I’m sure you all have seen those electoral maps that have been floating around. You know the ones. The “If only men voted” and “If only women voted” maps that show landslides. These ones:

The thing about these maps? I’m not surprised. They reflect everything I’ve been taught about white cishet culture. Nor am I surprised about the #repealthe19th hashtag or whatever nonsense that’s evolved into. I mean really, should any of us be surprised by this?

I sometimes joke and say I knew I was a lesbian before I knew I was a woman, and this is something I’ve heard from a lot of trans people I’ve spoken to. And a large part of it is the same reasons I’m not surprised by those maps. I’ve never once identified with either half of a cishet couple in pop culture. They’re portrayed as inherently adversarial, as working against each other at least as often as with, as enemies who have managed to forge a peace treaty out of necessity rather than two people who actually want to be around each other. Hell, the only straight couple I’ve ever come close to identifying with is Gomez and Morticia Addams, and their whole schtick is being as weird and abnormal as possible. That’s what we write as horrifying and unnatural: a loving straight couple.

Contrast this with a lot of what you get from queer relationships in pop culture, which is usually subtext and fanfiction… And you get people who actually want to be around one another. People who have to work against those same cultural norms that force the cishet people together seemingly against their will half the time. That’s just always seemed more right to me, why would I ever date someone who worked against me any percent of the time?

And so I really have to ask this question of cishet white America: are you really surprised? You’ve built this culture, been taught this since you were young and started teaching it yourself. Men, are you surprised at how horrified the women around you are? Are you okay with that? With voting for someone who considers half the population disposable sex objects? I mean, the fact that they’re human beings makes it terrible enough but let’s go with that fox news caster logic that finally got some of them to admit this is horrific, the majority of you either plan to or are already going to spend the rest of your life with a woman, so why treat them like your enemies and not your partners? I don’t understand.

(If you’re going to #notallmen me you can fuck right off)

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I’ve just published an update and sequel to last year’s Gender Analysis episode “Trans Passing Tips for Cis People”, which explored how perception of gendered features can vary between individuals due to the influence of a number of documented factors. This episode examines further evidence for various biases in gender perception and attribution, and considers what this means for trans people in the context of widespread cis assumptions about “passing” and the intensifying debate on restrooms:

In everyday life, interactions between the expression and interpretation of gender are so diverse that whether someone “looks like a woman” isn’t always entirely predictable. This naïve model of gender perception treats gender as a property emitted from an individual, with all others as passive receivers who simply accept this expression at face value. Yet this is precisely backwards – expressions of gender are not objective and singular; they are subjective, interpretative, and multiple.

The same trans person, on the same day, with exactly the same appearance, can still have their gender read entirely differently depending on who’s looking at them. Why does this happen? At least in part, it’s because many of the variables involved here aren’t located within the one person being observed, but rather the multiple people observing them.

Keep reading at Gender Analysis >>

The post Gender Analysis: On the science of gender perception and misgendering appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the nomination of “Galileo’s Middle Finger” for a Lambda Literary Foundation award, I’ve reviewed the book’s sections on J. Michael Bailey and autogynephilia (a proposed sexual etiology of gender dysphoria):

The central theme of Galileo’s Middle Finger is the importance of the scientific pursuit of truth to the wider social pursuit of justice – to Dreger, these aims go hand in hand, with factual accuracy as a necessity for effective advocacy. Her recounting of the disputes surrounding this sexual theory is just one of many vignettes intended to support these principles. Unfortunately, her uncritical acceptance of questionable science, and her dissemination of a misleading impression of trans women’s lives, cast doubt on the book’s value in advancing the very justice she prizes most.

You can read the rest at Gender Analysis (or as a PDF here), including factual inaccuracies in the stereotype-laden caricatures attached to this theory, issues with the half-dozen epicycle-like excuses that have been proposed to explain away data inconsistent with the theory, and a look at some of the surprisingly personal attacks that have been made in the course of promoting the concept of autogynephilia. Many readers have been asking me to cover Blanchard’s typology and autogynephilia for a while, and the book presented an excellent opportunity. At almost 7500 words, this is the longest article I’ve published, but it’s mostly due to how much was wrong here.

The details of the relevant scientific research are obscure enough that there’s very little chance the average cis reader would be sufficiently familiar with the literature to recognize the full extent of the flaws in “Galileo’s Middle Finger”. Sadly, this lack of awareness leads to puff pieces and glowing reviews from otherwise reputable outlets, praising her values of “solid data”, “empirical research”, and “true scholarship” without the slightest recognition of the book’s stark inadequacies in those areas. The vast majority of cis people simply have no reason not to take her words at face value, and it’s disturbing how easily one high-profile source’s slanted coverage of this topic can filter down to a believing media and influence the wider public. My review-slash-scientific-critique is intended to remedy this. The science, the trans people who are the subject of this research, and the cis people who are interested in learning more about this, deserve better than the narrow and incomplete portrayal offered by Dreger.

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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. As trans people, we’re often asked how we would know what it’s like to be our gender. Trans women are expected to explain how we know what it’s like to be a woman; trans men are asked how they know that they’re men. At first glance, this might seem like a simple enough question: what is it about our experiences that aligns with womanhood or manhood? But this line of inquiry, innocent as it may be, runs parallel to scrutiny and invalidation. And when you break this question down, it doesn’t really make any sense. 

What purpose does this question serve?

When someone asks us this question, what kind of answers are they looking for? What are they intending to do with these answers? Is it possible to give a right answer? This approach of interrogation tinged with doubt and judgment seems to show up pretty often.

In the last episode, I explained how the commonplace usage of fixed biological reference points to define trans people as forever “female” or “male” is inconsistent to the point of being unjustifiable. Afterward, I was often asked, “so what does it mean to be a woman?”, or “what makes someone a man?” The problem, as you might have gathered from the previous video, is that this is complicated. There isn’t an easy checklist that you can go through to verify someone’s gender. And more importantly, why even try? When you ask these questions, are you going to use our answers to fight for us, or as an excuse not to?

It turns out that many are looking for exactly that excuse. When trans children come out as girls or boys, they’re often met with the most bizarre objections – from conservatives who lazily retort, ‘oh, well some kids want to be firetrucks when they grow up’, and so-called ethicists who blather about children who like to pretend to be train engines. Now, if you’re aware that half the human population isn’t firetrucks, being a woman isn’t really like being a freight train, and children have examples of boys and girls all around them, the analogy kind of falls apart. But I guess not all cis people can wrap their heads around that.

On the other end, when trans people come out in adulthood, they’re told things like “how would she know what it’s like to be a woman after living as a man for 65 years?” The elegance of this argument is that it can be wielded against any of us at any time. If we come out at 50, or 20, or 5, we can be told that we lack that experience of living as our gender. But that’s the very point of transitioning: we want to acquire that experience and immerse ourselves in it for the remainder of our lives. And when you refuse to treat trans people as their gender, you’re denying them the very experience you’re demanding from them.

It’s a self-fulfilling bigotry.

How trans people experience ourselves

There’s a substantial gap between the typical cis approach to questioning trans people’s genders, and the process by which we as trans people come to recognize and actualize our genders. I can’t speak for others, but when I started to understand my gender, I never once asked myself, “how do I know I’m a woman? What does it mean to be a woman?” All of that was too abstract and disconnected to help me figure out who I am in any practical way.

Implicitly, these questions refer to cis women, treating them as a definitive standard of womanhood. I wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a cis woman – not in totality – because I’m not one, and I never will be. I can share experiences with them, just as any of us can share experiences with anyone else. But when those who position themselves as the judges of our genders don’t have a complete sense of our experiences, and are never really clear on the degree of similarity they expect from us, this is just a recipe for arbitrarily dismissing and invalidating who we are. They don’t quite know what the must-have criterion for womanhood actually is – they’re just set on believing we don’t have it.

It would be foolish to assume that my chosen affiliation with womanhood was based on my ability to meet that confrontational standard, whatever it may be. That doesn’t help us. Here’s what does: I didn’t have to know what it felt like to be a woman in some general, global sense. I only had to know what it felt like to be me. Declaring myself, presenting myself, and being recognized as a woman felt right, where doing the same as a man never did. Being a woman made me feel more comfortable, more confident, more ambitious, and more willing to see my life as worth living. Being a man made me anxious, depressed, hopeless, and lacking any reason to live. I know I’m a woman in the same way I know that I want to be alive.

Will the real gender please stand up?

So, how would we know what it’s like to be a cis person? How about this: How would cis people know what it’s like to be us? If we’re going to start using supposed personal familiarity with others’ experiences to authenticate or invalidate their gender, this can easily be turned on its head.

Who knows more about their gender, what it is, and how it works than someone who had to build theirs from the ground up in the face of ongoing assault and then defend it on all fronts from those who try to take it away? Who knows more about what it’s like to have a gender than somebody who spent years searching far and wide until they found what was right for them, and cherishes it more than anything?

We know that our gender makes things so much better for us that losing everything else is still worth it. And we know that going without our gender is so unacceptable that nothing else could make it worth it. Cis people have never had to make these difficult choices just to keep their hard-won gender. They may never even have had to contemplate the possibility. But we have – and we know what it’s like. So what if we hold the keys to the one true gender, and you’ll never know?

I’m Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.

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The post How Do You Know What it’s Like to Be…? (Gender Analysis 08) appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. Calling trans women “male” is like the background noise of transphobia. It comes from many directions, and it’s pretty much constant. On one level, it’s a lazy invalidation of who and what we are, offered up by armchair biology fans who insist that trans women are always and forever “male”. On another, it’s unwittingly perpetuated rhetoric by people trying to provide 101-level explanations of what it means to be transgender while unaware that they may be causing even more confusion. And, of course, it’s overtly weaponized as a rallying cry of those looking to keep our genders from being recognized and protected under the law.

But this concept of physical sex as permanent and inescapable is actually incomplete, inaccurate, and irrelevant. Are trans women really “male” in any way that matters? I don’t think so.

“Genderbread” people and unintended transphobia

In recent years, a diagram called the “genderbread person” has become especially popular as a visual explanation of how gender, physical sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation are all separate axes that can operate independently. The diagram uses the genital area to represent “physical sex”, and the brain to represent “gender identity”. This representation is incredibly misleading.

Treating genitals as synonymous with “physical sex” does a disservice to both biology and terminology. Physical sex is a broad concept that encompasses many sex-differentiated features of the body. It’s not as if we have no evidently sexed features until we take our pants off. And this also doesn’t actually reflect the common understanding of what it means to be trans. If physical sex were defined by the genitals, then a trans woman who has genital reconstruction would then have both a gender and a “physical sex” that are considered female. Would that mean she’s not trans anymore?

This sharp separation of “physical sex” and “gender” reflects a flawed belief that our physical sex is constant regardless of our gender. It serves as an excuse to regard us as still being male. We often hear well-meaning people describe trans women with phrases such as “their physical sex is male and their gender is female”. Unfortunately, not-so-well-meaning people tend to hear this as “man who thinks he’s a woman”.

Illustrating our gender as being limited to the mind suggests that it’s all in our heads, as if it’s a mere whim that can’t be seen or felt, and probably isn’t that important anyway. The isolation of our gender from our physical sex gives the impression that the physical changes of transitioning are irrelevant, and that we’re just forever “male” regardless of whether our bodies reflect that.

Scientific facts: the “delusion” delusion

When we question the labeling of trans women as “male”, we’re often told that this is simply a “scientific fact”, and disputing this would mean engaging in a “delusion” or “denying reality”. But none of these things are actually the case. It’s not a scientific fact that our bodies are male. It’s a fact that a penis is a penis, and XY chromosomes are XY chromosomes. But calling these things “male” is a choice of terminology.

A label isn’t even in the same ballpark as an empirical finding – there are no scientific papers with conclusions along the lines of “therefore, we have found strong evidence that people with penises are male”. And there are no aspects of biology that depend on labeling these features as “male”. If we referred to penises and XY chromosomes as female, would that actually require revising or overturning any physical facts or scientific findings? No. Would it mean denying that a trans woman’s penis is a penis and a trans woman’s vagina is a vagina? No.

We’re only “delusional” to those who fail to differentiate between a state of reality and the categories we use to describe this. Revising a map does nothing to change the underlying territory. Trans people know this, but transphobes seem to struggle with it – really, who’s deluding themselves here?

Brushing up on biology

The broad description of trans women’s bodies as “male” ignores many facts about physical sexual characteristics. The presence of XY chromosomes is often cited as a justification to mark our bodies as irrevocably male, but features of physical sex are hardly limited to XX or XY. Some of this may simply be due to a lack of understanding of how the expression of sex characteristics actually works.

The reality is that almost everyone has both testosterone and estrogen in their bodies, and almost everyone’s cells are capable of responding to a deficit or surplus of these hormones. Estrogen activates estrogen receptors, and this leads to the expression of certain genes that ultimately produce secondary sex characteristics such as breast growth, softer skin, reduced body hair, greater fat storage, and less muscle than that produced by testosterone. Again, almost everyone has these genes regardless of gender and regardless of sex chromosomes. This is why hormone therapy works for trans people: changing the balance of sex hormones produces the desired physical changes.

When these concepts are misunderstood, it can lead to some pretty ridiculous arguments. Transphobes often claim that we’ll never have XX chromosomes, not realizing that their presence or absence makes no practical difference when it comes to transitioning. We’re described as having “hormonally-grown breasts” by those who don’t understand that all breast development is due to hormones in trans women and cis women alike. This is like calling a grown man “really a child” who’s only “cosmetically adult” because of “hormonally-induced puberty”. The changes in our bodies are called “superficial”, “cosmetic” and “artificial” by those who don’t realize that we’re making use of the same biological pathways of development as cis people.

Outdated models: chosen to serve transphobia

Picking one feature that lends itself to labeling our bodies as “male” becomes a rather suspect choice when the rest of our bodies indicates otherwise. And if you’re only calling trans women “male” because you’ve chosen only to look at the parts that allow you to call trans women “male”, that’s circular. It isn’t a firmly established scientific argument – it’s a last resort.

Calling trans women “male” is often an intentional choice meant to promote public fear and advance discriminatory laws. Claims that “males” will be able to use women’s restrooms serve to associate us with crimes committed by cis men, treating us as if we’re a threat because of what cis men have done. The term “male” is used here because transphobes know that if they said “trans women,” their argument wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. They’ve grouped us under the same umbrella based on a shared feature that trans women explicitly disavow and actively work to move away from. But transphobes don’t care about that, because “allowing males in women’s restrooms” evokes suspicion and discomfort in every way that “allowing women in women’s restrooms” doesn’t.

Trans women are female

Many people don’t like it when trans women call ourselves female because it undermines the forms of transphobia that rely on thinking of us as men. It takes away that asterisk and removes one of the ways of marking us as less legitimate in our womanhood. It dissolves the arguments that link us to cis men based on this one tenuous, dishonest connection.

For some, calling us “male” is just an innocent mistake and it doesn’t come from a bad place. For others, it’s not so innocent. But no matter the reason, stop and think about what you’re doing. Trans women being “male” is not a fact. It’s just a really thoughtless thing to say.

I’m Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.

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The post Stop Calling Trans Women "Male" (Gender Analysis 07) appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. Ever since I transitioned, I’ve noticed something interesting: a lot of cis people really seem to care about where I go to the bathroom. Over the past few months, lawmakers in several states have proposed bills to ban people from using restrooms and other facilities that don’t match their sex assigned at birth. Practically speaking, this would have the effect of forcing trans women to use men’s restrooms and trans men to use women’s restrooms or face fines, jail time, or more.

This is an issue that’s been around forever and it makes life incredibly difficult for us. We’re painted as a threat to a cis population that in reality poses more of a threat to us. This much larger and more institutionally powerful group now seeks to enshrine their bathroom policing into law. And they’ve presented this as if it’s an actual controversy with genuine issues to be debated.

Well, it’s not. 

Safety as a smokescreen

The proponents of these bills have advanced them under the banner of safety and the prevention of assault, battery, and rape, but in reality, safety is the last thing on their minds. Some lawmakers, such as Florida state representative Frank Artiles, claim they aren’t concerned about any supposed threat posed by trans people in bathrooms, but rather the possibility that criminals will falsely claim to be trans in order to use whichever restroom they want. Others, like Texas state representative Debbie Riddle, focus more specifically on trans people, and claim that these bills “will protect women & children from going into a ladies restroom & finding a man who feels like he is a woman that day.”

When I first addressed these arguments in 2013, I pointed out that a majority of trans people have been harassed by cis people in public restrooms, and questioned whether a similar number of cis people have faced harassment in bathrooms by trans people. I now believe that approach was a mistake. These people are not developing policies based on facts. None of their concerns are credible, and none of their proposals have anything to do with safety.

Those who support these bills haven’t presented any data showing that cis people are at an elevated risk in bathrooms due to trans people’s use of them, or due to cis people pretending to be trans. So if they think that cis men will pretend to be trans women to use the women’s restroom, and these new laws will allow trans men but not trans women to use the women’s restroom, how do they know that cis men won’t just pretend to be trans men to accomplish the same thing? They don’t. And if they think trans people are going to assault cis people in the restroom of our gender, how do they know we won’t just start assaulting people in the other restroom? They don’t.

They have no evidence, because they consider evidence to be irrelevant. Representative Artiles dismissed the testimony he’d heard from countless trans people, saying:

“What about my feelings? What about my wife’s feelings? What about the feelings of 99.7 percent of the population that are being endangered just to appease (you)?”

To him, our actual experiences mean nothing. His unfounded speculation means everything. Who needs facts when you’ve got your precious cis feelings?

Why safety is the wrong argument

Amidst this atmosphere of evidence-free argumentation, even some people who support us have taken this as a cue to fight ignorance with more ignorance. Many people have claimed that there are zero cases of trans people ever assaulting anyone in bathrooms, or of cis people pretending to be trans people to use restrooms. This is a terrible argument. There are millions of trans people on the planet, and billions of cis people – how likely is it that in any group that big, none of them have ever committed a particular crime in a restroom?

Putting this much significance on the magic number zero will just make opponents think their concerns have been validated when one of these cases does appear. But would that actually be a reason to bar trans people from the restrooms of their gender? No, it would not. Concerns about safety aren’t just a poorly-formed argument – they’re the wrong argument for any of us to be having here. This line of ill reasoning doesn’t reflect any sort of established decision-making process about restroom safety. When is the last time that policymakers ranked different demographics of cis women by their statistical likelihood of committing crimes in restrooms, and decided that a certain threshold was unacceptable?

In most cases, we understand that allowing any group of people into a given place means that some small fraction of them might commit crimes, and we accept that the benefits of their being able to access that place outweigh the potential risks. Cis women have assaulted cis women in restrooms, yet nobody takes this as a reason to ban all cis women from women’s restrooms. Imposing that kind of inconvenience on all cis women is obviously unacceptable, but imposing it on trans women is totally okay for some reason. (The reason is transphobia.)

If these lawmakers are concerned about the potential for assault when certain people use restrooms, let’s look at an extreme case: registered sex offenders. 100% of these people have previously been convicted of a sex offense, so how is their restroom usage regulated? Out of all the restrictions imposed on sex offenders, this actually isn’t one of them. Male sex offenders who committed crimes against men aren’t banned from the men’s restroom. Female sex offenders who committed crimes against women aren’t banned from the women’s restroom. And the most that anyone ever says about this is, “be careful, there might be sex offenders in restrooms”. It’s taken as a reality of life. But lawmakers want to exile trans people from the proper bathroom on the basis of nothing but hypothesized threats? That’s not good enough, and it’s a mistake for anyone to treat this argument as if it was ever legitimate.

Bathroom bills are meant to dehumanize us

If this movement isn’t about safety, and it isn’t about evidence, what is it about? It’s about treating trans people as less than human. Public restrooms exist because they’re necessary – they’re for dealing with daily, universal bodily functions. Everyone goes to the bathroom. This is a constant of humanity, so what does it mean when these fundamental needs are disregarded for a subset of the population?

Representative Artiles defended his bill, saying:

“People are not forced to go to the restroom. They choose to go to the restroom.”

Cis people’s bodily needs are taken as a given, while trans people are placed outside of one of the most basic aspects of life. Their needs are real and valid; ours are not. Debating our access to bathrooms deprioritizes our own human nature, treating it as something beside the point – something that people just don’t need to care about if they don’t feel like it. It implicitly removes us from the circle of humanity.

The issue of bathroom access may be especially well-suited to dehumanizing people. A 2008 study found that found that people who are highly aware of bodily sensations became more severely morally judgmental after recalling experiences of physical disgust. A later study showed that people who were made to feel disgusted more strongly associated themselves with humans and outsider groups with animals. Disgust helps kick moral judgment into overdrive, and encourages people to dehumanize those who aren’t like them. Why do these lawmakers use bathrooms to attack us? Because it works.

Bathroom bills codify regressive transphobia

Trans people have been using bathrooms for as long as there have been bathrooms. So why has this become such an issue now? Our access to bathrooms has been contested for decades – but these new bills are more far-reaching than ever. They go beyond simply imposing restrictions on trans people, and provide enormous incentives for private citizens to police our bathroom usage.

Some of these bills would allow people to sue school districts, government institutions, private business owners, or even trans people themselves for thousands of dollars in “damages”. Damages for what? For having seen a trans person in a public restroom. A proposed referendum in California even creates a “civil claim for violation of privacy” in the event that someone doesn’t use a restroom because a trans person was there. Such laws would effectively disallow any public institution or private business from deciding to allow trans people to use the proper restroom, and they promise a reward of thousands of dollars for anyone who spots a trans person using a restroom.

At a time when awareness of trans people is more widespread than ever, these bills are designed to stop progress in its tracks. They legally enshrine the idea that cis people are entitled to avoid ever seeing us in the proper restroom. They’re meant to force us to out ourselves every time we go to the bathroom – they’re meant to force trans women to walk into a room labeled “men”. They’re meant to encourage the whole of society to pick us out from a crowd, and they’re meant to make us know that we’re a target. They turn us into prey. All of this is designed to disrupt our integration into society at a basic level, fundamentally negating who we are at a moment of universal human need. The absence of women’s restrooms has historically been used to exclude women from participation in public life. And today, these lawmakers want to roll back history: they want to erase trans people.

Non-issues get non-solutions

Maybe this is the part where you think I’ll offer an elegant answer that obviates this entire problem, like making all bathrooms unisex, or building new gender-neutral bathrooms. But really, this isn’t my job and it isn’t my problem. We’re not the ones who broke things here. Cis people started this, and they can end it – by leaving us alone. Meanwhile, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done, which is to use whichever restroom we feel is safest for us. And that tends to rule out drawing attention to ourselves by assaulting people.

I’m Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.

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The post Bathroom Bills: Dehumanization and Control (Gender Analysis 06) appeared first on Zinnia Jones.

CN: transantagonism, discussion of hypothetical sexual assault/rape

The internet has been abuzz over this thing that happened:

[…] a Planet Fitness gym in Midland, Michigan revoked the membership of a woman who complained that the trans woman she was sharing a locker room with looked too much like a man.

Of course, this event has stirred up a bunch of conversation around whether trans people (often trans women) should have access to certain gendered spaces, namely bathrooms and locker rooms. Trans people and allies are basically of the opinion that it’s no big deal to let people pick the bathroom that’s appropriate for them and cis people need to shut the hell up about it. The opposition centers around how it can make (cis) women uncomfortable, and how there’s a chance that (cis) men could dress as women any time they wanted to gain access to these spaces and maybe attack the cis women.

It occurred to me recently that if a cis dude wanted to dress as a woman to enter a gendered restroom, he would have to a) pack the clothes and change into them right before entering the bathroom, risking detection by anyone paying attention, or b) wear the clothes out in public on the way to his dirty deed of peeking or whatever. (Which–if peeking is what you’re worried about–would mean that any cis women attracted to women would also not be allowed in the women’s room. Just saying.)

Does anyone realize that cis men would have to be willing to put themselves in the position of a trans woman in order to accomplish this particular act of subterfuge? If they walked around dressed as women but still visibly male, they would literally be putting themselves at risk for the kind of violence that trans women face, just for the sake of gaining access to a women’s room. They would also be even more likely to be stopped before entering the restroom, or to have someone contact management about their presence since they wouldn’t have been doing any of the regular feminizing routines that many trans women maintain.

It also occurs to me to mention that, though I’m not a criminal psychologist, I suspect the type of guy who would attack women in a public restroom would probably just walk in and do it without the preamble of dressing as a woman. And claiming to be a trans woman isn’t going to nullify those sexual assault charges anyway.

On that thought, there are trans women who rape people. There are also cis women who rape people. Making public facilities accessible to trans people isn’t going to generate rapists where there weren’t any, no matter what their gender is. Not to mention that most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows personally, not random strangers in bathrooms.

Trans women are at risk for violence just like cis women are at risk, let’s not forget. Preventing trans women from using women’s restrooms is going to force them to go into men’s rooms, where they will be at greater risk of harassment or violence. I don’t mean to diminish the fact that violence against cis women from cis men is a huge problem, but cis men are not trans women, and taking away trans people’s access to certain gendered facilities isn’t going to stop or even deter that violence. It’s just discriminatory and othering, and is going to put more trans people at risk of harassment and possibly arrest since so many places are trying to codify laws restricting restroom use.

Bringing this back around to the Planet Fitness thing, the cis woman who complained did so because she thought there was a man in the locker room. The trans woman was reportedly wearing leggings and a baggie t-shirt, but she acknowledges that her body appears masculine from behind. Although, she has breasts and was carrying a purse… Point being, I’ve seen people arguing “But how can we tell if they’re trans and not just a dude in the ladies’ room if they aren’t wearing hyperfeminine clothing and haven’t been taking hormones?” To that I say, fuck you. Hormones cost money, and so do those feminizing routines I mentioned earlier. Let’s not pretend that standards of attractiveness aren’t being used to gatekeep trans women from accessing women’s spaces.

And to anyone who thinks that Planet Fitness responded too strongly by revoking the cis woman’s membership, I give you this:

She returned to the gym Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday “to get the word out” to other women that they “let men in the women’s locker room,” she said.

“Every day I said ‘just so you know, there’s a man they allow in this locker room and they don’t tell you that when you sign up,’ ” she said.

And also this:

Cormier said she then got a call from Planet Fitness’ corporate office telling her that she was violating their “no judgement” policy. She says they asked if she was going to stop talking to other women in the locker room and she said she would not.

Cormier said the representative told her she was no longer welcome at the gym.

This cis woman was aggressively returning to the gym specifically to ‘warn’ other members of the gym that Planet Fitness allows people to use the locker room suited to their gender identity. She was causing a disruption and creating an unsafe environment for trans people. Planet Fitness prides itself on being a no-judgment zone and she was clearly creating a judgmental environment by enflaming her fellow cis women. It makes perfect sense that they revoked her membership. And now she’s suing Planet Fitness for something like $25,000, so we’ll see how that goes.

In trying to come up with solutions to these bathroom debacles, some people have proposed making additional facilities for trans people or making all single-stall bathrooms gender-neutral, or even making all bathrooms gender-neutral, period. Here’s a Laci Green video talking about some of that:

I agree with Laci that making separate facilities for trans people is kinda separate-but-equal-y. Which is not good. I see no reason why all single-stall restrooms shouldn’t be gender-neutral, and I have seen “family” restrooms available, which seems perfectly reasonable. I’m also not particularly opposed to having all multi-stall restrooms be neutral as well, except for having cleaned men’s bathrooms before and they are.. not pleasant. Maybe we’d need to simultaneously introduce the concept of cleaning the bathroom after ourselves, like they do in French airports.

Ultimately, we need to collectively mind our own business and let people determine for themselves which bathroom they need to piss in. FFS.

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Did you know that parents tend to see newborn boys as larger and newborn girls as smaller, even when they’re the same size? Welcome to Gender Analysis.

Last time, we talked about how transgender people are affected by the expectation of passing – the idea that we should blend in as if we’re cis people. We discussed how this can force us to become secretive about every part of our lives, how it can keep us from advocating on our own behalf, and how it can isolate us from other trans people.

Now I’d like to examine passing in practice. Most people think of passing as a one-way street, as though the responsibility for passing or not falls solely on trans people. We often see cis people feign helplessness and protest that they just can’t see us as our gender. This serves as an excuse to misgender us.

But we’re not the only variable in this equation. It’s easy to assume that perception is an objective sense – that we all reliably see a person exactly as they are, just like pointing a video camera at them. Yet perception isn’t really like that at all, and this means that there are aspects of “passing” that are completely external to trans people.

Passing and media exposure

In episode 04, I mentioned a trans support group from the 1980s that largely refused to be a part of any media coverage about trans people (Bolin, 1988). They felt that any wider public awareness would only serve to inform people on distinguishing features that could be used to identify us. In other words, they believed that passing isn’t just about what we look like – it also comes down to how much other people know.

I’ve received hundreds of thousands of comments on my videos since 2008, and I’ve heard from people who always thought I was a cis woman until they learned otherwise. And yet, to this day, I also get commenters saying I still look like a man. They’re looking at the same person, but their perceptions couldn’t be more different.

This is a real phenomenon, and there are numerous studies showing that our impression of someone’s appearance is based on more than just their appearance. These judgments are influenced by what we know about a person, the stereotypes we hold, and biases against people outside of our social groups.

Attractiveness and assumed personality traits

Passing is about appearances, but what we believe about someone’s personality can influence how we see them. In a 2014 study, people were asked to rate the attractiveness of a series of faces. Two weeks later, the same participants were asked to rate the same set of faces – but this time, one group was also shown words for positive personality traits, and another group was shown negative personality traits. Faces accompanied by positive personality traits were rated more attractive on the second pass, while faces accompanied by negative traits were rated as less attractive.

Another study offered data on judgments of attractiveness and attitudes toward trans people. Participants were shown several composite images representing trans people, and were asked to provide their opinion on various character traits of these hypothetical people, one of which was attractiveness. The participants who scored higher on a measure of transphobic prejudice rated the images as much less attractive.

False alarms: Bias and over-exclusion

Passing can feel like being under a microscope, and there’s a reason for this: prejudice can change the way that people are scrutinized and categorized. A study in 1975 asked participants to classify people’s photographs as Jewish or as Gentiles, and found that subjects who ranked higher on a measure of anti-Semitism classified more photographs as Jewish. The authors state:

“…it appears that anti-Semites do achieve higher accuracy scores than unprejudiced subjects at the cost of a higher false alarm rate.”

In other words, people with higher levels of bias tended to err on the side of incorrectly excluding people like themselves, rather than risk including outsiders in their own group.

Another study on categorization by race asked participants to classify photographs of black people and white people. It was found that subjects with higher levels of racial prejudice spent a longer time looking at ambiguous photos than they did at photos that were clearly black or white.

Imagination and gender perception

Our perception of gender can be especially malleable. Recent studies on adaptation in perception asked subjects to imagine a woman’s or man’s face, then showed them a set of androgynous faces. After imagining a woman’s face, people tended to evaluate these faces as more feminine; after imagining a man’s face, they tended to rate them as less feminine. They were looking at the same faces, but they perceived the gendered features of these faces differently.

Ignoring and misperceiving: Appearance and genital knowledge

People can even ignore what’s right in front of them based on their interpretation of someone’s gender. A study in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach used overlays of gendered features to create drawn figures with a blend of different traits: long or short hair, wide or narrow hips, breasts or a flat chest, body hair or no body hair, and a penis or a vagina. All of them had a gender-neutral face. People were then shown these figures and asked to assign them a gender.

When they believed a figure had a vagina, they would often interpret the gender-neutral face as “feminine” and even decide that a shorter hair length was feminine. Conversely, when they thought a figure had a penis, they saw the face as “masculine” and often decided that longer hair was a “‘reasonable’ male hair length”. They would even believe that wider hips were narrow. When people will so rapidly shift their standards of feminine and masculine appearance based entirely on assumptions about genitals, how can they accurately judge a trans person’s appearance? Really, does this dick make my hair look shorter?

Gender-stereotyped body size perception

Even the straightforward perception of height can be distorted by gender stereotypes. A 1974 study examined parents’ perceptions of their newborns, and found that daughters were more often described as “little”, while sons were more likely to be described as “big”. But the difference in the average weight of each group was fewer than five ounces, and their body length differed by less than half an inch.

This distortion continues into adulthood. A study in 1990 asked subjects to estimate the heights of women and men in photographs. Every photo of a woman was matched to a photo of a man of equal height, so that each group of pictures had the same average height. Yet the women were still estimated to be several inches shorter than the men – even when subjects were specifically told that the women and men had the same height, and that they shouldn’t use gender as a basis for their estimations.

Passing: A rigged game

Not all trans people aim to pass as cis people – and we certainly shouldn’t be expected to. But no matter how we choose to present ourselves, there can be a substantial gap between how we appear, and how we’re perceived. People aren’t helpless to change how they see us, and we already know what influences that. So stop stereotyping men and women. Stop thinking that trans women are actually men. Stop fixating on our genitals. And please, stop staring at us. It’s not your job to decide whether we look the way you think we should – we’re not here to be pretty for you. And if you expect us to put that much work into passing, you can start by doing your share.

I’m Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.

References

• Blascovich, J., Wyer, N. A., Swart, L. A., & Kibler, J. L. (1997). Racism and racial categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(6), 1364-1372.
• Bolin, A. (1988). In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• D’Ascenzo, S., Tommasi, L., & Laeng, B. (2014). Imagining sex and adapting to it: Different aftereffects after perceiving versus imagining faces. Vision Research, 96, 45-52.
• DeBruine, L. M., Welling, L. L. M., Jones, B. C., & Little, A. C. (2010). Opposite effects of visual versus imagined presentation of faces on subsequent sex perception. Visual Cognition, 18(6), 816-828.
• Gerhardstein, K. R., & Anderson, V. N. (2010). There’s more than meets the eye: Facial appearance and evaluations of transsexual people. Sex Roles, 62(5-6), 361-373.
• Kessler, S. J., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
• Nelson, T. E., Biernat, M. R., & Manis, M. (1990). Everyday base rates (sex stereotypes): Potent and resilient. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(4), 664-675.
• Quanty, M. B., Keats, J. A., & Harkins, S. G. (1975). Prejudice and criteria for identification of ethnic photographs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(3), 449-454.
• Rubin, J. Z., Provenzano, F. J., & Luria, Z. (1974). The eye of the beholder: Parents’ views on sex of newborns. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 44(4), 512-519.
• Zhang, Y., Kong, F., Zhong, Y., & Kou, H. (2014). Personality manipulations: Do they modulate facial attractiveness ratings? Personality and Individual Differences, 70, 80-84.

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Remarks as prepared for Social Justice Calgary 2015:

Hi, I’m Zinnia Jones. I’ve been publishing my work on YouTube and on Freethought Blogs for several years now, covering secular and LGBT topics. I’m very honored that the University of Calgary Freethinkers have invited me here.

Most recently my focus has been on transgender issues. I’ve been transitioning for a couple years, and I’ve covered this topic like I would pretty much any other aspect of my life — telling the internet everything I think about it. I’ve also done a lot of research on it, because it seemed like no one else could really tell me all the things I wanted to know about going through this. So that’s a gap I’ve felt I should try to fill by sharing what I’ve learned with a wider audience.

My talk today is essentially about that. It’s about basic awareness of trans-related things, and specifically the positive or negative effects this can have on trans people’s self-understanding and self-realization: the process of coming to know that they’re trans. It’s my belief that by studying and targeting the factors involved in this, we can help facilitate trans people’s personal development on both an individual and societal scale — or, to put it simply, spawn more trans.

The only one?

When reading through trans people’s descriptions of their early sense of their gender, there’s a very common theme: they often think that they are the only person in the world who feels this way.

One woman stated, as she began high school: “At that time, I still thought that I was alone in the world.” Another person said: “I guess back then I felt a freak because there was no-one I knew who was like me.”

And it keeps going like that:

“When I was much younger I felt like the only one in the world.” (Bolin, 1988)

“Until I found out there were others, I knew I was alone.” (Bolin, 1988)

“I thought I was the only one in the world that was going through this. I didn’t know about hormones yet. I didn’t know what SRS was — sex reassignment surgery. I didn’t know what the procedure was.” (Kuklin, 2014)

Some of these quotes are from people who grew up in the ‘60s or ‘70s; some are from later. That last one is from a teenager who was interviewed last year. This is an ongoing issue.

Now, are they the only ones in the world? Far from it. Estimates of prevalence from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have stated that trans women are 1 in 30,000 and trans men are 1 in 100,000, which would imply there are only about several thousand of us in the United States.

But more recent research has shown that this is off by a couple orders of magnitude: a study in 2011 estimated that there are about 700,000 trans adults in the US. That’s about the same size as the population of Winnipeg or Seattle. Extrapolating this figure to the global population, there are about 16 million of us — almost half the size of Canada.

Finding the words

So what’s going on here? When there are 16 million trans people around the world, what’s making people think that they’re the only one who feels this way? In large part, there’s just not enough cultural awareness that being trans is a thing. People haven’t learned that their experiences are not an isolated anomaly, but rather an instance of a very widespread phenomenon.

Trans people have often said that they didn’t know there were even words for this. They’ve said:

“I didn’t know of ‘trans’ as a word or definition.”

“I didn’t know that I was transgendered or transsexual at an early age because I had never come across those terms.”

When people don’t know of any conceptual structure to fit their experiences into, their feelings can often just seem vague and confusing until they find a way to make sense of this. And the gap in time here between becoming aware of these feelings and putting a name to them has actually been measured. A survey of trans people in 2010 found that they became aware of their own gender variance in some sense at an average of 8 years old. However, it took until they were 15 years old before they actually learned words like “transgender” or “transsexual”. Another study of trans youth aged 15 to 21 reported that they knew they had some kind of gender discordance at an average of 10 years old, but it took them until age 14 to realize that the term “transgender” applied to them.

Historical challenges to self-recognition

This is a gap of years between knowing there’s something different about their gender, and knowing that there’s a word for it. It takes people time to stumble upon this and realize it fits them. So what are some of the moments that spark this realization? Some trans people have cited media coverage of Christine Jorgensen in the ‘50s or Renée Richards in the ‘70s. Others were first exposed to the concept via literature from trans organizations or images of trans people in adult magazines.

What’s interesting is that the age at which trans people learn of the idea has been decreasing. People who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s heard these terms at an average age of about 20, but this later decreased to an average of 14 years old.

So what influenced this? Decades ago, access to transitioning through the medical system was extremely restricted. At one point, hospitals turned away thousands of people who applied for surgery, and accepted only a handful (Meyerowitz, 2002). Doctors would often treat only those trans women who looked the most conventionally feminine — and since those women hadn’t yet been allowed to access these treatments, this made it something of a catch-22. They were expected to be heterosexual and to have a lifelong history of exaggeratedly feminine behaviors, to the point of being almost offensively stereotypical.

Those who were allowed to transition were told to keep their history a secret for the rest of their lives. They often had to quit their jobs and move to a place where nobody knew them (Bolin, 1988), and they were taught to come up with false pasts to serve as substitute life stories (Kessler & McKenna, 1978). So for decades, there were fewer of us who were able to transition, and fewer of us who could be open about it. It’s taken the medical community a disappointingly long time to realize that not all of us take on stereotypical gender expressions and gender roles, and many of us aren’t okay with just giving up the lives we’ve made for ourselves.

Modern-day possibilities for discovery

Another factor that started to open things up for us was increasingly widespread internet access. This gave people the opportunity to set up their own online resources and connect with others who have similar interests. For us, this held a lot of advantages over older forms of media and private in-person support groups. There may be millions of us out there, but we’ll still pretty sparsely scattered, and there might be only a handful of us in some smaller towns.

Openly considering transition comes with considerable social risks, as does being out, and this can keep us apart from one another. But online, we can reach out to people around the world, without the dangers of having to reveal our names, identities, or locations. We can search for information and explore various topics without having to commit ourselves to a certain label or identity.

Crucially, we don’t have to wait for it to come to us. We’re no longer waiting for news coverage of maybe one or two trans media stars a decade, or looking around libraries for obscure and inaccessible trans literature. Now it’s available in our homes whenever we happen to get curious about it. If you were in the middle of nowhere 40 years ago, you might not have any idea of where to go for help with this. Now you can post questions on a certain section of Reddit and get answers from other trans people in a matter of hours. That’s how far we’ve come.

From sensational to personal

The few trans people who were able to go public in previous decades typically represented a narrow cross-section of transness: they were the ones who were able to meet the restrictive standards of the time and successfully navigate that system. So, in turn, that was the only concept of transness that was widely represented.

The perpetuation of these standards in the public consciousness could be a significant barrier to trans people’s self-recognition. Sure, more people were aware that transitioning was possible — but after they learned the words for it, they could be misled into thinking this didn’t apply to them. Suppose they weren’t straight or extremely feminine from a young age, or maybe they didn’t feel that the “trapped in the wrong body” cliché applied to them. Those experiences weren’t reflected by the predominant media image, so they might end up unnecessarily doubting their own transness and putting off transitioning.

So what can address this issue? What raises awareness of being trans, without presenting only very limited ways of being trans? It’s not a hard problem, it just wasn’t possible before. Nowadays, more and more trans people are able to be out and open about their very different experiences — trans people who are queer, androgynous, or nonbinary. Our representation isn’t limited to homogeneous, distant celebrities who may or may not relatable. Now everyone can see that trans people are just everyday people like anyone else, and they’re all around us.

Rapid transgender population growth

In recent years, there’s also been an interesting demographic shift in the population of trans people: it appears to be growing more rapidly than you’d expect. Over the past four years, the number of trans youth referred for treatment in the UK has increased fivefold. And a 2011 report found that the number of trans people in the UK seeking treatment is on track to double every six and a half years.

So does this mean that the proportion of the population that’s trans is actually growing? Has something suddenly caused the prevalence of transness to spike drastically in recent years? That’s not actually necessary in order to explain these statistics. Keep in mind that they’re only counting the trans people who can be counted. So the actual number of trans people doesn’t need to be going up — just the number of trans people who are aware that they’re trans. We know that people can be trans and not know it until something activates that awareness; nowadays, people have more of an opportunity to learn about this than ever.

A 2002 study shows the effect of the internet on trans people’s self-awareness: out of 19 trans men, 15 of them said the internet helped them come out to themselves or others, and it was tied in first place with books, ahead of TV, movies, or newspapers. 14 said online groups and mailing lists facilitated their identification as trans.

And a 2009 report from the UK suggests that there is a “large reservoir” of trans people from which relatively few have emerged to seek treatment. They state that some of the reasons this number is growing are “the dissemination of information via the internet”, a “buddy effect”, and online discussion groups that help trans people connect with each other.

At the edge of realization

I’ve experienced this firsthand from both sides of the process. When I was a teenager, I didn’t really think about why I was uncomfortable with growing body hair or my voice dropping — I just thought it was something I had to deal with. But once I grew up, I found some trans IRC channels that I spent a lot of time in, and knowing dozens of trans people made the idea of it a completely normal thing to me. When I started thinking about transitioning, there were people I could ask about the protocols for therapy and the effects of hormones. All of this made it so much easier to reach a point where I could know who I was and what I needed to do.

And after I went public about transitioning, I eventually realized that this was actually having an impact on others. I had a decently sized platform when I began, in terms of my presence on YouTube and other networks, and this meant everything I posted about being trans was reaching thousands of people. And some of those people were trans and didn’t know it yet — until they watched my videos. I know this because they told me this. I’ve gotten dozens of messages from people who’ve told me that what I said helped them come to that realization.

On my blog, the most-read post I’ve ever written is about the somewhat less obvious signs of gender dysphoria — certain kinds of discomfort that don’t always seem related to gender but may improve when you start transitioning. I still get search traffic every day from people who are looking for symptoms of gender dysphoria, or how to know if they’re trans. I’m not special here — in an absolute sense, I’m pretty much nobody. The thousands of people who find my work are just a very small fraction; imagine how many more must be out there searching for an answer.

Every day, I’m looking into that gap in time as people move from feeling to knowing. And if this process can be inhibited, then it can be accelerated. We can do that — I’ve seen it happening. When we talk about our own experiences with gender, we can help some people get closer to being able to do the same. We aren’t limited to a few potential role models or rare opportunities for realization anymore. We’re a sprawling network that’s paying it forward every day, in a world where any of us can be the beacon that finally guides someone home.

References

• American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text rev.). Washington, DC: Author.
• Bolin, A. (1988). In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• City of Seattle, Department of Planning and Development. (2015, February). About Seattle – Population.
• Fisk, N. M. (1974). Editorial: Gender dysphoria syndrome–the conceptualization that liberalizes indications for total gender reorientation and implies a broadly based multi-dimensional rehabilitative regimen. The Western Journal of Medicine, 120(5), 386-391.
• Gagné, P., Tewksbury, R., & McGaughey, D. (1997). Coming out and crossing over: Identity formation and proclamation in a transgender community. Gender & Society, 11(4), 478-508.
• Gates, G. J. (2011). How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender? Los Angeles, CA: The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.
• Gender Identity Research and Education Society (2011). The number of gender variant people in the UK – Update 2011. GIRES: Surrey.
• Grossman, A. H., & D’Augelli, A. R. (2006). Transgender youth: Invisible and vulnerable. Journal of Homosexuality, 51(1), 111-128.
• Harvey, D., & Smedley, L. (2015, February 5). Referrals for young transgender people increase. BBC Newsbeat.
• Kennedy, N., & Hellen, M. (2010). Transgender children: More than a theoretical challenge. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 7(2), 25-43.
• Kessler, S. J., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
• Kuklin, S. (2014). Beyond magenta: Transgender teens speak out. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
• Meyerowitz, J. J. (2002). How sex changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Reed, B., Rhodes, S., Schofield, P., & Wylie, K. (2009). Gender variance in the UK: Prevalence, incidence, growth and geographic distribution. Gender Identity Research and Education Society: Surrey.
• Ringo, P. (2002). Media roles in female-to-male transsexual and transgender identity formation. International Journal of Transgenderism, 6(3).
• Statistics Canada. (2014). Population by year, by province and territory (number) [Data file].
• Stoller, R. J. (1971). Transsexualism and transvestism. Psychiatric Annals, 1(4), 60-69.

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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. The term “passing” is typically used to describe whether or not a trans person is perceived as noticeably trans. For a trans woman, to “pass” is to be seen as a cis woman in everyday life, and vice versa for trans men. Most people tend to assume that passing is or should be a goal for every trans person, and it’s easy to see why. Some of us do find it necessary to look like cis people of our gender, because that’s what it takes to relieve our dysphoria. In other cases, the changes that we need in order to feel comfortable just happen to push us more in the direction of passing. And when people don’t know we’re trans, it can eliminate some of the insecurities that can arise when people do know, like wondering if they really see us as our gender or they’re just humoring us.

More than that, being visibly trans in public can be dangerous. In a study of over 6,000 trans people in the United States, those who were seen as “visually non-conforming” were more likely to be harassed in retail stores, hotels and restaurants, and they were more likely to be attacked when using public accommodations such as restrooms. Practically all of us have faced the fear or the terrifying reality of being heckled by strangers just because of what we look like. Passing isn’t just about aiming to reduce our own dysphoria – it’s also about keeping ourselves safe from everyone else.

“Men in dresses”: Cultural pressures in passing

All trans people should have the choice to express their gender in the way that’s most comfortable for them, but there are many such pressures that limit our choices, and passing can have more to do with cis people’s comfort than our own. Pediatric endocrinologist Norman Spack pioneered the usage of puberty blocking drugs for trans teenagers in the US, allowing them to experience a puberty that’s appropriate for their gender. This can be a lifesaving treatment for trans kids, and it can help reduce their need for future procedures to remove unwanted masculine or feminine features. Yet in a 2013 TEDx talk, Dr. Spack used one of his patients as an example of how his treatment can make trans people physically nonthreatening to others in restrooms:

“There was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms, and it looked like the bill was going to pass, and that would have been a problem, but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said, ‘I can do this. If they see me, they’ll understand why I’m no threat in the lady’s room, but I can be threatened in the men’s room.’ And then they finally got it.”

A trans person obviously doesn’t become more or less of an actual threat to anyone based on how masculine or feminine they look. But when this treatment is advertised as a way to give us a body that cis people are more comfortable around, that’s just legitimizing their restroom-related fears and working within them. It leaves that particular prejudice completely unchallenged.

This isn’t the only instance where cis people have unwittingly revealed how much they’ve internalized media stereotypes while trying to express support for trans children. In the 2012 book Far from the Tree, one mother said:

“She won’t have testosterone ravaging her body. … So she’ll never get an Adam’s apple or facial hair. She’ll never look like a man in a dress.”

That particular phrase, “a man in a dress”, seems to turn up over and over:

“I don’t know that she would have survived male puberty. You know, how’s she going to prove to someone that she is a girl? At best, you know, she would have been shaving every day and been the man in a dress, and that might be great for some people, but it certainly wasn’t who she is.”

“They were making a transition in their 40s, 30s-plus… And especially in the case of the male to females, they weren’t looking particularly female. … If people said ‘man in a skirt’, a lot of them would have conformed to that…”

Now, are we really supposed to believe that women who transition after puberty all look like “men in dresses”? How much of this comes from an actual understanding of what it’s like to be trans – and how much of it comes from cis people who’ve watched Mrs. Doubtfire and Drag Race too many times?

Physical and financial constraints

Even if we do want to look just like cis people, there are so many factors that can make this difficult or impossible. For instance, an early treatment protocol isn’t even available to most trans people: puberty blockers for trans youth were only introduced in the late 1990s in the Netherlands, in the mid-2000s in the US, and in 2011 in England. There are still only a handful of dedicated gender clinics for children in the US, and these treatments often aren’t covered by insurance companies, assuming that a child’s parents are even willing to help them transition. And this is a moot point for many of us, since not everyone is aware that they’re trans from an early age – far from it. A 2009 study in the UK reported that the median age of trans people first seeking treatment was 42 and rising.

In adulthood, there’s only so much that transitioning can do for us in terms of appearance. As a group, we display the same wide range of physical masculinity and femininity as cis people, and as many trans people say: your mileage may vary. It’s important to remember that gender dysphoria can happen to anyone. This may seem obvious, but not everyone who transitions is going to end up looking like Laverne Cox or Andreja Pejic. There are still limits to what modern medicine can do, and there are aspects of the skeletal structure that can’t be changed after puberty, such as height, shoulder width, hip size, hands and feet. When so much of this comes down to biological chance, it’s simply unrealistic to expect that every single one of us will be indistinguishable from a cis person of our gender.

As for what is possible, surgical aspects of transitioning can cost tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, and are rarely covered by healthcare plans. Facial feminization surgery for trans women consists of a number of different procedures, and can easily add up to anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000. Chest surgery for trans men can cost $8,000 or more, and vaginoplasty for trans women can cost $10,000 to $20,000. Given that 14% of trans people are unemployed, 44% are underemployed, and 15% had a household income of less than $10,000 a year, these procedures can often be totally out of our reach. When’s the last time you had $40,000 just sitting around for facial surgery?

The social cost of passing

Putting aside the practical aspects of passing, consider what it means when this is treated as something we should all aspire to. I don’t want to shock anyone here, but maybe – just maybe – being expected to be completely invisible isn’t always good for us. That attitude has wide-ranging implications for our personal comfort as well as our place in society. For instance, look at how dramatically the stakes of passing were portrayed in a recent article in The Atlantic about voice training for trans women:

“If she slips up, the $100,000 she has spent to shed every trace of masculinity will count for nothing.”

I’ve heard from so many people who were worried it was “too late” for them to transition, because they felt that at their age, they would never be able to pass. Some of these people were in their 30s or 40s. Some of them were teenagers. But all of them were under the impression that there was no point to transitioning if they didn’t end up looking just like a cis person of their gender. They didn’t take into account every other possible benefit of transitioning, like how much this can relieve our dysphoria and improve our mental well-being and physical appearance regardless of whether we pass or not. But when this is treated as all-or-nothing, so many people will feel like their only choice is nothing, when they could have had so much more. It’s never too late for that.

The exclusive focus on passing is not new – historically, this attitude has wrapped our lives in a shroud of secrecy and isolation. In the 1988 book In Search of Eve, many trans women stated that living as a woman required an almost total separation from anyone who knew them before they transitioned. For some of them, this meant avoiding family, giving up friends, quitting their jobs, concealing their history of work experience, and starting fresh at entry-level positions in other fields. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach by Kessler and McKenna describes how trans people in the 1970s would construct entirely new biographies all the way back to their childhoods, just to conceal the fact that they hadn’t always lived as a woman or a man. For these people, passing meant having to abandon some of the most important parts of their lives.

This pervasive concern over passing also serves to keep trans people separated from one another. In Search of Eve cites a common belief that going out in groups with other trans people makes us less likely to pass, and that passing is therefore much easier for individual trans people. And a 2014 study of 536 trans people found that a fear of being outed by association was one of four major barriers to their friendships with other trans people.

The social distancing due to anxiety over passing extends further than our circles of friends. In Search of Eve reports that some trans people were opposed to any news coverage about what it’s like to be trans. They felt that this would inform a wider audience about certain physical features that are common among trans women and trans men, making it more difficult for them to pass. Some even believed that trans people who did come out, like Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards, “were indirectly threatening others’ ability to pass by sensitizing the audience”.

Working past passing

This openness and widespread awareness may actually serve a useful purpose. Polls have consistently shown that personal familiarity with gay people is linked to greater support for gay rights. But while 65% of Americans report having a close friend or family member who’s gay, only 9% have a close friend or family member who’s trans. A 2012 study found that exposure to a lecture on transgender topics, as well as a speaker panel of trans people, was associated with a significant reduction in transphobic attitudes.

Clearly, outness has its benefits, both for us and for the rest of society. Passing demands invisibility, but how can we advocate for ourselves if we’re never supposed to be seen? How can any of us share our experiences or serve as role models for people who are thinking about transitioning, if we can’t even say what we are? How could I even do this show if I were trying to pass?

At its core, the very idea of passing contains an incredibly toxic suggestion. When “passing as a woman” actually means “passing as a cis woman”, it implies that people won’t really see you as a woman if they know you’re a trans woman. But why does that have to be the case? If someone knows you’re trans, why should that keep them from recognizing your gender? There’s no reason why this should be impossible. Countless cis people are entirely capable of recognizing our genders even when we’re out about being trans. I’ve come out to four doctors since 2012, and three of them still asked me about my periods. I’m pretty sure they don’t think I’m a guy.

But the glorification of passing completely rejects this reality. It rejects openness. It rejects community. And worst of all, it rejects hope. When passing teaches trans women that if they can’t look like cis women, they’re really just men, it’s pushing them away from being themselves. It’s closing off a world of possibilities for them. It’s telling them to throw away their dreams.

Passing is a very personal concern, and the way we present ourselves is a decision for each of us to make, based on our own needs and goals. Everyone will have their own answer, but the question must still be asked: Is silence always worth it?

I’m Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.

References

• Bolin, A. (1988). In search of Eve: Transsexual rites of passage. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• Cole, E. (Producer). (2012, July 9). Dateline [Television broadcast]. New York, NY: National Broadcasting Company.
• Galupo, M. P., Bauerband, L. A., Gonzalez, K. A., Hagen, D. B., Hether, S. D., & Krum, T. E. (2014). Transgender friendship experiences: Benefits and barriers of friendships across gender identity and sexual orientation. Feminism & Psychology, 24(2), 193-215.
• Kessler, S. J., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
• Reed, B., Rhodes, S., Schofield, P., & Wylie, K. (2009). Gender variance in the UK: Prevalence, incidence, growth and geographic distribution. Gender Identity Research and Education Society: Surrey.
• Solomon, A. (2012). Far from the tree: Parents, children, and the search for identity. New York, NY: Scribner.
• Subkoviak, P., & Scudieri, T. (2012). Transgender Chicago: The new health frontier [PDF document]. Retrieved from http://las.depaul.edu/mph/docs/HDSJ_2012/SubkoviakandScudieri.pdf
• Walch, S. E., Sinkkanen, K. A., Swain, E. M., Francisco, J., Breaux, C. A., & Sjoberg, M. D. (2012). Using intergroup contact theory to reduce stigma against transgender individuals: Impact of a transgender speaker panel presentation. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42(10), 2583-2605.

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