Leftytgirl is absolutely on point with her critique of the no-win situation trans women are placed in by the demand for “disclosure” on their part:
So we see that what’s happening in these situations: there is an unresolved tension between the imagination of a cissexist society that heterosexual, cis men are only attracted to cis women, and the real-world fact that heterosexual, cis male sexual attraction to trans women is far from an uncommon phenomenon. Given that this larger cissexist imagination often emerges from voices with greater power in society, that tension tends to be resolved by assuming that such attraction never happens, and that even if it does, it is the just the result of some “deceptive tr*nny,” who probably deserves whatever violent “retribution” she receives— even in the case that this violence was never retributive in the first place.
Now, this isn’t to say that there are not instances in which a cis man does discover a woman’s trans status “in the moment,” then reacts in a violent manner. But this is to say, first of all, that the “disclosure” myth hands this man respect and power that he does not deserve, in the form of a ready-made, socially palatable alibi for violence against a woman with whom he willingly decided to engage in sexual relations. And secondly, given that this hypothetical cis man is indeed attracted to a trans woman, we cannot allow ourselves to buy into the cissexist imagination that she has somehow “disrespected” him merely by accepting or encouraging his very real sexual desires.
The fact is that regardless of what this man likes to imagine about himself, or what any of us might be inclined to tell ourselves, he is indeed attracted to a trans woman. That is an undeniable fact, and there’s no manner of obsessing, or fidgeting over it, and certainly no amount of blood splattered across the wall that is going to change that. So from the point that the man realizes that he is in fact attracted to a trans woman, he has two choices: get up and leave the room if he so desires, or else get the fuck over it.
By legitimizing the idea that violence is an acceptable response to finding out that someone is trans – whether before, during or after any physical contact, even while you’re sexually assaulting them, and even if you already knew well ahead of time that they were trans – and then accusing trans people of “deception” if they don’t offer this information, society has taken all of the responsibility for cis people’s brutal, prejudiced, plainly unacceptable reactions to trans people, and shifted it to trans people themselves.
We’re to blame for their attraction to us. We’re to blame for our existence ensuring that they can no longer rightfully believe that all the women they’re attracted to aren’t trans. We’re to blame for their discomfort at the disconnect between what they believe their desires to be, and what those desires actually are. We’re to blame for the violence they inflict on us when they come face-to-face with their own internal dissonance. And even if they’re only faced with this realization after the fact, we’re still to blame for the supposed “trauma” they might somehow suffer from the oh-so-terrible discovery that one of their past partners was trans.
We’re to blame for the actions of people who can become so “panicked” at someone’s mere existence that their first reaction is to harass, beat or kill that person. And we’re to blame for hurting their fragile feelings when we upend an assumption they shouldn’t have held in the first place – an assumption which their own actions directly contradict.
Think about whose problem this really is. Don’t make it ours.
Leftytgirl is absolutely on point with her critique of the no-win situation trans women are placed in by the demand for “disclosure” on their part:
So we see that what’s happening in these situations: there is an unresolved tension between the imagination of a cissexist society that heterosexual, cis men are only attracted to cis women, and the real-world fact that heterosexual, cis male sexual attraction to trans women is far from an uncommon phenomenon. Given that this larger cissexist imagination often emerges from voices with greater power in society, that tension tends to be resolved by assuming that such attraction never happens, and that even if it does, it is the just the result of some “deceptive tr*nny,” who probably deserves whatever violent “retribution” she receives— even in the case that this violence was never retributive in the first place.
Now, this isn’t to say that there are not instances in which a cis man does discover a woman’s trans status “in the moment,” then reacts in a violent manner. But this is to say, first of all, that the “disclosure” myth hands this man respect and power that he does not deserve, in the form of a ready-made, socially palatable alibi for violence against a woman with whom he willingly decided to engage in sexual relations. And secondly, given that this hypothetical cis man is indeed attracted to a trans woman, we cannot allow ourselves to buy into the cissexist imagination that she has somehow “disrespected” him merely by accepting or encouraging his very real sexual desires.
The fact is that regardless of what this man likes to imagine about himself, or what any of us might be inclined to tell ourselves, he is indeed attracted to a trans woman. That is an undeniable fact, and there’s no manner of obsessing, or fidgeting over it, and certainly no amount of blood splattered across the wall that is going to change that. So from the point that the man realizes that he is in fact attracted to a trans woman, he has two choices: get up and leave the room if he so desires, or else get the fuck over it.
By legitimizing the idea that violence is an acceptable response to finding out that someone is trans – whether before, during or after any physical contact, even while you’re sexually assaulting them, and even if you already knew well ahead of time that they were trans – and then accusing trans people of “deception” if they don’t offer this information, society has taken all of the responsibility for cis people’s brutal, prejudiced, plainly unacceptable reactions to trans people, and shifted it to trans people themselves.
We’re to blame for their attraction to us. We’re to blame for our existence ensuring that they can no longer rightfully believe that all the women they’re attracted to aren’t trans. We’re to blame for their discomfort at the disconnect between what they believe their desires to be, and what those desires actually are. We’re to blame for the violence they inflict on us when they come face-to-face with their own internal dissonance. And even if they’re only faced with this realization after the fact, we’re still to blame for the supposed “trauma” they might somehow suffer from the oh-so-terrible discovery that one of their past partners was trans.
We’re to blame for the actions of people who can become so “panicked” at someone’s mere existence that their first reaction is to harass, beat or kill that person. And we’re to blame for hurting their fragile feelings when we upend an assumption they shouldn’t have held in the first place – an assumption which their own actions directly contradict.
Think about whose problem this really is. Don’t make it ours.
My partner and I have recently been reading The Lightning Thief with our 9-year-old son. One of the recurring ideas is that “names have power”, which is usually meant as “don’t say someone’s name or they’ll get pissed off”. While it initially seemed absurd that Greek gods and other creatures would somehow be okay with people talking about them as long as no one uses their actual names, it’s more likely that this is just a literary device to allow these newly renamed figures to be included as characters in their own right without triggering too many of the cultural associations that have become attached to their usual names.
But in looking into what “names have power” might mean, I found that this was actually a somewhat common idea. One person cited the Genesis myth of Adam naming every animal as an example of the act of naming symbolizing one’s power over the thing being named. This is just a specific instance of a more general kind of power: there was already an imbalance, because animals typically lack the ability to assign or comprehend names in the same way as humans. While the actual act of naming is an expression of this power, it’s not central to it. It’s a symptom, but not a cause.
Elsewhere, the American Druid Isaac Bonewits listed the “Law of Names” as one of many “Laws of Magic”. As he explained it:
Knowing the complete and true name of an object, being, or process gives one complete control over it. …knowing the complete and true name of something or someone means that you have achieved a complete understanding of its or their nature.
Ironically, this appears to disregard the common understanding of the name “name” as a convenient label for something, instead using the term to refer to an extended and comprehensive description. While fully grasping the functioning of a given entity might enable someone to exert control over it in certain ways, merely knowing its name – as most people use the word – is only a starting point.
But even as nothing more than convenient labels, names do have a variety of “powers”. The reason they have power is that identities have power, and the use of names provides a way to create, access, alter, merge, separate and destroy identities. This applies not only to people, but also to events, concepts, and movements.
For instance, a name can serve to integrate multiple identities that would otherwise be separate, such as someone’s offline identity and whatever additional identities they may have online. By associating these with the one individual behind all of them, they can be resolved to a single identity and a single name, potentially compromising that person’s privacy or safety. Conversely, omitting any identifying information, or using a very common name like “Anonymous”, can prevent the unwanted unification of one’s identities.
Putting a name to something also allows it to be discussed much more efficiently than if it had no name. Notice the ease of simply being able to say a name like “Elevator-gate” rather than having to rehash the specific nature and timeline of a certain controversy every time you talk about it. A name enables people to begin staking out the precise boundaries of something, defining it as a distinct entity.
For example, “atheism” has an obvious and well-understood definition, but in practice, it often implies a variety of stances beyond the disbelief in gods. “Humanism” and “secular humanism” can describe some of these additional beliefs, but these terms still haven’t always been linked to specific positions on ethics or political issues, and they’re even compatible with certain religious faiths. Because of this, their practical implications are often unclear.
People who identify strongly with atheism and secularism as a movement, but also share particular beliefs pertaining to equality, sexism, racism, women’s rights and LGBT issues, have long recognized that they constitute their own movement of sorts, but the lack of a distinct banner to organize under has sometimes left unclear just who they are and what exactly they stand for. Putting a name to this, like “Atheism Plus”, gives people something to affiliate themselves with and collaborate on to establish what it should mean.
Of course, this particular power of names is not a one-way process. The use of names can clarify and distinguish ideas and movements, but the ways people use and misuse them can also make their meaning much less clear. In the case of feminism, someone might use it to mean gender equality, but others may hear it as meaning an effort to subjugate, castrate or exterminate all men. This occurs because people don’t understand feminism as one distinct concept, and they have many mutually exclusive ideas of what feminism is – ideas which have become so, shall we say, “diverse”, that using the term can often result in these disconnects in communication.
Sometimes, people act as though names have more power than they actually do. They might disavow the labels of “racist” or “homophobe” or “hateful”, and then exhibit precisely the beliefs which are understood to be racist or homophobic or hateful, mistakenly believing that they can somehow alter the substance of their behavior merely by renaming it and attaching the disclaimer of “I’m not a racist”. But in using the name “racist” for something very different from how most of us use it, they’ve already disavowed that common meaning, so their defense that they’re “not a racist” ends up meaning very little. It can only be persuasive to others who commit the same error of thinking that something isn’t racist as long as you say it’s not.
People’s attitudes toward personal names also imbue them with certain powers. Because no one is capable of naming themselves at the time of their birth, their parents or guardians must provide a name for them. That name will be attached to them throughout their upbringing, and even once they reach the age of majority, most people still never change their first name. Because of this, that original name will always occupy a privileged position in their history, and the act of naming a child carries the solemnity of having to choose something that will be fitting and proper for them until death.
Changing your own name means rejecting these norms, and many people aren’t comfortable with that. When we do change our names, some people see these newly chosen names as somehow less authentic than the original name. Because they’re no longer something that we’re tied to for life, people might treat them as simply capricious, with no more significance than a change of hair color or a twenty-something’s ill-considered decision to get a tattoo.
At the same time, a chosen name takes on additional meaning in the case of transgender people. Because names are usually gendered, and gender is seen as one of the most fundamental aspects of our identity, changing your name to that of another gender is a declaration of not only who you are, but what you are. The popular notion of one’s original name being a “real name” can cause serious problems here. If your original name is the “real” one, then any name for yourself other than that will be treated as less real. And when you’ve declared yourself as the gender you now identify as, this use of “real” implies that what you are now is less real than what you used to be.
Considering how prevalent the notion of birth names as “real names” is, it’s not surprising that many people will ask trans people what their “real” names are. But they shouldn’t expect that we’ll be all that eager to tell them. Because of how people treat names, our original names have the power to invalidate who we are in the eyes of others. Rather than just ignorantly seeing us as “really a man” in the generic sense of “man”, knowing our previous names may lead them to see us as “really that one specific man”. It assists them in constructing some imagined identity for us that simply doesn’t exist, as an alternative to the person standing right in front of them. Our present may not erase our past, but our past doesn’t erase our present, either.
We’re proud of our chosen names because they represent who we are, but we can be equally secretive about our original names because they represent who we’re not. Just as our chosen names serve our own purposes, our original names can be used against us. And much like how people are willing to fight over the concepts and movements that a name stands for, they also seem to think that who we are is open to dispute. They might argue that I’m not really Rachel, I’m actually Tom. Not everyone seems to understand that while ideologies are up for debate, individuals are not.
These are the powers of names: to declare your self or deny someone their self, to affiliate or disaffiliate yourself with a movement, to make something into a thing in its own right or make it meaningless. Know them, understand them, and use them appropriately, and the powers of names can be yours.
A judge has ruled that Massachusetts prison officials must provide genital surgery for a transgender inmate, Michelle Kosilek, currently serving life in prison for murder. This is an entirely logical conclusion. Prisoners are entitled to health care, the established standards of care for trans people indicate that genital surgery is appropriate for those who need it, therefore trans prisoners who require genital surgery should have access to it. But this obvious answer has evaded many, like Senator Scott Brown:
“We have many big challenges facing us as a nation, but nowhere among those issues would I include providing sex change surgery to convicted murderers,” Brown said in a statement. “I look forward to common sense prevailing and the ruling being overturned.”
Denying that prisoners should receive any kind of health care quickly becomes untenable – physically preventing a group of people from even attempting to access the medical treatment they require, and simply leaving them to suffer or die, is clearly inhumane. The fact of them having been convicted of murder or other crimes is irrelevant to this; sentencing someone to imprisonment is not equivalent to sentencing them to medical neglect and the consequences thereof.
After denying this first point, those who reject this conclusion move on to denying the next one: that genital surgery and other transsexual treatments are indeed medically necessary. Instead, these are often trivialized as merely cosmetic and not essential to one’s health. This attitude has cropped up elsewhere, such as in the FRC’s contention that trans people detained by ICE should be denied access to their prescribed hormone therapy. The ruling in the Kosilek case explicitly refutes this, finding that surgical treatment is a “serious medical need”. It correctly concludes that the medical needs of trans people are no less crucial, important and valid than the medical needs of everyone else. Would Scott Brown, and others who deny this, pretend that they’re just as qualified as medical experts to decide which treatments someone should receive for cancer, heart disease or any other condition? So why do they think they know better when it comes to transitioning?
Radical feminism is a platform for gender equality which includes, among other things, the belief that most gender is performed. As a radical feminist, I believe that gender roles are artificially created, that most dimorphism is affected rather than mandated by nature, and that the divide has been pushed beyond all reason to the express benefit of men. This is what we call the patriarchy.
One unfortunate aspect of this socialization is that society, through various messages including but not limited to role-modeling from peers and media, teaches young men that they are entitled to the hearts and minds of women, including but again not limited to domestic and sexual servitude. Women, no more fond of subjugation and servitude than men, become unfortunately prone to self-loathing and more fortunately prone to rebellion.
In the process of shaking ourselves loose the shackles of gendered expectations, different schools of feminism have emerged. Varying degrees of oppression are recognized, and socialized roles and appearances are sorted differently into categories of oppressive and benign. Radical feminism, as the name suggests, subscribes to the most severe criteria. Radical feminism is also unfortunately best known by queer communities as transphobic.
The rift between radical feminism and trans activism begins with the application of known oppressive phenomena to the analysis of trans presentation and activism. On the surface, it’s easy to see what their problem is. To the casual observer, trans women assert and express their womanhood physically and visually. They often wear feminine clothes, shave feminine areas, and insist on feminine names and pronouns. Trans men resist feminine obligations, much the way radical feminists do, but then also resist the designation of “woman.” In the eyes of transphobic radical feminists, the former too closely resembles role enforcement while the latter too closely resembles self-loathing.
If trans people and trans activists were at all interested in sending women at large back to the kitchen, entrenching them further into the sex class, or in the case of trans men, eliminating women altogether or otherwise gender-leveling up, the transphobic radical feminists might have a point. Inconveniently for them, this couldn’t be further from the case.
The patriarchy has the same persistent negative impact on trans women as it does cis women. Society tells them that they are more acceptable when they present in a feminine manner and worth less as a person when they fail to please the eye. The rigid physical standards applied to women cause trans women inordinate amounts of stress. The sex classing of women and requisite caste system of the class (more commonly known as varying degrees of fuckability, or even more commonly as a scale from 1 to 10) has inhumanely relegated trans women with a certain remaining organ to the undesirables. They are expected to be content with either fetishization or pity fucking, along with cis women of the overweight and differently abled varieties. This particular problem has recently been the birth of a massive online “cotton ceiling” debate. We’ll get back to that.
Let us first work on the premise that trans women are women and trans men are men. Of course without the validity of their genders decided upon, it’s easy enough for transphobes to make their arguments unchallenged. The most common radical feminist position on trans identities is that a post-patriarchal world would not require men to call themselves women to be feminine. They could just be feminine men; reverse that for trans men.
But this doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Society already does not require masculine women to call themselves men or feminine men to call themselves women. Furthermore, a post-patriarchal world – more specifically a post-gender role world – would necessarily have eliminated almost every trait that divides men from women. Things we think of as masculine or feminine would no longer be associated with men or women and would no longer even be recognizable as masculine or feminine. Masculinity and femininity would lose all meaning.
This is not a utopian fantasy. Many things have already lost masculine and feminine categorization. In my mother’s time, trumpet playing was masculine. In my grandmother’s time, making jokes was masculine. Today, neither of these activities are associated with gender. It is not possible to draw a line in this gender-blending at the physical. Perhaps the imaginations of older-generation feminists who grew up in far more oppressive environments than today’s feminists were unable to think as far ahead as, say, the thick-necked, slender-hipped, flat-chested physiques of the very feminine 2012 Olympic women’s gymnastics team, or the soft skin and round, well-developed breasts of a trans woman on HRT. Nonetheless, here we have it. The lines are being erased with the slow liberation of women and medical advancement.
If the contention of radical feminism is that neither behavior, nor presentation, nor physical appearance should make or break the difference between men and women, why draw the line at the word “man” or “woman?” The very words will become nonsensical and impossible to define. Sure, there will still be some natural hormonal division, but when people can safely, permanently, and completely alter these differences at will, why deny it? When women and men are socialized equally, what will anyone have lost? What will anyone have gained but the right to define themselves, the right for which radical feminists so arduously fight?
Back to the cotton ceiling debate, or really, any debate online between radical feminists and trans activists: Is a childhood of boy-designated socialization sometimes evident in arguments from trans women? Absolutely. To start with, they don’t question themselves, apologize for themselves, or wait for their turn to speak quite as often as cis women are taught to do from birth. Likewise, a childhood of girl-designated socialization is sometimes evident when trans men make arguments. It will be nice when girl-designated socialization and boy-designated socialization include a childhood where respect and assertiveness are taught equally, but though there has been progress, we’re not there yet.
However, there is no reason to make the leap from a sense of the way somebody was socialized as a child to their “true” gender. Like the wage gap, sex classing, and glass ceiling, all of which very much apply to trans people’s identities rather than their designated birth sex, these are simply the costs and benefits of the patriarchy. Like skirts, heels, trucks, and sports, they are no more reflective of the true identity of a trans person than they are a cis person.
For some reason, mainstream news organizations still can’t resist giving a platform to some of the oldest, most worn-out and nonsensical tropes about transgender people. Like this:
In a recent Straight Dope Message Board thread about transsexuality, one commenter offered the following: “People who have gender identity disorders . . . are just dudes dressing up as chicks and/or dudes who have gotten a doctor to mutilate them to have imitation female genitalia (or [the other way around for women], I guess.) . . . GID patients have a mental illness and society should be looking into ways to eradicate that mental illness through some form of treatment that isn’t the equivalent of giving a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he’s Napoleon a bicorn hat and a saber.” Care to comment? — Startled Lurker
Yes, this line of argument is all too familiar to us by now, yet these people seem to think no one has ever thought of it before. To make being trans seem like nothing more than a delusion, they parallel it to identifying as another species, identifying as imaginary animals such as dragons and unicorns, or identifying as another race (apparently multiracial people do not exist and are not allowed to identify as any of their constituent races). To this list of absurd comparisons, we can now add identifying as Napoleon.
This is one of those times when someone just throws a bunch of words together and expects that an actual substantive argument will spontaneously emerge. It’s made to look like it has some kind of meaning, but when you look closer, there’s nothing there. It seems like they think we’ll fail to notice that a solid half of the human population are women, identify as women, go about their lives as women, and no one has a problem with this. Being a woman is not, you know, rare or anything. Saying you’re a woman is not an outlandish claim to make. Expecting to be treated as a woman is not at all unreasonable. And yet they make it sound like this is the same as saying you’re the one Napoleon, as opposed to every other person in history who isn’t Napoleon. That simply doesn’t map to this.
Among the other ways that the Napoleon scenario fails to track with the realities of sex and gender: Fetal humans do not differentiate into Napoleon and not-Napoleon (or white and black and Asian and Latino and so on, or human and dolphin and cat, or dragon and unicorn); they do differentiate into male and female. The hypothetical Napoleon/not-Napoleon differentiation process does not occasionally result in people being born who are part Napoleon and part not-Napoleon (or partially human and partially dolphin or cat or dragon), yet intersex conditions are recognized to exist in humans. Nowhere do we encounter people whose genetic makeup indicates that they are Napoleon (or a dog or unicorn) while their external features make them appear to be not-Napoleon, or vice versa. There are no cultures with established social roles of Napoleon and not-Napoleon (or dragon), let alone additional roles for those who move between these categories, yet a number of cultures recognize three or more genders, encompassing men, women, and others whose birth sex doesn’t align with their identity.
But suppose we did live in a world where a significant portion of the population lived as Napoleon (or cats or dragons) every day, without issue and without facing any resistance from society. If someone decided, you know what, I think I’d feel more comfortable being a Napoleon, what grounds would you have to deny them that? It’s very telling that to some people, gender is so important, so set in stone, so inseparable from one unchangeable aspect of reality, they expect us to believe it’s just as crucial and relevant and undeniable as the distinction between being Napoleon and being everyone else. In practice, it’s not like that at all. There’s more to it than your insipid pet theory that tells you what you want to hear while failing to account for how the world works.
For some reason, mainstream news organizations still can’t resist giving a platform to some of the oldest, most worn-out and nonsensical tropes about transgender people. Like this:
In a recent Straight Dope Message Board thread about transsexuality, one commenter offered the following: “People who have gender identity disorders . . . are just dudes dressing up as chicks and/or dudes who have gotten a doctor to mutilate them to have imitation female genitalia (or [the other way around for women], I guess.) . . . GID patients have a mental illness and society should be looking into ways to eradicate that mental illness through some form of treatment that isn’t the equivalent of giving a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he’s Napoleon a bicorn hat and a saber.” Care to comment? — Startled Lurker
Yes, this line of argument is all too familiar to us by now, yet these people seem to think no one has ever thought of it before. To make being trans seem like nothing more than a delusion, they parallel it to identifying as another species, identifying as imaginary animals such as dragons and unicorns, or identifying as another race (apparently multiracial people do not exist and are not allowed to identify as any of their constituent races). To this list of absurd comparisons, we can now add identifying as Napoleon.
This is one of those times when someone just throws a bunch of words together and expects that an actual substantive argument will spontaneously emerge. It’s made to look like it has some kind of meaning, but when you look closer, there’s nothing there. It seems like they think we’ll fail to notice that a solid half of the human population are women, identify as women, go about their lives as women, and no one has a problem with this. Being a woman is not, you know, rare or anything. Saying you’re a woman is not an outlandish claim to make. Expecting to be treated as a woman is not at all unreasonable. And yet they make it sound like this is the same as saying you’re the one Napoleon, as opposed to every other person in history who isn’t Napoleon. That simply doesn’t map to this.
Among the other ways that the Napoleon scenario fails to track with the realities of sex and gender: Fetal humans do not differentiate into Napoleon and not-Napoleon (or white and black and Asian and Latino and so on, or human and dolphin and cat, or dragon and unicorn); they do differentiate into male and female. The hypothetical Napoleon/not-Napoleon differentiation process does not occasionally result in people being born who are part Napoleon and part not-Napoleon (or partially human and partially dolphin or cat or dragon), yet intersex conditions are recognized to exist in humans. Nowhere do we encounter people whose genetic makeup indicates that they are Napoleon (or a dog or unicorn) while their external features make them appear to be not-Napoleon, or vice versa. There are no cultures with established social roles of Napoleon and not-Napoleon (or dragon), let alone additional roles for those who move between these categories, yet a number of cultures recognize three or more genders, encompassing men, women, and others whose birth sex doesn’t align with their identity.
But suppose we did live in a world where a significant portion of the population lived as Napoleon (or cats or dragons) every day, without issue and without facing any resistance from society. If someone decided, you know what, I think I’d feel more comfortable being a Napoleon, what grounds would you have to deny them that? It’s very telling that to some people, gender is so important, so set in stone, so inseparable from one unchangeable aspect of reality, they expect us to believe it’s just as crucial and relevant and undeniable as the distinction between being Napoleon and being everyone else. In practice, it’s not like that at all. There’s more to it than your insipid pet theory that tells you what you want to hear while failing to account for how the world works.
Heather and I recently had the opportunity to appear on a podcast with Sarah Anne. Topics discussed include being trans, the LGBT agglomeration, and idols we no longer idolize. Enjoy!
During my recent interview on the Godless Business podcast, I was asked whether I was “pre-op” or “post-op” – terms which refer to whether a transgender person has had genital surgery. Since this wasn’t really the focus of our conversation, I just answered the question and moved on. But after we were done, it occurred to me that there’s a lot more to be said about this, such as how relevant the pre-op/post-op distinction actually is in trans people’s lives, what kinds of questions would more accurately reflect our experiences, and when it’s appropriate to ask about these things.
To start with, it’s really important to understand that unless they’ve indicated that they’re willing to talk about this, trans people might not want to answer just any question about being trans. Agreeing to talk about it in the context of an interview is one thing, but in our everyday lives, respect for boundaries is important. Think about it: There’s a difference between “Hi, how are you doing?”, and “Hi, how are your genitals doing?” The latter can be intrusive and presumes a degree of personal familiarity that usually isn’t there.
If you wouldn’t say that to someone who’s not trans, then why would you say it to someone who is? Unless you know them really well and they’re okay with talking about it, don’t just assume that they’ll be fine with this. For a lot of trans people, being trans is something that’s already on their mind a lot, and sometimes, the last thing they want is to talk about it with random people who may not even understand them and are potentially hostile.
Having a body that isn’t fully in step with your identity is a pretty personal thing, and like anyone else, you can’t expect trans people to be completely open about their own private history. Recognize that the usual norms are still in place – about asking people how they have sex, what their genitals look like, the surgeries they’ve had and the medications they’re on – and understand that for trans people, these can be even more sensitive topics. And just because you heard one trans person voluntarily talking about this, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is therefore a subject of casual conversation that’s suitable for all occasions. Treat it as opt-in, not opt-out.
Of course, that only covers people who you already know to be trans. If you don’t know that someone is trans, then you definitely shouldn’t just ask them about it. If they are trans, and they haven’t told anyone, consider that they simply may not want people to know. Confronting them out of nowhere would be disrespectful, if not extremely unnerving.
But aside from the matter of when it’s improper to ask questions, it’s also worth examining what kinds of questions would be more fruitful when the topic is on the table. Whether someone is pre-op or post-op tends to be one of the most common starting points for those who are trying to understand trans people, but it’s far from the most useful. It’s easy to see why this is the first thing that would come to mind: most of the world still regards gender as being defined by genitals, and this is a quick way to eliminate an unknown and determine where trans people fall within that system.
The problem is that this system is incomplete and inaccurate. What’s in someone’s pants is only one small part of who they are as a person. To trans people, this tends to be obvious, but to others, it may not be. Maybe it’s just something you have to experience firsthand: if your body, identity, and presentation are all in sync, you might think your genitals have something to do with the fact that you’re seen by others as your gender and treated appropriately. But for us, it’s clear that whether we’ve had genital surgery isn’t usually relevant in our day-to-day lives.
When body and identity are no longer linked together and restricted to being all-male or all-female, it becomes obvious that genitals don’t always matter all that much. We don’t go around pulling people’s clothes off to tell what gender they are – we use other clues. The way that someone goes about life as their gender usually hinges on features other than their anatomy, so while it may be personally important to some trans people, modifying our anatomy is far from our only means of exerting control over this.
At times, it can be artificially forced into greater prominence in our lives by laws in some areas that prevent us from receiving identity documents that match our gender until we have surgery – a requirement that’s all the more troublesome when such operations are undesired or out of reach. Yes, not all of us seek that kind of surgery. The dichotomy of “pre-op” and “post-op” depicts it as something that either happened already, or hasn’t happened yet. This ignores that for some of us, it may be something that never happens – there is no “yet”. Some people can’t have it for medical reasons. Many just don’t have the means to afford it. And some of us simply don’t want it – we’ve decided that we’re satisfied with what we have.
So, what sort of things are more relevant to our goal of going about life as our preferred gender? Well, you could ask what made us realize that this was something we wanted for ourselves. You could ask us when and how we came out – we each have our own stories, much as with anything else you have to come out about, and this tends to be one of the first steps in the process of transitioning. Another major milestone is presenting full-time as our intended gender, something with much greater significance to our everyday lives than the state of our genitals. You could ask what sorts of interesting things we’ve noticed as a result of having lived in two different genders. You could ask us about what kind of difficulties we’ve faced as a result of transitioning. And you can ask what you can do to support trans people in a meaningful way.
Just as with anyone else, there’s so much more to our lives than surgery. And when we do have the opportunity to learn from each other, it would be a shame to miss out on the full breadth of human experience.
But some people don’t believe these facts compel us to identify and address the underlying causes of such inequalities. Instead, they draw completely different conclusions, and focus on the individual rather than the world LGBT people have to live in. It might take the form of “ex-gays” who lament how their lives used to be an unsatisfying blur of drinking, drugs, porn, loveless relationships and casual sex, until God pulled them out of that “lifestyle”. It might be the friends and family members who, out of genuine or feigned concern, warn us that we’ll be unhappy, unfulfilled, and vulnerable to discrimination and diseases if we’re gay. It might be the social conservatives who declare that “if we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students”. We might even inflict it on ourselves, recoiling in fear from the countless stories of how difficult it can be to go through life as a trans person, and deciding we couldn’t possibly be that.
Everyone who does this makes the same mistake: They fail to realize that none of this changes who we are. These external factors do nothing to alter our internal reality, because facts aren’t something that can be argued away. Just because you got tired of living a shallow life of constant partying, that doesn’t make you any less gay (and such a life has no inherent connection to being gay anyway). The prevalence of discrimination, bullying, suicide, or HIV among LGBT people won’t make you any straighter. And even though I’ll likely have even more difficulty finding a job as a trans person, be at a vastly higher risk of assault, and be viewed by many as neither wholly man nor wholly woman, I am still the woman I am.
Do some people genuinely realize that a former sexual or gender identity didn’t encompass the totality of who they are? It’s certainly possible. I’ve been there before. But those who argue that a miserable life should make us any less queer are simply using an appeal to consequences against the very substance of who we are, and it’s just as fallacious as it is in any other circumstance. While some of them have made the choice to ignore who they are inside and live their lives differently for fear of these consequences, they can’t expect that their concerns will be equally compelling to the rest of us. As real as these unfortunate facts of life may be, so is the reality of who I am: My self is the truth. And like any other truth, it’s something I refuse to deny.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
