertion.

I wasn’t born this way. That’s exactly what makes me trans.

And I’m proud of being trans.

…

I’m going to be leaving Freethought Blogs soon. To be kept up to date on where I’ll be going next, please follow my twitter, @nataliereed84. If you’d like to help me land on my feet, save up for SRS, and invest in future projects, please donate to my Tip Jar!

A few weeks ago, someone wrote to me on twitter asking about my failure to recognize the prior work of Monica Maldonado on the subject of radical-feminism’s relationship to trans-misogynistic violence, in my Complicity Vs. Cause post. My initial reaction was defensive. I felt like I was being accused of plagiarising a colleague and friend, and of being unaware of the way my privilege affects the degree of recognition and praise I receive for ideas that are often ignored, or reacted to with hostility, when expressed by trans women of colour, or trans-feminists who don’t class-pass, and “sound smart”, the way I do. Additionally, I had made no secret on my twitter of the intense debt the evolution of my trans-feminism and ideas owes to my friends and colleagues, many of whom are trans women of colour, non-binary trans people, or otherwise in a position of less privilege, and less mainstream “palatability”, than myself. And consequently don’t receive nearly as much recognition and respect as they deserve, in contrast to myself.

But being aware of those issues of privilege doesn’t absolve me of accountability or responsibility in relation to them, and having been explicit about how much I owe to my friends and colleagues on my twitter (which is a big jumbly mess of whatever pops into my head whenever) is not the same thing as overtly and purposefully owning up to that here, in my “official” writing. I did fuck-up.

Maybe there’s been some subconscious vanity going on. Maybe on some level, I knew that I’d be jeopardizing the recognition I receive for my writing if I directly acknowledged the manner in which my ideas develop. Maybe I, like everyone, was allowing myself to buy into the idea of the solitary intellectual, generating Great Ideas out of nowhere with which they change the world. And worse, maybe I was allowing myself to play along a little bit with the trans community’s dangerous reliance upon Community Leaders and Role Models.

All of which is in direct contradiction not only of my actual process, but what I believe trans-feminist discourse needs. What intersectional feminism needs. My collaborative, discursive process of trans-feminism isn’t chosen because I’m lazy, or leaning upon the ideas of greater minds (my friends and colleagues aren’t Solitary Intellectual Geniuses either…we share with and learn from eachother). It’s chosen because I feel it’s what trans-feminism needs to be. At least if it’s to be healthy and intersectional in nature.

We all have privileges, each and every one of us, and as we all know, privilege comes with blinders. It takes consistent, and difficult, effort to work around that, and learn to see in your blind-spots. No single isolated voice can ever be a fully “intersectional” voice, except perhaps in awareness of that individuals intersecting oppressions. But no one can exist at the intersectional of all oppressions. This makes isolation an inherently limiting factor in the effort to build an intersectional feminist discourse.

One of the only reliable means of working around the blind-spots we each carry, that limit our capacity to understand the full breadth of any social issue, is to depend on and listen to people for whom it isn’t a blind spot, people we can count on to see in those corners for us. I can’t fully understand all the nuances of what it means to be a person of colour in North America, and I can’t fully understand what it means to live with a visible disability, and I can’t fully understand the lived experiences and unique perspectives of people involved in sex work. But I can listen to the people who do, who’s experiences allow them full understanding of those issues, and I can allow their perspectives to inform my own. Just as, in turn, my own experiences can inform those who have blind spots regarding womanhood, transsexuality, addiction, poverty, Canada, rural upbringings, etc. By sharing perspectives, and listening to one another, we develop a much broader view, patching together our individual viewpoints in a panaramic, meaningful, intersectional perspective.

This becomes very important when speaking of trans experiences. While it’s already an inherently problematic (and inaccurate) thing to talk about Universal Narratives of, say, womanhood, or disability, or race, or any other shared facet of a set of lives, the idea of expected, and assumed, narrative or history is an overwhelming force in the discourse of gender variance, with serious consequences for those involved. This has a complex history, with origins, perhaps, in the narrative we were expected to recite in order to receive treatment under strict gatekeeping, but continues to thrive in the insistence upon Telling Our Stories, the genre of The Trans Memoir and its recurrent memes, the concept that particular histories (like “I always knew“, or “I knew as a child, before having any sexual agency“) have more currency in regards to the validity of one’s gender, our insistence upon a linear experience of gender (encoded into our language and terminology of self-expression itself), the erasure and mistreatment of backgrounds that fall outside the standardize Trans Narrative, and the degree to which one matches that narrative reflecting the degree to which one is given visibility and voice (which, again, touches upon the privileges I have in regards to my ability to be heard and recognized over friends of mine).

Yet beyond that problem of dominant narrative in regards to trans experience, and the need to dismantle it (aggressively, if need be!), the shear diversity of trans lives and experiences demands consideration of a multiplicity of voices, and therefore demands a discursive, conversational model of trans-feminism.

While all trans and gender-variant people experience oppression, and all those oppressions relate, the precise nature of their experiences, genders, bodies, and histories conditions the form that oppression takes, and the conditions that produce those forms are frequently mutually exclusive. For instance, trans men and trans women depend on one another, need to learn from and inform one another, to be able to grasp anything close to a view of the experiences and oppression of “trans people”, and need to act in concert in order to address those oppressions and inform the cis public. The same is true of those with binary identities and those with non-binary identities needing to converse and share and work together, of people whose bodies were normatively sexed prior to transition and those whose bodies were not, those who had linear “transitions” and those who didn’t, those who transitioned at various ages, those with conditional cis privilege (who are consistently read as cis) and those who do not (and those in various positions between), those who live in stealth, those who are fully “out”, and those navigating more varied and contextual approaches to disclosure, those who have access to coverage for medical treatments and those who do not, trans people who come from various class backgrounds, trans people who come from various ethnic backgrounds, trans people who are involved in sex work, trans people in the military, trans people in academia, trans people in the tech industry, trans celebrities and public figures, trans people with disabilities, trans people who are unemployed or homeless, trans people with addictions, trans people with children, trans people who were married, trans people of varying sexual and romantic orientations, and so on and so on and so on.

Very few of those are as simple as just being an intersecting axis of oppression. How sexual orientation, for instance, operates in relation to being trans isn’t as simple as stacking “gay” on top of “trans”. Being trans modifies the experience of being queer, and it’s attendant oppressions, just as being queer modifies the experience of being trans. And many of these things, while seeming to be a case of “one side having it better”, is often far more complex. Conditional cis privilege, for instance, does not put someone in the position of total exemption from transphobia, and indeed exposes one to certain specific risks; trans-misogynistic violence, for instance, is heavily intertwined with the concept of the “deceptive transexual”, and that feeling of having been “deceived” is dependent on having first read the target as cis. Consequently, we’re not looking at a range of issues that can be understood as simply “Transphobia + Another Issue”. We’re looking at different transphobias and different cissexisms and different trans-misogynies and different manifestations thereof.

Absolutely NO single trans person can speak for that immense diversity of experience.

I’ve often said, especially to cis people who discovered me by proximity to the Skeptic and Atheist communities, that if I’m the only trans-feminist you’re reading, then you don’t understand trans-feminism or trans issues. I meant that. I really really meant that. I can speak about a lot of things, but I cannot, by definition, speak to the actual range of gender diversity. No one can. The only way to understand trans is to understand it from as many angles and experiences as possible. Which is an effort I make as best I can.

My writing is informed by that. My hope is that being open to a wide variety of other experiences, and learning from them, makes me a better feminist, better advocate, and better human being. But it wouldn’t matter. No matter how much I listen to others and am informed by them, I’ll only ever be one data point in a vast chain of trans experiences and trans perspectives.

This is one of the reasons I have so many fears about the way that The Trans Community selects specific idols and Leaders, and invests them with so much power to speak for us as a whole. Firstly, the Trans Community doing that selecting are already those so privileged to speak for the community (through dollars, through publishing, through visibility, etc.), and the people who get selected are drawn from a narrow pool of broad acceptability and narrow range of histories, opinions and politics that fit with what The Trans Community want to hear and what they want cis people to see of us. After that many iterations of paring-down the breadth and diversity of what “transgender” is, you end up with just a tiny sliver of us positioned to represent a whole that no individual is able to represent.

Julia Serano, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Kate Bornstein and Mara Kiesling are not The Trans Community. No matter how well-intentioned, they never could be.

What we need to be is a discourse. A communication, a range of voices interacting and sharing and learning and challenging and pushing and driving forward, with compassion, working together. What we need is for the full diversity of trans lives, and it alone, to stand up to represent and speak for the full diversity of trans lives.

And I’m a part of such a discourse. Everything I’ve ever wrote has had my friends and colleagues in it. Everything I’ve ever wrote is a product of them and their minds and insights as it is my own. And I don’t want to hide that.

A conversation is exponentially more powerful than a solitary voice.

Now go read some other trans-feminists.

Lots of people have made the issue simply one of “offense” vs. “free speech”.

Lots of others have made it about the offensive nature of the term “transexual” as a noun.

Still more have discussed that this is just a bigoted, naive and lazy stereotype.

And one could also discuss the horrifying context in which the remark was made; that of Brazil having an epidemic of trans-misogynistic violence, with more trans women having been murdered there in 2012 than in the rest of the Western hemisphere combined.

That last point seems especially important and valid to me, at least far more so than “offense”, the (very obvious) dimension of stereotyping, and the question of terminology. But I’ve no desire to disrespect the deaths of the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of Brazilian trans women over the past years just for the sake of getting one-up on the TERFs. That would be crass, misleading, and unnecessary.

But what the existence of that violence, in exactly the context that generates the stereotype of the gorgeous, “ideal”, sexually irresistible trans woman, very disturbingly reveals is exactly how backwards the conceptualization of trans women’s bodies implicit to the statement is; a backwards conceptualization upon which the near entirety of the actual content of the arguments and hatred of Moore and her defenders rests.

Put simply, trans women’s bodies are by no means an “ideal” that is loved and respected by men or “The Patriarchy”, leaving “real” women passed over and neglected. Rather, trans women’s bodies are the subject of hatred, shaming, policing, pathologization, ridicule and violence by The Patriarchy (and, to a degree, feminism as well), held constantly against cis-centric standards; of beauty, of “passability”, and of being “real” or “biological” or “natural” at all.

The meme that transsexual women are artificially constructed versions of women tailor-made for the desires and fantasies of men and patriarchy, like we’re little drop-dead gorgeous bio-mechanical Stepford Wives that every man will prefer to “real”/”natural” women, is incredibly old, and indeed first emerged with Janice Raymond And Friends back in the original transphobia-fad of 70s second wave feminism. At that historical juncture, there may indeed have been just enough of an illusion of our possessing the alleged “hyper-femininity” to fuel that perception, due to how Gatekeeping enforced an incredibly strict standard of femininity (as well as excluding from transition anyone who the doctor felt would not be able to “fully assimilate” as a woman; i.e. would not have a body and appearance that conformed to what the doctor in question found feminine enough, beautiful enough, etc.). The fact that only those trans women whose bodies were already viable as objects of conventional male desire had the opportunity to seek treatment in the first place, and the fact that accessing treatment demanded strict and unwavering conformity to incredibly strict standards of how a woman is “supposed” to dress, look, walk, talk, behave, fuck, and so on, the end result was that the only trans women actually undergoing medical transition were those who would appear to be “hyper-feminine”, and be “palatable” to the male gaze and male desire. The invisibility, exclusion and suppression of trans women who didn’t fit this image created a reality that, for someone unaware of what was really going on, would appear as though to transition was to deliberately seek out becoming such a “hyper-feminine” ideal, and that this was the desired outcome of all trans women seeking treatment. It’s understandable (albeit still very stupid and presumptuous) that people like Raymond would draw the conclusion that transexuality was all about wanting to conform to male fantasies, rather than that conformity to rigid patriarchal standards was one of the prerequisites for accessing a treatment that was about one’s own comfort in one’s own body, with virtually nothing to do with wanting to please or attract men.

That was the 70s, though. In 2013, it takes willful ignorance to believe that trans women embody a patriarchal ideal, and that we’re more desirable to men and patriarchy than are cis women. That our “artificial design” is placed on some pedestal above the “natural” female shape. It’s willfully ignorant AND, far more likely than not, more about taking out anxieties about misogynistic body-shaming on an “acceptable” and vulnerable target than actually looking at what the problem actually entails, and owning up to one’s own position (and vulnerabilities) within it.

There certainly is still an illusion that helps maintain the stereotype of the transsexual supermodel with an “ideal body type” (one notices it regularly in snarky little urban myths like “you know, I hear most supermodels really have XY chromosomes!”, that are often busted out in the infinitely problematic “real women have/are [x]” forms of feminist critique). But, just like how it was cissexist gatekeeping and patriarchal policing of trans women’s bodies that produced the “hyper-feminine” trans woman caricature of the 70s, contemporary perceptions of us as such have nothing to do with what trans women’s bodies are actually like, or how our bodies are perceived and treated by men and patriarchy, and everything to do with how a cissexist culture regulates who amongst us gets seen, has a voice, has a presence, is treated as worthwhile, is treated as deserving, and who amongst us gets shuffled off out of visibility, or only trotted out for the sake of ridicule and scare-tactics.

To go on a little tangent for a moment, to help illustrate my point about who gets seen and why, I’d like to mention a similar problem that occurs within the trans community itself. There is a myth amongst white trans women (which sort of is The Trans Community, given how little power and voice is given to trans PoC within that community), of “Asian women are more passable”. Likewise, there is another myth that Thailand is a perfect, wondrous, tolerant utopia for trans women, where we’re idols and pop stars, and the Thai trans women are all just gorgeous and wonderful and revered. Both of these myths, at least in (large) part, relate to an incredibly narrow, distorted, biased perception of what the reality actually is for trans women in Asia, and Thailand specifically– primarily distorted by which trans women are going to actually be seen on Thai television and media, and which bits and pieces of Thai media get seen by North American trans women. While there are some trans (kathoey) pop stars in Thailand, those women are only the tiniest sliver of the trans population in Thailand, and the ones who had the beauty (and perhaps pre-existing wealth or privilege) to make it in media. The rules of what you’re supposed to look like before being “allowed” in front of the camera aren’t much different in Thailand than they are in Hollywood. It’s a bit like pointing to Janet Mock and saying “trans women in the United States are gorgeous and get awesome jobs in publishing!”, pointing to Jenna Talackova and saying “Canadian trans women are supermodels!”, or pointing to Kim Petras and saying “German trans women are so much more passable!”.

Needless to say, the lived realities of most kathoey are very different than that of Thai pop stars.

In a culture of media and privilege, who is permitted visibility and voice is not the same thing as who is actually out there. Learning to separate media realities from actual realities isn’t just activism 101, it’s living in the 21st century 101. The trans bodies that appear in media designed for cis (male) consumption are not the reality of trans bodies any more the cis women’s bodies that appear in Maxim or FHM reflect the reality of women’s bodies. Anyone claiming to be a feminist should be able to grasp this incredibly basic shit.

And not to put too fine a point on things, but it’s incredibly common for trans people in media to not be depicted by actual trans bodies at all. Most trans characters in film and television are portrayed by cis actors or actresses. That is just a mild example of the degree to which the trans body is policed, erased shamed and suppressed by patriarchy: hardly a case of us being adored, artificially perfect fuckdolls.

The issue of media distortions of what a given group’s actual bodies and lives are actually like becomes even more intense when speaking of minorities. Black women, for instance, don’t typically look like Halle Barry did in X-Men, the women of colour who are selected for appearance in Maxim are chosen in accordance with the degree to which they meet white-defined standards of beauty, and are typically airbrushed or done up with make-up and hair straightening to fit further into those imposed standards. Bodies that are non-normative aren’t welcome in media, and don’t get to be visible. In media, the question of diversity of women’s bodies, or even diversity in general, is answered with literally the bare minimum the platform so interrogated can get away with.

This is applied to trans bodies too, of course. Which trans women are permitted visibility are those trans women who meet the culturally normative standards of beauty. So the trans women you see are the ones that are most desirable to a generalized, bland, top-point-of-the-bell-curve male gaze. It’s that simple, and that complicated.

All of which is to say nothing of the degree to which we self-impose invisibility, due to issues of safety and privacy, of harassment and cissexism, of risk and violence, and even of emotional response to the incessant, ubiquitous shaming of trans bodies, our implicit position as the most disgusting, unfuckable, ridiculous kind of body on Earth (a position that cis women, queer cis women, feminists, and even other trans women, frequently, fiercely reinforce). It’s kinda hard to feel confident “putting yourself out there” when you’re told over and over again that it’s totally reasonable for a man to vomit for several minutes straight (TW) if he discovers he was attracted to, or (GASP!), was intimate with, someone with your kind of body.

But what’s of particular importance here is the standard by which a trans body is considered acceptable, and deserving of visibility… because it is not our transness that grants us desirability, or sets that standard. It’s the exact opposite. Our acceptability to patriarchy and male gaze is defined by cisgender standards of appearance, and precisely by the degree to which our transness ISN’T visible, by the degree to which we “overcome” our transness (“You look amazing! I never would have guessed you were trans!”), by the degree to which we appear, in that patriarchal gaze, indistinguishable from cis women. The degree to which we “pass”.

Passing = Beauty = Womanhood = Success = Passing

Cis women are never expected to live up to an “ideal” of a trans body, but every trans woman is asked to live up to, and is judged, shamed, and/or policed by, the standard of a cis woman’s body.

Trans women’s bodies are, of course, incredibly diverse. At least as much so (maybe even more so!) as cis women’s bodies. There are literally no universals to what our bodies are like. There is absolutely no such thing as “looking trans”. Even the basic trends one might assume are common to trans women (like “narrow hips”) aren’t consistent, only consistent amongst trans women who underwent the full affects of physical masculinization during adolescence and did not undergo physical feminization during adolescence (needless to say, THAT IS NOT ALL TRANS WOMEN. I’m not even in that category). And this is, of course, true of trans women of all nationalities.

Just to speak of my trans-women friends (which, you know, IS NOT ALL TRANS WOMEN), there are bodies that are tall, short, muscular, lean, skinny, fat, average-weight, able-bodied, disabled (in diverse ways), XY, XXY, XY/XX, various other chromosomal arrangements, large busted, small busted, narrow hips, broad hips, pointy noses, wide noses, little noses, blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, hazel eyes, curly hair, straight hair, wavy hair, large butts, skinny butts, penises, vaginas, long legs, short legs, big hands, wee little dainty hands, big feet, little feet, widow’s peaks, receding hairlines, thin hair, thick hair, dreadlocks, dimples, freckles, overbites, underbites, attached earlobes, unattached earlobes, lots of tattoos, lots of piercings, none of either, hairy pits, hairy legs, shaved pits, shaved legs, scars with interesting stories, scars with boring stories, long painted femme nails, chewed down nails, calloused fingers, smooth fingers, every complexion from super dark to pale-as-the-grave, appendices, the absence thereof, and a whole bunch of other shit.

Fuck off with your “ideal body shape”. There is no trans body shape. Draw me a picture of it sometime, I bet it’ll take me all of 30 seconds on Facebook to find a trans woman who looks nothing at all like it. EXACTLY like if someone drew you a picture of what a cis woman is shaped like. At best, you’ve come up with a picture of your normative biases.

Or, in the case of Moore’s “Brazilian transexual”… an image of her resentful, ignorant biases.

Trans bodies fit no ideal. Certainly not of the patriarchy, who have met those bodies with nothing but fear, ridicule, disgust, hatred, violence and, “at best”, fetishization (which, remember, means: “being into something I’m not supposed to be into”), since the day they came into being. Moore’s conceptualization, the entire excuse for her resentment of us, is not only willfully ignorant, not only based on an impossibly silly stereotype, not only childishly confusing media with reality (next she’ll warn us of the dangers of trans serial killers, like “Jaime Gumb”!), and not only spoken in a context of specific and horrifying violence against the precise target of her stereotype … her conceptualization was backwards. As bizarro-world as the persecuted men fighting back against feminism to defend the rights of fathers from sperm-burgling feminazis and their false accusations of rape.

The only ideal we may ever meet is that of our own self-acceptance, and self-love. To get there, it would be helpful if silly bigots like Moore stepped aside for a moment, and tried educating themselves.

TERFs certainly can be dangerous, in certain situations. But it’s extremely important to look at what the tools and weapons they use in order to cause harm actually are. On their own, they don’t wield nearly the influence the constant freak-outs on the part of trans activists would suggest about them, and they simply don’t deserve the degree of fear and anxiety we lend them. Consider the heavily controversial “Rad-Fem 2012” conference in London (conceived partly as promotion for Sheila Jeffries’ latest work from Rutledge University Press, “The Industrial Vagina”; the title of which, btw, is a denigration of sex workers’ bodies as “industrial” and not their own, not the bodies of trans women). Months of anxiety and debate led up to the event, which ultimately turned out to be no more than a dozen or less women gathering near a tube station and going to grab coffee for a pointless little chin-wag about the evil trans women and evil sex workers “reinforcing the [blank]”. Although partly it was the efforts of trans activists that kept the conference from becoming anything more substantial, it’s nonetheless the case that the worry that the trans community expressed in the months leading up to the “conference” vastly eclipsed the actual subject of that anxiety in scale, influence, reach and the energy expended upon it.

As another example, I am constantly given reminders from various well-meaning trans readers and friends about the latest idiotic stunt of Cathy Brennan, everyone always seemingly terrified about the effect she might be having on the perceptions cis people have towards us, or outraged by her latest (completely non-surprising) demonstration of pettiness and hatred. But she only has some 250 followers on twitter (several dozen, at least, being “hate follows”). She doesn’t have any real cultural influence. Our disproportionate fear of her far outweighs any legitimacy anyone actually sees in her. And undoubtedly, she’s FAR more well-known in the trans community than in the rest of the world, where she’s effectively not really anybody at all. The threat she poses is only by her connections in Maryland law and politic, and her willingness to resort to using cissexism and patriarchy as a means to hurt trans people, when the mood strikes her. That distinction is extremely relevant, and I’ll return to it in a moment.

In our somewhat obsessive collective preoccupation with transphobic feminism, we frequently make the mistake of positioning such feminists, either explicitly or implicitly, as a direct threat to our safety. Indeed, I’ve come across trans activists outright accusing TERFs of being responsible for trans-misogynistic violence, for getting trans women (or, worse, “trans people”) killed. As loathsome as transphobic feminists can be, this is an unfair and dangerous accusation, and changes an issue preoccupation and disproportionate anxiety into a self-destructive misdirection of our attentions. It leads us away from looking at the actual realities of such violence, and the realities (and real causes) of the harm being done to our communities. TERFs have never murdered any of us, much less so for the cause of their version of feminism. And the culture from which this violence overwhelmingly originates is just as hostile to cisgender women as it is to us: in fact, the exaggerated hostility and disproportionate violence directed towards trans women is an immediate reflection of “conventional” misogyny, and intimately related to it. None of our murderers have likely ever heard of Sheila Jeffries or Janice Raymond. TERFs are an indirect threat to our safety, and only by proxy of patriarchy.

Patriarchy is the threat. And, uncomfortable as it may often be, a common threat to any cis woman, transphobic or not.

At least once, probably more, I’ve employed the metaphor of suggesting that transphobic or cissexist cis women (organizations or movements or festivals) have “blood on their hands”. I wouldn’t retract that, but I’d certainly be a lot more hesitant in saying stuff like that in the future, given the danger of the aforementioned misdirection of our energies away from more immediate threats (like pointing in the direction of an incoming thunder storm and saying “look out! storm coming!” when there’s a mountain lion more quietly preparing to pounce your friend from the other direction). “Blood on hands” is generally a metaphor that refers to complicity. But complicity is a very, very different thing from cause. While TERFs, organizations like Vancouver Rape Relief, cis women who, “trans-panicked”, support bathroom exclusion policies, cis women who bar trans women from access to women’s domestic violence shelters and women’s health resources, and comparable instances of cissexism employing feminism or “women’s safety” as an excuse, are certainly complicit in harm, suffering and violence towards trans women, they are not the cause. Although a women’s rape crisis line, or domestic violence shelter, refusing a trans woman access to their services are indeed severely exacerbating the harm done to trans women, they weren’t the ones who necessitated the existence of rape crisis lines and domestic violence shelters in the first place.

Collectively, we’ve lately been making some meaningful progress in looking at how violence towards trans women, and other harm, is unevenly distributed (with trans women of colour, sex workers, youth, addicts, PwD and trans women living in poverty being at exceptional risk). We still have a long way to go, of course, with privileged trans men and whte trans folk still talking about the frequency at which “trans people” are murdered, and the continuing general overemphasis on the comparably minor issues of transphobia that are concerns for the more privileged amongst us (like, say, misgendering, visibility, cultural inclusion and the question of transphobic feminism itself) instead of more severe concerns that disproportionately affect the less privileged (violence, rape, homelessness, addiction, medical access, shelter access, “black market” medical intervention, etc.).. but we’ve at least broached the subject of who the victims of trans-related violence have generally been (trans women of colour). Missing, however, has been meaningful discussion of who the perpetrators of such violence have generally been.

The perpetrators have been men.

It’s tricky, and perhaps a bit dangerous, to excessively generalize or speculate on the precise motives (conscious and cultural) of the men who perpetrate such violence, it’s nonetheless reasonable, from what we learn from trials, media coverage, and comparison to other comparable forms of transphobia and cissexism also enacted by men (often symbolically violent), to make assessments about the degree to which the violence is far more a product of patriarchal, misogynist and cisnormative cultural bias, and rape culture, than anything even remotely connected to feminism or the protection of women from “perverts” (indeed, the justifications of trans-exclusion forwarded by feminists and women’s organizations typically involve rendering us as men, and dangerous in being hypothetical agents of exactly the forms of violence that target us in the non-hypothetical realities: by rendering us as women. Under patriarchal, oppositional binaries, men are protectors and perpetrators, women are victims and survivors, and trans women are whichever one you need them to be to get what you want.)

Men are the ones conducting the violence, motivated by exactly the patriarchal values that feminism (in all its forms) seeks to oppose. In considering where the actual cultural causes for this violence lie, it’s also of value to look at the places in the world that experience the most violence against trans women. Latin America is a particularly brutal example… if I remember correclty, over the past few years, Brazil has had overhwlemingly more murders of trans women and “trans-feminine” people than any other country, and those murders independently outnumbered the combined murders of the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Brazil is by no means an overwhelmingly “feminist” or “radical feminist” country.

In all cases, the factors that seem primarily connected to trans-misogynistic violence are patriarchy, machismo and strict (and consequently fragile) standards of male identity, poverty, rape culture or other understandings of women as sexual objects that’s value is defined by male desire, a lack of legal protection, and a lack of the lives in question (women’s lives, trans lives, sex worker’s lives, lives lived in poverty, lives that are not white, etc.) being considered genuinely of value to the cultural climate in which the violence occurs. Feminism, radical or not, is not such a factor, and indeed is (when not a grotesque mockery of itself) antithetical to these cultural values.

These patterns are seen terms of trans-misogyny in general, even when the view is broadened, away from the specificity of violence. The fuel for trans-misogyny is misogyny, interacting with oppositional sexism and gender binarism. Feminism is never at root of trans-misogyny, it only participates in so far as feminists themselves fail to interrogate their own patriarchal and misogynistic baggage sufficiently, or over-zealously, uncritically, embrace flawed theory due to the temptation to validate their pre-existing cissexist biases.

Feminist comedians like Roseanne Barr and Margaret Cho can and do make transphobc jokes, but it pails in comparison to the ubiquitous use of such, generally hinged upon the prioritization of the cisgender, white male gaze in the culture industry (hence how many jokes are about men “accidentally” sleeping with a trans person, rather than about women doing so, or their “accidentally” making friends with us, or their boyfriends cheating on them with us, or whatever other awful thing might not be predicated on the cultural tendency towards privileging the vantage point and experiences of men). The types of shows that employ “shocking” and “edgy” trans-related content, like Sons of Anarchy, Nip/Tuck, Law & Order and Hit and Miss are very much aimed at male audiences. When we appear in television directed at female audiences, the cissexism is far more of the “brave, inspiring journey” variety, far less violent, and far less loaded with the dehumanization that enables violence, than how we appear in male-targeted media.

None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that feminism and cis women can’t be complicit in systems of trans-misogyny and trans-misogynistic violence, as already touched upon. And more importantly, this is not to say that cis women, or cis women calling themselves feminists, can’t be a threat, can’t compromise our safety, and can’t be dangerous. But the manner in which they’re a threat is through, as also already touched upon, their willingness to turn to, employ, and lend legitimacy to, the patriarchal powers they claim to oppose.

Cathy Brennan, for instance, has indeed posed a real danger to many trans people, by outing them to their schools. But consider what her actions there were, and how the threat was enacted. She didn’t overtly threaten anyone with the use of her own power, she leaned into the existing power systems and existing power inequalities (the school, and the reliably cissexist biases of the school administrators, and the trans kids’ peers, and their peers’ parents) to enact the oppression for her. At first, yes, that seems slimy and duplicitous, a means of keeping from getting her hands dirty. But there’s a more meaningful layer there, which is that Cathy Brennan, cis-and-white-and-professional-class-privileged as she may be, is nonetheless not, as a queer woman, sufficiently empowered by patriarchy to enact the oppression directly, or hurt us directly. She doesn’t have that level of power and entitlement. What she does is expose us to the already existing cissexism, transphobia and misogyny of the patriarchy at large. and allows those power systems to hurt us as they will. Exactly the same tactic employed by every other TERF organization that tries to threaten and silence us by outing and doxing us.

Likewise, as mentioned, when we’re barred access to women’s space, and resources like rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, women’s healthcare, and so forth, they’re not enacting the violence and oppression, they’re simply refusing to fight against it, and allowing us to be harmed by the systems and men and powers that, hypocritically, harm them (cis women) too and have necessitated such resources for cis women. They didn’t cause the harm, they just knowingly allow it to exist. They just selectively refuse their own mission of minimizing the consequences of patriarchy and patriarchal violence. They’re akin to the paramedics and doctors who decide trans lives aren’t worth saving, and allow us to bleed out in an emergency room (I had recurring nightmares about this happening to me even before I learned it actually happens).

They’re complicit in the violence and the harm… perhaps unforgivably so… but they are not its agents or culprits or cause.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to regard as significant the relationship between trans-misogyny and awareness (subconscious or direct) on the part of its agents that they’ll get away with it, that trans women aren’t considered as worth saving or protecting as cis women. That is, perhaps, one way in which the discourse of trans-exclusion, as engaged in and fueled by cis women, might causally contribute to the larger climates of violence and hostility towards us. But in turn one can’t ignore the fact that part of that belief that trans women aren’t worth protecting or saving emerges from resignation to the fact of the hostility and violence directed towards, and victim-blaming belief that we “brought it on ourselves” and “knew what we were getting into” . Nor can we ignore that the trans-exclusionist discourse isn’t an exceptional product of the specific needs, values, biases and beliefs of cis women, but is simply the inherent trans-misogyny (or…you know…misogyny) of patriarchy as manifested amongst cis women (and perhaps given extra weight in that manifestation by cis women’s ability to regard as Other, and a potentially “dangerous” Other as well… to say nothing of the way the gender in which we’re perceived to belong can be swapped out in accordance with context, and the emotional needs of whosoever is doing the gendering). Acceptance of being able to get away with the violence and acceptance of the inevitability of the violence is a chicken/egg scenario, a mutual, self-sustaining, redirection of accountability… two sides of a wider cultural resignation to trans-misogyny and its attendant consequences as just a fact of life, as unchangeable as the weather. In such circumstances, they’re reinforcing eachother… so again we can’t draw a causal relationship between those two mirror symptoms of an underlying pathology. Again, the root cause is clear: patriarchy.

In certain contexts it is useful and helpful to remind cis women that they’re members of the privileged class, along the cis>trans axis. But in the broad context of where we direct our energies, its not only useful, but necessary, to remember that transphobia, misogyny, trans-misogyny, femphobia and homophobia are intimately, inextricably connected. Transphobia cannot exist except as a byproduct of sexism and patriarchy as a whole, and in the sense of what’s “really” going on, in the sense of that deep relationship between transphobia and misogyny, cis women are not members of the privileged, oppressive class. They are targets of exactly the same oppression as us, they simply afford themselves more shelter from it, and hoard their protections. This happens in relation to many forms of oppression: white women protected from patriarchy more than women of colour, wealthy and middle-class women protected from rape culture more than women living in poverty, women of “acceptable” sexual practice protected more than women who were “asking for it”, and so on, endlessly. On the axis of gender, there is no such thing as simple oppression of women at the hands of other women (though women can of course be both parties in other kinds of oppression). On the axis of gender there’s just the complex fact of selling each other out to patriarchal oppression (even where that oppression has been internalized). Just like trans-on-trans oppression is still a cis problem, woman-on-woman oppression is still a patriarchy problem (even when it’s cis women oppressing trans women).

Cis women are not our jailer. Even the worst amongst them, the most transphobic or most misogynistic, are just co-prisoners who volunteer information to the guards.

And it is patriarchy and rape culture that is the mountain lion stalking us. Transphobic feminism is just a distant storm. We should look in the right direction, and not point one another away from that which is actually threatening them. When we direct our attentions away from addressing the systems and causes of the actual violence and most severe harm, in favour of a preoccupation with that which is only vocally refusing to help, we ourselves become complicit in the consequences too.