Lately, I’ve been feeling the inability to write coherently on trans issues; I obviously have, recently, to note the news out of Massachusetts, but there are deeper, more nuanced issues that I want to confront, and I’ve started writing about them only to stop myself several times in the last week and a half. I haven’t become less political about it; I think that part of it is the dominant community views (at least in the radical queer community) are exactly what I want to critique. And of course, the radical queer community is not a monolith. So I’ll be blunt:
Everyone, stop the backlash against genderqueers. This seems to have picked up in the last couple of years, since Serano’s Whipping Girl became first mandatory reading and then dogma (and a major critique of it is long overdue) and the concept of subversivism(1) seemed to change into “all genderqueers, everywhere, oppress transsexuals and their identities are just for subcultural status”. Which continues the erasure of transgenderqueers (a friend’s term for genderqueer people who also fit into a medical/social definition transsexual) that certainly was a highlight for me of Whipping Girl, a book where Serano repeatedly states that it is not about her experiences, implies they are illustrative, and then goes on to completely erase transgenderqueer people.
It seems lately that the political accusation of the day in queer/trans communities is being subversive. And it only gets thrown at one group in the community.
Genderqueer femmes.
Yes, masculine genderqueers, trans men, anyone who has a masculine queer identity gets a lot of positive attention. We live in a sexist society, of course we internalize that and value masculinity. Genderqueer femmes don’t get that, and we’re the ones who get either erased, or accused of being subversivists. Yes, there have been issues of appropriation from female-assigned-at-birth femmes; I still refuse to watch Female to Femme; if you want to talk about being assigned female, and going from having a gender identity of woman to a gender identity of femme, you want to call it Woman to Femme.(2)
Unless we go out of our way to make really sure we don’t fit into common social concepts of woman, we don’t get our pronouns asked, have language used for us that often erases our identities. And, if we speak up, we’re being subversivists, holding back the real trans people.
I pretty regularly have had trans women (3) intentionally disrespect my pronouns, use totally inappropriate language to refer to me, all with the implication or sometimes stated belief that my pronouns and preferred terminology serve to reinforce trans misogyny and/or the compulsory third-gendering of trans people. Up until recently, I only got that from non-radical trans women. Now, the blatant disrespect and erasure of my identity has spread to some radical trans women.
Brief guidelines that would make it better:
1.) Ask everyone’s pronouns, no matter how you read their gender presentation.
2.) Ask consent before using any gendered language for anyone.
3.) Recognize that gender non-conformity/genderqueerness is another, tightly intertwined oppression with the oppression faced by binary gendered transsexual people.
Unless I work in a gay bar again, I will likely never again work a job where I will have the correct pronouns or correct name used for me. It is a 99.9% certainty that I will be misgendered by every stranger I encounter. That chance only goes down if I’m in very gender-aware radical spaces. But unless I see the gender binary smashed in my lifetime — the same thing that makes me a subversivist — no matter what I do, I will be consistently misgendered by the public as a whole. There is no access to resources or plain old luck that can get the public as a whole to perceive a non-binary identity.
Yet, I’ve been told my gender is part of a system of oppression that strangely exists only in tiny subcultural spaces that have no permanence in physical location and gives absolutely no privilege in the world as a whole, that oppresses binary gendered trans people. This is bullshit and is the same thing as any other privileged group claiming that an oppressed group is oppressing them. The ability to identify with a binary gender is a source of privilege.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of awesome, radical trans folk in my life who don’t pull this — both binary and genderqueer identified. But I’m afraid to call out the ones who do, and due to both the femmephobia in radical queer communities, which has been there forever, and the recent attempt at making an appearance about being good on trans misogyny (which they actually aren’t), I get to deal with being part of a group that is a convenient target. And, by and large, it, along with all the other oppressions that the community often perpetuates, makes me want to avoid queer/trans spaces.
Whipping Girl doesn’t cause all of this, but in addition to adding some good ideas to the discussion, it’s fueled a lot of lateral hostility in the queer/trans community. And a big source of that is Serano’s massive bias against genderqueers, erasure of transgenderqueers, unacknowledged femmephobia, major misreading of queer theory and gender theory, lack of understanding of the history of feminism, and steadfast refusal to take any oppression seriously that isn’t trans misogyny.
As a community, we need to be able to critique, take the ideas that are good, and stop treating it like it is a completely accurate account of the truth. It’s one book by a massively privileged woman that only takes into account the oppression she has suffered and tries to turn it into a universal account of oppression. It has succeeded in that it resonates in some way with a lot of other trans women’s experiences; it has failed and been harmful in the number of people it has silenced, and it becoming something uncriticizable.
(1) Which I think was a concept full of holes and a lot of trying to elbow people aside with privilege to begin with.
(2) Everyone is so willing to accept butch as a gender identity, but people refuse to get femme as a gender identity, or accuse you of appropriating trans experiences. Sometimes, even if you are trans. Once again, sexism and femmephobia.
(3) A group, that as a genderqueer who, in terms of medicalization, is labelled trans female, one would think I would have a ton of solidarity with.
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This is the first post of yours that I’ve read — just stumbled on it. I just wanted to let you know that it was good to read your words.
“The ability to identify with a binary gender is a source of privilege.”
Yes.
“Everyone is so willing to accept butch as a gender identity, but people refuse to get femme as a gender identity, or accuse you of appropriating trans experiences.”
Thank you for pointing this out; I realize that I’ve done that. -_-;;
Stephanie: Thank you!
Drakyn: Yeah, it’s so tempting to do, because (traditional) butch is very visibly queer, and well, the community is pretty blind to femme, either traditional manifestations of it, or non-traditional ways get read as something else. So I think that contributes. But there have been blow ups for years at people claiming femme as a trans or genderqueer identity, but never directed at butch. And when you put the two together — if butch is a valid gender, why not femme? — it becomes so obvious.
“The ability to identify with a binary gender is a source of privilege.”
“Yes.”
anarchafemme and drakyn, you found me out! i am indeed one of those Super-Privileged Binary-Identified Patriarchy-Reifying Ev0l Trans Women!
so let’s see what this Grand And Sweeping Ability-To-Identify-With-A-Binary-Gender Privilege gets me:
- i have a much better chance of meeting up with peeps who’d like to assault, rape, and / or kill me than any cis person ever will. adds a kind of an excitement to my life. i’m really glad i have that privilege.
- if i ever need to go to the emergency room, i will get to witness first-hand the phenonemon of doctors and nurses freaking out over seeing a dyke with tits and a penis. the fact that i’ll be pushed into a hallway and allowed to bleed to death untreated is a small price to pay, dontcha think?
- same thing if i get in an accident and need emerg med services.
- i get to have a challenging experience in finding a doctor who will treat prostate enlargement / cancer in a dyke with tits and a penis. kinda like playing a really hard MMPORPG, can’t wait to do it.
- i get to form a really close relationship with my doctor, cos said doctor is the ONLY ONE IN THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA who will treat trans folk as fully human.
- i get to weigh the risk of not having mammograms and not catching breast cancer early enough to treat it vs. the risk to myself of being humiliated and mistreated by radiology staff who can’t handle dykes with tits and penisis.
- every time i interview for a job, i get to out myself as trans even when it is irrelevant to the job, so that the employer maybe — MAYBE — won’t do a freakout when that good old gender no-match letter comes in and fire my ass.
- i get to engage in illuminating conversation with the cop who pulls me over for a traffic stop, sees the female name and male gender marker on my license, and decides that a strip-search and some time in a cell with half-a-dozen men would be very entertaining for me. or hir, actually.
o, i feel so privileged. it’s fucking incredible that i have to list these 101 things on *this* blog, especially considering that you are also at risk for these same things.
o, i feel so privileged. it’s fucking incredible that i have to list these 101 things on *this* blog, especially considering that you are also at risk for these same things.
You’re proving my points and you’re derailing. You act as if I need you to list all this, and then acknowledge I have to deal with the same things, which is one of the many silencing tactics that gets used. Thus, the argument is over whether 1) society gives privilege to people with non-binary IDs, 2) society doesn’t care either way about non-binary IDs, that it recognizes them, but does not give any set of privileges over binary IDs or 3) that society does not recognize or respect non-binary IDs.
*I have to lie every time I fill out a form.
*If I change my name legally to my chosen name, it becomes one more thing that I have to deal with when interacting with the straight world.
*I have to constantly compromise my gender expression into something that is legible to society and make sure I don’t look “too trans” to not put myself at extra risk of transphobia.
*I can not honestly access any gendered space, no matter how trans inclusive it is.
*If I voice a desire that women’s spaces should be more inclusive than a single gender, I am accused of wanting to let the men in, even with the most trans inclusive of women’s spaces.
*The vast, vast majority of people, even in my social life, feel no need to respect my gender, and will just stop listening if I try to explain it. Limiting my social life to people who are willing to actually recognize and respect my gender would drastically reduce my social circle to nearly nothing. Even in Portland.
*To be involved in activist communities, I need to allow my gender to be disrespected, because there isn’t time to constantly correct people’s language, and besides, it would distract from the goals of the space. A simple pronoun go around will not solve the issue.
*I have to explain my gender (in addition to being trans) to every potential date/hook up/partner and have a lengthy talk about how what is and isn’t appropriate when I’m most vulnerable; this scares most people, even in queer/trans communities, off.
*I have never found a doctor willing to respect my gender enough that I don’t feel sick after seeing them. I can either lie to a doctor about my gender, or, be honest, and have it get treated with less respect than if I was binary-ID’d and trans. It gives them one more reason to not provide me with medical treatment and/or access to hormones.
*I had to pretend to not be genderqueer to transition in the first place.
*Considering the actual expression of my gender, when I’m willing to take the risk, is a mix of gender cues, every interaction is incredibly dangerous, no matter what my “sex” is read as.
You’re derailing with the classic tactic of denying one privilege exists by listing another oppression. Intersectionality 101:
*Just because someone is oppressed in one way, doesn’t mean they aren’t privileged in others.
*Oppressions intersect in ways that are more than additive (e.g. trans misogyny, being transsexual and genderqueer, being trans female and genderqueer)
*Someone being oppressed in different ways than you doesn’t lessen your oppression
Yes, other genderqueer people have different privileges and oppressions than me — some genderqueer people who don’t medically transition, and express their gender in certain ways certainly still get access to cissexual privilege (but not cisgender), despite the fact that referring to them as cissexual may well be disrespectful because their relationship to their bodies may have nothing to do with their sex assigned at birth. And I would never argue that transphobia doesn’t exist (oppression of non-binary genders is part of it!), or that trans women are intensely oppressed by the intersection of transphobia and sexism, just that another part of transphobia is the assumption that all people are men or women. Some of the cis people who are most respectful of binary-ID’d trans people just can’t understand that not everyone is a man or a woman, and thus will just not hear when someone says that they aren’t either.
Can you honestly tell me that society either gives me privilege for having a non-binary identity, or that it treats my identity with as much respect as a binary one?
It doesn’t, but neither can you smoothly equate trans binary identifications with cis ones. Some cis people are respectful of trans binary identifications, and most are not. For most people, a trans woman is a punchline, whereas a non binary identification is? invisible? Both are erased in particular kinds of ways.
And further, you can’t conflate identification with effect–a binary identified trans woman may *not* pass very often, and hence may have a more visibly trans presentation than a no-ho genderqueer. A lack of distinction (between transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, crossdresser etc etc) characterises trans experiences of discrimination, no?
That’s my biggest problems with the more celebratory takes on genderqueer – a voluntaristic ideal that privileges identification over context (institutional, queer/trans, varying kinds of public and private spaces) and effects (somatic, social etc)… and in doing so ignores how violence and discrimination are mobilised against gender variance at multiple levels.
I do actually agree that Serano’s critique has slipped at times and particularly in interpretation from simply context (“it’s wrong when people use genderqueer to ungender binary identified men and women”) to blanket dismissal (“it’s wrong for people to be genderqueer because it makes my life harder”).
I also think that the effects of a reading aren’t coterminous with the book itself–just as Serano exaggerates and misunderstands queer theory by reading Butler through Namaste, I didn’t really her as saying ooh, genderqueers are rubbish so much as saying, hey, trans women get maligned in queer/trans/lesbian spaces. And I totally agree that the fetishisation is a form of transphobia (eg that comic), and that Serano minimised it to an extent. Still, she did nevertheless make that point at times when she said something like “it’s transphobia when trans women are excluded from women’s space, and transphobia when trans men are included.”
And yes, what occurs in queer/trans spaces isn’t the same as what happens in the broader world.
I do disagree that it’s only genderqueer femmes that the subversivism critique has gone after–if anything it’s more likely to have centred on masculine genderqueers. I’ve seen a lot of quite ugly sentiment about masculine FAAB genderqueers lately.
So I don’t agree that the “butch is a gender but femme isn’t” is a widely accepted standard amongst trans women–which is where your OP situated the belief. Having said that, I’m leery of people using either butch or femme to evade the question of cissexuality in favour of gender presentation. To do so is to frequently ignore the institutional conditions by which violence against trans people of all kinds of identifications is produced.
eg trequently we get referrals at QT to butch-femme.com where there’s threads of people arguing about trans oppression. Inevitably there’s always multiple femmes going “just because I have a female body, female documents and a feminine presentation *doesn’t* mean I have cissexual privilege.” Well, I’m sorry, in that case it does. So that’s just bloody annoying.
I do identify as femme, fyi, but have gotten nothing but grief from cissexual femmes deciding that trans women are incapable of the nuance to distinguish between gender presentation and sex.
“Yes, masculine genderqueers, trans men, anyone who has a masculine queer identity gets a lot of positive attention. ”
Here’s my critique of this section.
I think you are somewhat incorrectly assuming that a trans man *wants* to get positive attention in a women/trans community. I am mostly gay, and honestly, my transness even coupled with my resplendent masculinity does *not* get me positive attention from queer cis men.
I wouldn’t have even bothered to comment, but i think it’s important to note that i may be radical, and feminist, and queer, and trans…but all of that doesn’t make it appropriate for me to be included in a larger women/trans community. (your terminology, i believe.)
so, i guess i just question the “positive” part of all that. not all attention is positive, even if it seems so in some ways. the same cis queer women who may in theory be all about me are not doing me any favors.
Well, yeah – and a lot of the positive attention is fetishizing and informed by transphobia, and it may not even be true that in a queer/trans (which is often dyke and trans) community, that the trans men are there because they want the attention of that community; it may be events that they’re still interested in (in terms of performances, etc) or it may be a space that while physically safe is not comfortable. I’ve been using the queer/trans community as a term because that’s what Serano uses, but in all practicality we know that that generally means a dyke and trans space, where some FAAB masculine genderqueers and some trans men are fetishized, and all other genderqueers and trans folk are marginalized.
The point, though, was that yes, masculinity is a source of privilege there like it is everywhere else, and thus differences in treatment may result in privileging of masculinity rather than a privileging of genders that are seen as more subversive (though statements that they’re more subversive probably stem from them being privileged due to being masculine).
i have no idea why my response got threaded there. sorry.
I definitely agree that Serano made the point that fetishizing is transphobic, but that it’s perhaps minimized at times. And you’re absolute write that the act of reading and the way a community handles a bit of writing is not the bit of writing. I’m intending on rereading Whipping Girl again and critiquing the text itself, rather than the community interaction with the text (as I did here).
I’ve mainly seen critique of masculine FAAB genderqueers on the internet, and not in the queer/trans spaces in my own community. And I think we’re on the same page about it, that it’s wrong when and where it occurs, but also masculine FAAB genderqueers do get varying degrees of masculine privilege in queer/trans communities, and need to be conscious of that.
I apologize that it wasn’t clear in my post, I had intended for it to come across that queers in general were far more willing to consider butch as a gender than femme. And I would certainly agree that if one is FAAB, doesn’t alter one’s body, and is comfortable refering to it as female, then one certainly isn’t cissexual. And even if one has to use different language, but has no intent of altering one’s body, then one has access to a lot of cissexual privilege.
I’ve gotten a lot of grief from cissexual femmes in the past (as in the first time I identified as trans and femme; it didn’t seem to happen when I was femme before transitioning), and I’m really lucky now that the cissexual femmes I associate with the most are rad, but, that is a definite huge problem with a lot of cissexual femmes interactions with trans femmes.
Just a quick note:
Some of us straddle those lines.
I grew up what you would call femme genderqueer in rural Texas in the 1980s I transitioned over time. So, I have racked up some experience in each space, if I may be so arrogant as to claim.
So, while I appreciate your frustration with the trans women who have mistreated you, I have to weigh in and say talking about binary IDed trans ppl as a privileged class is a fools’ errand at best, marginalizing and othering at worst.
For one thing, where would you put me? and who appointed you to assign me to a class?
I think a much better approach would be to talk about the privileges conferred by how we are perceived, rather than what particular identity we have.
I think a common theme in discussions of trans privileges perceived distance from masculine gender in a masculine body, as determined by the observer.
I also think this is the crux of the problem. Arguing whether this trans hamlet or that is more provincial than another is a bad way to fly.
Talking about how the distance from the center of male bodied masculinity might be more fruitful than demonizing the villa down the road.
Anyway, back to your regularaly scheduled GQ versus trans fight. Just try and remember the folks who live on la frontera, k?
I grew up what I would now call genderqueer (I didn’t have the term then) and transitioned as well. And I could rant about non-transsexual genderqueers as well. And I think you’re right that we should talk about the privileges based on how we’re perceived, and I think your point about perceived distance from male bodied masculinity is excellent. I do, however, think that perceived dissonance between expression and body is important, too, but I do think there is something valid to it breaking one down to never, ever being able to explain one’s identity, and to have things be different in how one is read from day to day. And I’m on that border too, I just lately have mostly seen binary trans people attacking GQ people, especially the ones who get the least gender-based privilege from society — actually, most of what I’ve faced from binary trans people is because I am trans, and genderqueer, and that I’m somehow betraying trans women by not having an identity like theirs. Attacks go on from both sides, when we should be in solidarity with each other against the systems that oppress all of us.
absolutely. My bad for forgetting to type that.
and never underestimate the ability of a bunch of peasants in villages to overthrow a tyrant. Just ask the French.
Sadly, I won’t be able to comment here much. Juggling my Fresnel plate to read the screen is a lil too much, but, I do love this blog’s design. well done.
I’ll be back when I get a proper mount for the plate.
Talking about how the distance from the center of male bodied masculinity might be more fruitful than demonizing the villa down the road.
should read:
Talking about how the distance from the center of male bodied masculinity affects our lives might be more fruitful than demonizing the villa down the road.
I get the feeling that part of the issue here, in the counter-arguments here, is that people are still stuck with the idea of a trans spectrum, whether ‘trans feminine’ or ‘trans masculine’ spectrum, where genderqueer folk are seen as less than fully trans, not as far along on the spectrum. Voz seems to set up genderqueer and trans as exclusive of each other, in commenting that she grew up genderqueer and then later transitioned (implying that her transition was the end of her being genderqueer, but not actually stating this). Again, the idea of the spectrum, and a progression along it.
I have major issues with this framing. Transsexuality and genderqueerness aren’t on a spectrum together; they are orthogonal to each other. A person may be one, or the other, or both, or neither, and each combination has it’s own configuration of privileges and/or oppressions.
The other issue I see here is a failure to separate out ‘passing’ privilege and internal privilege. Yes, of course, a cisgender trans woman who is visibly trans faces a lot of the same issues in this regard as does a genderqueer trans woman who is visibly trans, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a difference in experience because of the interplays of internal identity/desired gender expression/gender assignment by society. This needs to be seperated out, in the same way that the ‘passing as male privilege’ of a pre-transition trans woman is distinct from the privilege that a cis man experiences, which is both passing as male and internal male privilege.
I don’t think that pointing out these things is demonizing of cisgender trans people. Honestly, to me, several of the reactions in this thread read very much like cissexual women denying that they experience cissexual privilege by arguing that they lack male privilege. It’s not a demonization, it’s basic intersectionality.
Yeah, I notice when I say I’m genderqueer, I need to reinforce the idea that I’m trans (and it’s hard for me to find the right language to do so). I really like the framing of it as them being orthogonal to each other. And yeah, I get a lot more ‘passing’ privilege in a dress than in some sort of tight jeans/western shirt/vest get up, because I look like a femme dyke when I’m in a dress, and some sort of flamey faggotdyke thing the other way. But either way, I can feel isolated, genderwise, in a room of twenty people, you know? And I’m not even arguing that just having an internal genderqueer identity leads to a lot of horrific oppression – just that it hurts to everyday face a world that doesn’t admit the possibility of your existence.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve always had a hard time seeing trans vs genderqueer infighting. It’s just so painful and feels like I’m being slammed from all sides. When I was identifying exclusively as non-binary, I certainly got a lot of shit for it. The most blatent and reoccuring transphobic oppression I ever faced was from a group of people who later told me that they support LGBT folks and wouldn’t have had a problem if I was just trans, but they decided to target me because I used gender-neutral pronouns. I was never sure if I could access non-discrimination designed for trans people because of that. Not to mention, I lost half of my trans support network when I started strongly articulating a non-binary identity.
After all that, I adopted a binary identity. At first it was just an outward binary identity, but the more I wore it, the more comfortable it got. Now I feel both non-binary and binary, hah, that sounds like a very complicated non-binary thing to say. But anyway, seeing the difference to how people respond to me and other things I have to deal with is rather stark. My ability to comfortably put on a binary identity is clear to me as a privilege. It’s only partly a mask, but one that I first put on with the distinct intention of gaining some of that privilege.
Yeah, it’s really tempting for me to let it slide when people “she” me, refer to me as a woman, etc., because it is a way of accessing privilege (and constantly explaining my identity is tiring). For me, it’s gotten more and more important to articulate that my identity is non-binary as it’s become easier to slip under the radar. The years I was butch, I was constantly being asked my pronouns; now I have to make an effort to be expressing femme and putting that uncertainty in people (if that’s what I want to do). I’ve had a couple partners not respect my pronouns, and more not respect the language I wanted used about me (and sadly, some of these partners have been trans, and I’ve had cis partners that totally got it).
And “now I feel both non-binary and binary” is totally a complicated non-binary thing to say.
this is just one of those “thank you” comments, trying not to be so over-effusive that it’ll embarrass either or both of us.
i haven’t read very many things that make me feel like i’m part of the world in the way this – and the rest of what i’ve read in your blog so far – does. rocco bulldagger’s fabulous critique of the narrowing-into-masculinity of ‘genderqueer’; a few zines; a few records. i had tears in my eyes before i was halfway through.
i’m very interested to hear what you think about the serrano if you did decide to read it through again. partly because this piece was so good; partly because i’ve heard so much of that book’s language absorbed into my (queer/trans – read: dyke/trans) communities, and so little conversation about it. and also because i’ve got a mostly-written critique (also mostly focused on the naturalization of conventional binary femininity, from a bit of a different angle) that needs polishing before i do anything with it. in any case, knowing someone else has already gotten their shit together to put something like this out there will get me back in motion on it.
so: thank you. again.
I’ll definitely write a piece at some point, and will likely talk more about the concept of subversivism soon. I think you make a really excellent point that she naturalizes conventional binary femininity, and within acceptable limits (I don’t know why the brief statement where she defends her identity by not being high femme sticks in my mind so much). I really love Rocco Bulldagger’s piece on genderqueer in That’s Revolting, btw.
And thank you for all your praise!
I agree that it’s not a smooth equation, and that all trans and/or genderqueer people’s identities are erased by cis people. And yeah, “passing” has a lot to do with the effect, and genderqueers have massively different levels of invisibility. Your point about the lack of distinction is absolutely correct, as well. And my views are of course affected by being transgenderqueer. As to your last paragraph, I’m a little unclear — certainly, I don’t think we should look at genderqueer as something you decide to feel like you are or aren’t unless we want to argue full force for all queer by choice (which is a debate I feel like I could be on both sides of), coming out and claiming the identity (like any other queer identity) is certainly a choice, but it doesn’t change how one feels. So, if that’s what you’re getting at, I agree to that extent. But I do think we need to recognize people’s internal identities are important, and no matter how visible they are, affect how they interact the world and deal with it. And there have been plenty of genderqueers who’ve ignored the differences in privilege and vulnerability to violence is trans, genderqueer, and queer/trans/genderqueer communities.
I look forward to you coming back and commenting more, and thanks for liking the design.