Lauren, who is still with us all in spirit, handed me a link to this post about tranny stuff from Oso Raro’s blog.
(No offense to OR, here, who can hardly be expected not to consider all the issues raised by a transgendered person negotiating a queer sexuality in a culture that doesn’t admit either category. Yay thinking! It’s just that the phantom pain in my groin is particularly bad this evening, and it’s making me bitter.)
La Question Trans has been a complicated one for the Ls and Gs in the LGBT universe, as I discovered in conversations following my hosting of a National Coming Out Day event last fall. In the audience were many trans people, including many transmen. After the event, one of these transmen came up to me and started making conversation, flirting actually, with me. I had noticed him before the event, and since I have a sharp eye (see Passing, below, and cruising generally, natch) and am familiar with trans culture from so many years in the Bay Area, where there is a large trans community, I remember thinking at the time it was hard to tell whether he was a “real” man or not (Hips and hands are usually some initial clues, but not always). Of course he let me know he was a transman, and as our conversation proceeded, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is interesting.” He was an attractive man, with a beard that was, quite frankly, nicer than mine, an intelligent post-doc, who was making eye contact, smiling, and touching my arm casually but explicitly. I was bemused (after all, I am a married lady), but also pleased. What girl doesn’t like a little attention, especially from a handsome, intelligent man? At some point, another transman friend of his came up and they started discussing the new politics of the penis in transmen culture, and how they didn’t want or necessarily need a dick to be a man, but rather that they were men who wanted to maintain (i.e. keep) their vaginas. Here is where the Burt Bacharach soundtrack playing in my mind abruptly scratched off the surface of the record. This was certainly, um, new.
I wonder what the transman was thinking.
Something that for me informed these questions was the frisson of being cruised by a transman, I had been attracted to this transman at the lecture, and afterwards was a little freaked out, not necessarily in a bad way, but rather a thinking way. Kissing is fun, petting nice, but when it came down to it, what did it mean to be with a man without a penis? Penises are part of the whole man, and as anyone can tell you, you don’t (if you’re nominally healthy) fall in love with a penis, but with the man attached to the penis (an interesting ordering). But a penis seems, for gay men, as the prelude to a kiss, so to speak. The penis is but one aspect of the masculine infrastructure (body type, voice, facial and body hair, sartorial and manneristic presentation) that we sexualize as well as socialize. In the end, there was no resolution to the conversation that Prancilla, Zilla, and I had, except regardless of what we thought about it, the phenomenon of the gender indeterminacy for those trans folks who choose a non-surgical route was one that challenged us in ways that could be construed as productive, at the very least insofar as they lead us to examine our own lives and desire more closely.
…I fucking hate being a transsexual sometimes.
It’d be nice to not be one big gordian knot of expectation, perception, and desire. It’d be nice not to have to symbolize the bleeding edge of controversy. It’d be nice not to freak anyone out. It’d be nice to hit on some cute person and know–not just hope, but know–that whatever he knows, whatever he sees, whatever he assumes, it won’t matter.
Failing that, it’d be nice to be able to believe that all of those issues will fall neatly to one side or another for at least a few transguys once they figure out how to grow a fully-functioning penis out of the side of a mouse. It’d be nice to believe that it really is just a matter of anatomy. But we all know that’s horseshit, don’t we? Ask a post-op transwoman if there’s any cultural anxiety about her sexual self. It’s not about the body. It’s about the possibility of change. The rule is one gender, one body, one role, no substitutions.
Anyway. He goes on to talk about Transamerica, which I also saw.
It was okay.
It was hard for me to enjoy the movie because of the premise, which was just wrong. Basically, there’s this transwoman named Bree. She’s about to undergo bottom surgery. As the movie opens, she’s collecting letters from her therapist and her physician that okay her for the operation. Then she gets a phone informing her that she (a) has a son who is (b) in jail several states away. Her therapist tells her that she has to go get her son, and resolve this whole thing, or her therapist will not approve her surgery. She has less than a week before her appointment at the surgery center.
First of all, a transwoman in Southern California as desperate for surgery as Bree was would have been able to find a surgeon to perform it. Second, even had said desperate transwoman decided to go the standard route, it’s really unlikely that her therapist would have refused a referral to a transwoman who had transitioned socially and legally, started hormones, and undergone surgery. Third, had her therapist had any doubts about Bree, resolving those doubts would not have involved Bree going on a roadtrip days prior to surgery to track down the son she’s never met. In brief, the care provider writing the referral wants to be satisfied as to the following things:
1) Will the surgery make the patient feel more comfortable in his or her body and in his or her life?
2) Will the patient be able to handle the emotional fallout from surgery?
3) Does the patient have a realistic picture of the results, and a clear understanding of the risks?
Readiness does not involve fixing everything wrong with your life. And if the therapist was seriously worried that Bree was gonna have a post-op meltdown, or that Bree didn’t really want a vagina, the treatment would have involved therapy, not a cross-country scavenger hunt for Bree’s soul. It’s entirely possible, mind, that a transwoman would encounter an evil, abusive, manipulative therapist. That doesn’t mean that Bree had no other options, or that these kinds of marching orders would be good for a transwoman in Bree’s situation.
It was like watching a madcap romantic comedy about a transman’s hilariously ill-starred attempts to get to the post office and retrieve his mail-order penis in time for his wedding.
The storyline, about one transgendered person’s pursuit of both the surgery that will make her a woman and the need to tie up the loose ends of her life as a man (an unknown son makes his appearance at the commencement of the film) has a lot in common with classic American road movies, as Huffman’s character Bree and her son Toby (unbeknownst to him for most of the film), played by Kevin Zegers, travel cross-country to reach LA in time for Bree’s reassignment surgery and her psychologist’s permission, dependent on Bree’s open acknowledgement of her fathering of Toby.
This paragraph sums up every problem I have with structuring the narrative around Bree’s attempt to get The Operation. Surgery doesn’t make you anything but post-op. What if Bree hadn’t wanted SRS (the movie’s conception of transwomen doesn’t even bother with that possibility)? Would Bree never have become a woman? Would Bree have been less of a transsexual? Bree identified as a woman and lived as a woman. Why was she not yet a woman?
The most fraught moment in the film, powerfully portrayed by Huffman and Zegers, is where Bree must tell Toby the truth as Toby makes a sexual move on Bree. Oops! In response, Toby lashes out violently and then disappears.
Yeah. You introduce a tranny in the first act, there’s gotta be a vicious assault by the third.
Bree continues with her surgery, now devoid of the previous joy she associated with the event, in an evocative and coldly filmed montage that ends with Bree comforted by her psychologist (played by the fabulous Elizabeth Peña of Lone Star), claiming through visceral tears (snot included!) that “it hurts!”
This is where the unrealistic premise comes around to bite itself in the ass. A therapist almost certainly would not have required Bree to track down a child. A therapist almost certainly would have been very worried about a patient who doesn’t understand that SRS, being surgery, is painful, exhausting, and debilitating. That is the kind of thing you do cover prior to the referral letter. That is the kind of thing that falls under “realistic expectations.” That is a basic part of informed consent.
And you know what doesn’t help you prepare, physically or emotionally, for major surgery? A madcap roadtrip whose explicit purpose is to reopen as many emotional wounds as possible. Did this licensed professional expect Bree to emerge from the experience tranquil and well-rested? Did she think Bree would not be absolutely devastated? Did she not check in with Bree prior to surgery?
In Transamerica, Bree’s crime is not transgenderism, but rather her failure to fully connect. The film’s message to its viewers as well as to the LGBT community is similar. To live the life we want, the life we seek, we must connect.
…Or no vagina for you!
The Operation is already too fraught. It’s already seen as the dividing line between man and woman, real and fake, in a way that doesn’t really have much to do with us. It was disheartening to see a movie that accepted totally uncritically the idea that a transperson’s life can–or should–be divided in a straightforward way between Before and After. Bree deserved better treatment than that.
I’d watch that. At least, nobody would think it was serious.
OT, but the gullible Vox Day is buying into the report that blondes will be extinct in 200 years from now and that the last one will be born in Finland. href=”http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49014″>
The thing was shown to be a hoax (and an obvious one) over 2 years ago.
That would indeed be nice. You would, of course, be the first human being for whom that had ever happened.
yay! i’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk about this! i’m writing a fictional story and there’s a transgendered character in it… it’s becoming a commentary on the absurdity of gender roles, without my completely meaning it to…
anyway i started reading The Riddle of Gender, and i’m only an intro and chapter into it, but thus far, the author seems to be saying that the “need” for surgery is driven, at least partially, by fear of not gaining social acceptance otherwise. which makes sense, when you consider some of the horrible things that happen sometimes when people discover that SHE is actually male-bodied*. And vice versa. (She recounts a mind-bogglingly awful incident in which a male-bodied woman is left to die by paramedics after they strip her clothing off and discover she has a penis.)
but that opens up a whole other can of worms for me. i mean, i would never call for the outlawing of grs, because people should be able to do what they want, but sometimes it feels to me like… getting breast implants or something. like… who decides that your genitals/breasts SHOULD look like in order to be OK? and is that paying tribute to gender mandates? (i also wonder, in the back of my mind, how this might relate to other cultures and their “mutilation” practices. because ALL unncessary surgery seems pretty mutilative to me.)
i’d really appreciate your input, piny. or, if you’re busy, maybe just a link to a good text? i really feel like the transgendered issue is an extremely important one.
*I hope that terminology is OK…?
Chet: Indeed, everyone–trans or cisgender–has to deal with the daunting assumptions of others when seeking out a romantic or sexual partner.
However, let’s not miss the implication of piny’s statement: a lot of people are quite freaked out by the notion of a man having a vagina or a woman having a penis. So too, a lot of people get freaked out by the notion of a man formerly having a vagina or a woman formerly having a penis.
So, trans-people have to worry about all of the usual unspoken assumptions that cisgender people worry about plus the assumptions that underlie the notion that gender and genitalia–past and present–must “match up.”
Let’s not forget: a lot of trans-people are murdered or beaten up each year because of this assumption. A fair portion of that violence occurs within the context of a love interest becoming aware of the victim’s current or former genital configuration.
There is something else about this movie that bothers me. So much of the tension and humor in the movie derives from the fact that Bree portrays herself as a concerned “church lady” to her son rather than telling him that she is his only surviving parent.
There is a stereotype that pops up now and again that portrays transsexuals as dishonest, deceptive people. (I suppose that this stems from the prejudicial notion that we are not truly the gender/sex that we claim to be.) I worry that this movie, on some level, will play into this stereotype. While the movie resolves this issue in a fairly humane fashion, I still worry about it.
I think the majority (certainly not all) of the violence/sterotypes and unwillingness to discuss transsexual or transgender persons comes from the innate knowledge that once you start to discuss gender and sexuality you must also begin to *think*.
Thinking requires that you confront your own indoctrination into the world and, layer by layer, challange the frame in which you see the world.
I question whether this kind of thinking can be done without the aid of other people. Certainly you can attempt it, but life goes quickly and pesky things like rent, love and career can get in the way of devoting all your attention to your environment.
Transgender people challange us to think about what gender really is. The simple answer is – whatever you want it to be.
But that answer requires that we ditch everything we’ve ever been taught (both directly and by inference) about gender.
It’s definatly not the work of an afternoon (or a movie).
The most you can hope for is that you pique people’s interest in a subject that they want to learn more about.
Whether that was done responsibly or not is a different story.
Was Transamerica billed as fiction or “based on a true story”?
I think my problem with it was that Bree was portrayed as flaky and immature–someone who failed to connect–if not necessarily as a deceptive person. For example, she calls her therapist at one point to tell her that the whole son thing is completely resolved, and everything couldn’t be going more smoothly, and they’re going to Disneyland after her surgery. And her therapist tells her how disappointed she is that Bree is lying. Bree may be a crappy liar, but she is making an entirely sane choice. Her therapist is an asshole. She wants surgery. This trip to find her son is a horrible idea. Ergo: lie to the therapist, get the surgery, and get out of the trip.
Hmmm. That’s a good point. Given the context, it was a pretty sane decision.
I’ve always been put off by the notion that cisgender therapists should have power over what I do with my body. It’s yet another case of a dominant group wielding control over the most intimate aspects of a subordinate group’s lives.
I count myself as lucky, for I didn’t have to lie or jump through an inordinate number of hoops to get my referal for surgery.
I did have one fairly abusive encounter with a therapist years before–it only took one visit to figure out that she had issues with who I was. I was so angry about the matter that I almost got into a car accident on the way home.
As a regular homo guy, I had a lot of beef with Transamerica (mostly that, again, it feels like The Gays have hijacked the trans experience – in this case it feels particularly expletive – like the maker really wanted some shock material and d homo-ness isn’t enough anymore.) Anyhow, I wrote about it here and would love to know where I get it wrong. My primary beef is that casting a woman to play a transwoman is inherently offensive – especially when maker said he never even explored casting a real transwoman. but to stick to the thread:
Yeah, thanks buddy for buying into and fluffing up the penis-crazed sex addict stereotype of homo men. It’s so best to be served this kind of hate by your own kind. Personally I find transmen very attractive, though I’ve been partnered for almost a decade so I never had a chance to act on it. He’s simply using this penis-crazed stereotype as a smokescreen for his own transphobia. Or he’s a mythological kinsey 7.
I agree with lots of expletives. Even Brokeback Mountain – for all the progress it represents, kills off the pretty boy to homophobic violence. violence is not essential to the queer experience, and promoting that idea is hurtful and offensive even if it’s used to manipulate sympathy out of an audience. This film passed along the cultural meme that queers (especially queers that trangress gender roles) deserve violence.
You hit it 100%. I actually think this film is very guilty here. Pre-op, Bree was dishonest and deceptive – with herself, her therapist… The film uses trans stereotypes as shorthand (sometimes a bit punned) to take viewers through the plot arch. It embraces the stereotypes to tell the story more easily to an uncritical audience (yeah, “accessible” is such an f-f-ing copout) instead of trying to be more honest about the experience.
I don’t think this is fair to Oso Raro. He goes on to say:
…So it doesn’t sound as though he either sees the penis as the ne plus ultra of gay male desire or even believes that he will necessarily feel that way about all his own partners.
And I don’t think he means to communicate a penis-crazed stereotype so much as one understanding–a widely-held one–of what “man” and therefore “attracted to men” means.
A lot of people are quite freaked out by the idea of an intelligent, well-paid professional adult man who likes to play World of Warcraft. In other words people are freaked out by what is unusual.
Moreover, persons looking for another person to (among other things) have sex with have certain requirements that they have in mind. One of those is that they have the requisite body parts for the sex acts that one wishes to perform with that person. I’m sorry that the transgendered experience the heartbreak of someone rejecting them after learning their trans status. Certainly I’ve been rejected by the cisgendered when my nerd status has been revealed.
People look for certain things in other people. The heartbreaking reality is that all of us are equally likely to be rejected based on things that seem very dear and personal to us, and that experience feels devaluing. Part of being an adult is dealing with that with grace, politeness, and confidence. Of course that statement applies to both the transgendered and those who find a potential partner doesn’t have the plumbing they expected. Naturally, to respond violently in that situation is an abhorrent crime.
Eh, that’s nonsense. Not everything that describes violence promotes violence. His death is a tragedy in the movie, and presented as such.
I mean, maybe I have my history wrong but it seems that until recently the queer experience was pretty likely to include violence from some elements of mainstream culture. Even now that can be the case.
BM wasn’t intended to be a documentary, of course, but it would have been a considerably less realistic movie – and a much less interesting one – except for the core conflict of the story, which was a love between two people that literally put both of their lives in jeopardy. That jeopardy isn’t present without the threat of violence, and the threat is meaningless without, somewhere in the story, the follow-through.
I blog, remember? I’m a big nerd, myself, albeit not a gamer. I’ve been one all my life, and know exactly what kind of social rejection nerds who aren’t transsexuals face. And I can tell you that I’d much rather date as a cisgendered guy with dorky interests than a transsexual who liked…whatever it is that normal people like. Football. Survivor. I have no idea.
And your statement that people are freaked out by the unusual is not true. I doubt very much that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company would feel trepidation about revealing his extremely unusual job to a potential date. Or that a Pulitzer-winning journalist would agonize over whether or not to reveal her shameful secret before or after her date has had a chance to see who she really is. Or that a supermodel faces rejection for her freakish appearance.
Dude, just say “penis,” okay? And I’ve got eight of them, so no problem there.
Have the people who reject you made it clear to you that they don’t see you as a human being? That you disgust them? Have you ever felt physically threatened? That hasn’t been my experience when I reveal my geeky proclivities.
No. Just…no. Different qualities, different levels of prejudice, different likelihood of rejection. It’s not the same thing.
Chet, I would prefer to live in a black and white world without causation or correlation, but cultural ideas are in fact communicated through mass media. When every image conforms to a certain stereotype, they collectively reinforce that stereotype.
While violence against queers has always occured (and that’s certainly not in the past – especially violence agains trans folks) it is not an essential element to the experience. Said another way – would it be ok for every image of black men to include crim just because some black men engage in criminal activity?
I think you’re trying to reduce this too far. It’s like saying transphobia never happens because it doesn’t to you.
Here’s another analogy:
Seropositive and seronegative people both have to deal with rejection based on their personalities. But would you rather date as someone who has a fatal, incurable, sexually-transmitted disease that scares the shit out of people, or not? Say you had to choose between that and, say, an extensive stamp collection.
Chet: Speaking as a transwoman who is also a nerd, I just don’t see how being trans and being a nerd compare. Ok, so I have a thing for computers, science fiction, and trains. That might seem a little odd for a woman, perhaps even socially backward, but it doesn’t quite stop a conversation in the way that, “Oh by the way, I used to be male.” quite does.
For many people, it doesn’t matter if your plumbing meets their desires or not–what matters is the fact that they don’t see you as truly female if you are a trans woman or truly male if you are a transman.
Plus, one of the first things that pops into people’s heads when they discover a trans person’s past is often, “Gosh I sure did find them attractive, does that mean I’m straight or gay?” Then the person’s insecurities kick in and things get really weird.
To deny that these issues cause transpeople greater difficulty in finding a mate than cisgender people face, is to ignore reality.
I’ve yet to see it, but based on what I’ve heard about TransAmerica I really don’t feel very positive. It is interesting the way that it’s discussed as marking a cultural shift in the representation of trans people though; I’m not sure that it does, or certainly not very effectively given it rehashes a number of crappy archetypes, but there definitely seems to have been more trans visibility in media recently.
Excepting the shitty stuff like CSI, what do people think of trans representation in pop culture? Both Veronica Mars and Dead Like Me had sympathetic trans characters relatively recently and despite its flaws Transgenerations was a very different series to most trans documentaries (it didn’t even have the near obligatory person putting on their makeup shot at the beginning.)
Whilst it’s not exactly mainstream this is why I adore Our Bodies Our Selves, it is literally the only book (particularly amongst feminist/lesbian type books) I’ve come across that shows a trans woman I can identify with. It really made a big difference to me to see a young, non gender normative trans woman portrayed in OBOS.
Piny said:
This is absolutely sublime.
Incidentally, what did you make of Boys Don’t Cry? I’ve yet to watch it all the way through as I tend to find it too difficult to watch, but I’d be interested to know what you thought of it.
Tarn-
I know you’re not asking me, but… BDC was a really different kind of film, and I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters many years ago. At least Hillary Swank looked like a transman. Felicity Huffman’s make-up was intentionally terrilbe. She looked like a sloppy transvestite, which I think was one of my biggest problems with the film.
Jesus Made Like It When Transamerica Meets the Business End of Critical Thinking
With odds showing Felicity Huffman in the race to win an oscar for her role in Transamerica it seems like as good a time as any to pull out this dead horse and beat it with some great quotes
Hm. I think it may have been a little more complex than that–an attempt to show Bree not as a failure, but as an adolescent. I take issue with the timeline that the movie seems to want to set up, but I’m not sure that the filmmaker means to imply that Bree or transwomen in general make lousy women. The film implied–and rightly so–that Bree passed consistently.
I remember, too, that Brandon was very much an adolescent in the film, and that his character seemed to display a great deal of awkwardness.
I noticed Bree’s uglifying make up gradually improve as the film goes on until you finally see Felicity huffman with little or no make-up on at the end. I took it like the classic external-image-represents-the-internal-state thing. Like when Bette Davis looses the eyebrows in Now Voyager (or you know, the glasses and bun = ugly contrivance in so many teen movies).
I think it was intended to make bree look like a lousy woman until after her transformation – via the “madcap roadtrip” (awesome) that the maker forces her through. She doesn’t pass to the audience until she’s “whole” by those standards. (and after the film beats her crotch over their heads twice so they are extra sure about what’s down there).
I’m excessively negative on the film because the maker was at the screening I went to and his comments made me feel like he was exploiting the trans experience to get his pretty pedestrian road movie some attention (which it has).
Gah! Spoiler warnings, please! I’ve not seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but I’m planning to sometime this week.
</threadjack>
As some feminists remind us,
Yes.
Look, if it’s so important to your world view that you not consider the possibility that you’re not the only one who has it bad, or that there aren’t those who have it worse off then you, I don’t know what to say.
Dealing with rejection is part of being an adult.
Piny doesn’t seem to be talking about transphobia; he’s talking about situations where someone’s response is basically “oh, I’m sorry, you aren’t equipped for the kind of sex I want to have. Guess we’re done here.” I’ve already agreed that prejudice and violence are just plain wrong. But allowances need to be made for the fact that most people who want to have sex with a woman are expecting a vagina to be part of that sex, and most people who want to have sex with a man expect a penis to be involved. Those are completely reasonable positions to take, and when one finds themselves disadvantaged by those preferences the adult response is to suck it up and not make a big deal about it.
We all do it. Nobody has a right to be sexually attractive to anybody else. Transpeople have every right to be accepted, of course, and I join everybody here in condeming prejudice and dehumanization. But people have legitimate reasons not to connect with other people, too. It would be a great world if everybody always accepted everybody else. But adults deal with the fact that that is not the world we live in.
So it’s childish to recognize patterns of oppression and discuss their mechanics?
Sorry Robert. For what it’s worth, I don’t think what was said is very important to the story – knowing that they get together at all is more of a spoiler…
At this point, I suppose that I’m feeding the trolls, but here I go anyway.
As the quote illustrates, Piny is talking about far more than anatomy, Chet. He’s talking about how society constructs gender, the prejudices that evolve out of these constructions, and the ways in which transpeople–both pre-op and post-op–serve as focal points for these prejudices.
Does anatomy matter to some people when it comes to sex? Yes. I remained a vigin until after surgery because I too wasn’t interested in sex with “undesirable plumbing.” If another lesbian decided that she didn’t want to be intimate with me because I had a penis, I would have been the last person to try to dissuade her.
So what? That’s not the point here.
Many of us have been trying to say that it goes far beyond anatomical preferences. Piny said this in the above quote, I said that in my previous post, and several others said this too. Why can you not admit the significance of this? Instead, you denigrate piny by saying that he is immature.
Yes, I agree. Try applying that logic to yourself.
Excuse me, but who here is insisting that no one can have it worse than him?
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. The problem is not rejection. I can deal with, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The problem is what a friend of mine described as, “OMGmywholeworldisthrownintoconfusioneleventyone.” Did you even read the parts of the essay I quoted, the ones I was responding to? About how getting hit on by a transguy required an entire day of dissection? The Trans Question is all over the place these days, and nowhere more present than in the bedroom. I can buy that you’ve been rejected. I agree that rejection sucks, and I agree that such is life.
However, I very much doubt that anyone has ever had a seizure over the idea that they may at one point have looked at your nerdly self and liked what they saw–or, for that matter, that you had sexual desires of your own. Do you see the difference? When rejection is simply an interpersonal matter, the same snag that everyone faces now and again, that will be fine. When I can’t get laid without opening the proverbial Pandora’s Box of gender and sexuality, that’s different.
I’m just going to state the obvious. Having sex with a man and having sex with somebody pretending to be a man are two entirely different things.
I’m sure this makes me some kind of monster.
I don’t think it makes you a monster, but it makes you kind of rude.
Couldn’t you say “having sex with a man born a man, and having sex with a transman, are two entirely different things to me?”
wow. I thought I was ignorant on trans issues. I’m sincerely surprised by these comments showing up on feministe – I know there’s trolls everywhere, but if there’s anywhere I’d expect more respect it here. Thanks to P & S for talking openly. I appreciate it.
Monsters are original. You are anything but.
But then s/he wouldn’t have been insulting anyone, and where’s the fun in that?
Robert, *wipes tear from eye* I’m so proud of you.
Hey, thanks for providing an example of the kind of prejudice we’ve been talking about all along.
Monsters tend to inspire fear in others. Your statement inspires feelings of anger and sadness.
Ha! Oh, Piny– I think you’re my new blog crush.
Those poor, sick bastards.
You dont think it’s a little self-pitying to compare yourself to someone with a fatal, incurable sexually-transmitted disease. Perhaps this IS how non trans-people react to transpeople. I dont know, as I am not one.
But Id hesitate to date ANYONE with a fatal disease mostly because they are going to die soon, not because they have a disease.
And, frankly, Id date someone with a fatal disease before Id date someone with a fatal STD because – it’s catching. Isnt it the ultimate hateful-gay sterotype to act as if you can “catch” gay just by being with someone who is? Or in this case, to imply that you can “catch” being a transperson. I would think THAT’S offensive.
Putting every non-transperson in a catagory labled “normal” makes everyone else Other. As soon as you do that, there’s never gonna be room to find common ground. If it’s the terminology that offends, just say so – then I/we can apologize.
But no one here (including me) knows Chet. It’s possible that he HAS experienced just as much prejudice and discrimination in his life.
I say this because the last time I entered a trans discussion piny assumed that no one would ever ask me if they could “see it”. Or become disgusted by my physical “flaws”, or the fact that my sexual experience/person causes people to treat me differently once they know or the fact that once they know, it becomes the ONLY topic of conversation.
The truth is that all of these things become factors in any relationship I have even being a cisgender person. Finding commonality is how human beings learn to be friends and understand their own and other people’s world better.
In my analogy – I spent the first 14 years of my life along with 6 other little girls being brutally raped – in pairs & alone. It was done for pleasure of torture and violence and not sex. I am disfigured physically from it, and obviously have many other emotional issues from it.
But if I share that with someone and she tells me that a man touched her innapropriatly when she was little, I dont repsond by saying that it’s hardly the same thing. I respond by telling her that Im glad she understands the fear, pain and irrational behavior that can result.
Of course, I can choose the first option – its true- but how does that advance understanding between us? Or create a space where BOTH of us can talk about our experiences and maybe help each other find solutions.
First of all, yes, you aren’t one, and yes, you don’t know.
Second, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO. The comparison was an attempt to get at the idea that some personal circumstances carry more romantic complications than others. For example, being seropositive presents more romantic difficulties than being a philatelist. Being a transsexual presents more romantic difficulties than being a gamer. Because I am not seropositive any more than you are a transsexual, I cannot speak to the relative degree of difficulty wrt romance.
Bear in mind, please, that this analogy is not an attempt to compare any part of the two situations not related to trying to pick someone up in a bar and knowing that you will at some point have to reveal a very important and often frightening secret.
(Incidentally wrt “catching” transsexuality: it’s a more fitting analogy than you know. Of course I don’t think that you can give gender dysphoria to anyone, because that’s insane, or that transsexuality is a disease, because likewise. But the idea that fucking me will transmit some gender instability is very much a part of my reception in the world at large.)
…No, it’s really more about the way you seem to be reacting. How did you get from, “For example, people with HIV have problems getting laid,” to, “No one else has ever been the victim of prejudice like this?” You are neither HIV positive or a transsexual, and yet you seem to feel justified in arguing basic differences of complication. Why can’t I make some similar distinctions between being a transsexual and being a gamer?
Possible, but not terribly likely.
You’re doing the same thing Chet did. He pulled the one sentence that didn’t explicitly refer to transsexuality completely out of context and assumed that I thought the revolution would occasion getting laid all the damn time, that no one else has difficulty getting laid, and that no one else can handle rejection.
Whereas demanding respect is just counterproductive.
And if that hypothetical woman says that she knows exactly where you’re coming from because her parents wouldn’t let her get her ears pierced until she was thirteen? Or if she says, “Well, everyone has some trauma in their past, get over yourself?”
Oh, dear. I guess I’m two for two at alienating people.
And finally, what is this “we” bullshit? Read your post. Then think about your own prescriptions for a productive conversation again. You seem perfectly willing to commit all the sins you’re castigating me for. And you don’t seem terribly interested in complaining about Chet’s posturing in this thread. Why should the burden of diplomacy be on me?
Maybe he’s had a hard time, but being a dork does not equate to experiencing institutionalized discrimination.
This is typical denial. You hear a oppressed group tell their story, then respond with a sad story of your own and equate the two. Chet’s rejection – and your terrible experiences – are being shared in order to trivialize Piny & Stacy’s. It’s as if you’re saying “You think you have it hard – well, listen to how terrible my life is – you don’t have shit.”
This is no competition to see who has been crapped on most. It’s a discussion about specific patterns of experience regarding trans folks. To sidetrack the conversation is to dismiss it and deny it – to ask these people to continue suffering apparantly deserved crap – intentional or not.
Piny – I am neither a gamer, seropositive, transsexual or a stamp-collector. And I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone how hard they did or didn’t have it. That was my point.
I wasnt arguing differences of complication – I was answering the question, not answering that this is how everyone should feel or who they would choose. Personally, I know people who would choose the HIV person over the stamp collector. If I was on the seropositive, gamer, transsexual, stamp collector Elimadate, frankly, I would choose the transsexual.
That’s just me though, and Im sure theres plenty of other people who would choose differently.
The problem that I have is that you ask questions like “Have you ever felt physically threatened [for being who you are]?” And then when someone responds Yes you say “It’s different.” How is THAT not “my pain/risk is worse than yours”. If you’re arguing violence is more pervasive against the trans-world in general, then say so.
I didnt say that you shouldnt demand repsect. Or recieve it. Where I guess we differ is in our attitudes. I know meeting people where they are is not hip but Ive found that it’s the only way to start a conversation that goes anywhere productive.
I never complain about having to “teach” feminism or pro-choice or anything to anyone else because if I refuse to teach someone then I dont think I have the right to complain that everyone else is mysognistic/anti-choice etc. And before you attack me, Im not saying that this is the “right” attitude, Im saying it’s mine.
If hypo-girl tells me her story about ear-piercing then I take it to mean “I dont understand THAT pain, but here’s the pain *I* carry, we are alike.” And I wouldnt presume to judge how horrible that experience was for her. If she took the “everyone has some trauma get over youself attitude” I would assume that she wasnt interested in talking, just in shutting me up. (Unless she was sharing the trauma in which case, see the first example.
Assuming you weren’t being snide about alienating me, you didn’t alienate me. Im just sincerely trying to understand. My reading of what Chet had to say (in his original posts) was exactly that – he was saying that he had similar experiences, that (he assumes) everyone does. Then Stacy told him that because Stacey was both a geek and transsexual could tell him for sure that being a transsexual was worse.
The “we” referred to me and hypothetical woman. It wasn’t directed at you. I was asking a question.
I didnt complain about Chet because plenty of other people did it for me. If complaining about him is the only thing that will give my comments legitimacy let me know and Ill pile on.
I wasnt saying you have to be diplomatic. I guess I was saying that you can choose to respond diplomatically or not, but Ive never witnessed an instance where telling someone to F-off helped forward the conversation or brought mutual understanding. Neither of which am I suggesting is YOUR job OR that you told anyone to F-off.
Other Ryan-
I never equated my story to piny’s experience as a transsexual. Or trivialized how hard it is or the prejudices piny faces. What I DID say was that when you try to make a point by asking rhetorical questions you are just trying to passive-agressivly insist on your point. Not really ask a question.
I didnt see anywhere in my story that I said my life is hard or burdensome at all. That was, actually, my point. It’s possible to share experience without complaining how hard it is to be you – and that you shouldnt judge other people’s pain relative to yours because you are just assuming/judging them without knowing them or anything about their life.
Seriously, if by sidetracking you are somehow claiming I derailed the thread – that was not my sin in this thread. I didnt sidetrack anyone’s conversation. And sidetracking a conversation somehow becomes oppression? Because obviously, ignoring me (if i DID sidetrack) is not an option.
The fuck? Yes. Yes it is. Of course it is. Should I answer Chet with the understanding that he’s seriously implying that being a gamer carries the same risk of violence as being a transsexual? Or would that insult his intelligence?
Let’s roll tape, shall we?
That was your opening salvo. That was how carefully you read what I was saying. Don’t talk to me about “meeting people where they are.”
You’re also saying that it should be mine, that that’s the only way to have productive discussions. This is criticism, which is fine, but don’t pretend otherwise.
And the latter is exactly what Chet was doing. Read his first comment.
No, he said, “That would indeed be nice. You would, of course, be the first human being for whom that had ever happened.” That wasn’t an attempt at empathy. He was being a jerk.
Chet’s comment did a couple of things. First of all, he insisted that transsexuals do not face more difficulty dating–which covers a lot of stuff related to sex, romance, interpersonal interactions, passing, safety, anatomy, gender, and identity–than everyone else. That’s not true. No discussion about being a transsexual and dating as a transsexual can continue if that assertion is not dispatched with extreme prejudice.
Second, Chet went and confused what I was saying. Taking a single sentence completely out of context will tend to cause problems. He conflated the rejection–thanks-but-no-thanks–that everyone has to deal with with what I was clearly talking about just before: “It’d be nice to not be one big gordian knot of expectation, perception, and desire. It’d be nice not to have to symbolize the bleeding edge of controversy. It’d be nice not to freak anyone out.”
How could “it’d be nice to hit on some cute guy and know–not just hope, but know–that whatever he knows, whatever he sees, whatever he assumes, it won’t matter” be read as referring to anything other than being read as a transsexual and turned into a scrim onto which to project the Gender Mess? It’d be pretty difficult to miss that context completely, unless you were so wrapped up in yourself that you couldn’t see anyone else’s circumstances where they differed from your own.
That was where Chet was.
And what is wrong with Stacy saying that? Seriously, though? Stacy does have firsthand knowledge of both states, and, unlike Chet, can actually speak to both. How do you “educate” people about choice and feminism without arguing some similar disparities? How do you talk about either subject without saying that, in some ways, it really is worse to be a woman in a sexist society than a man? Or that it really is harder to be the one who gets pregnant than the one who simply can’t?
Well, just speaking from my experience, I don’t tend to have useful conversations with people who need to be handled that gently.
Trust me, the very last thing I will ever do again is comment in a trans-post or ever offer my opinion about anything to do with transsexual/transgender people in this forum.
You have absolutly taught me the error of my ways. I apologize for my comments and the harm and additional oppression they have caused everyone.
Thank you for providing the best argument of all for why these calls for civility and productive conversations are just so much disingenuous bullshit.
This is the subtext that you’ve so kindly made explicit: Be nice to me, or I won’t listen to things I know are true. If you upset me, I’ll walk away from the issue entirely, as is my privilege. I will punish you with ignorance if you don’t make me comfortable. That’s speaking power to truth.
I’ll remember this the next time someone insists that I should meet people where they are. Where’s your forbearance, Sweetness-and-Light?
Good riddance. To you and your hypocrisy.
Not that you’re likely paying attention anymore, but there’s a time to listen to what someone is saying – Piny & Stacy have a specific wisdom to share – and a time to listen. At least discuss the topic at hand on their terms following their train of thought. Instead you tried to steer the conversation to your own irrelevant aside.
When there is a gap between the ignorant and the wise, it’s most productive for the ignorant to take a step. It’s disrespectful to force someone into your rabbit hole of metaphor – you had no right to ask anyone to talk about their issues in your terms. Piny is damned explicit and clear – it’s not like she needed any clarification.
Thanks, ryan, but I go by male pronouns.
um, that’s a duh. I’ll blame the woman-orientedness of the site
S’okay. I mean, you’re an evil, evil transphobe and you should be flogged through the Holiday Inn hallways at the next True Spirit convention, but I still like you.
Since once again I have failed to communicate correctly, I shall comment yet again (no doubt bringing on a comment of “She says she wont comment and then goes ahead and does it”).
I will no longer comment on transgender/transexuality in this forum for three reasons. One, I am apparently oppressing people/adding to their oppression by my comments. This is not my intent at all. I realize that (at least in other ryan’s eyes) intent and a subsequent apology dont make my transgression/oppression any less horrid. If my ignorance is offensive, Id rather be silent.
Two, my comment did NOT mean “I plan to punish you with my ignorance.” Ive never known a transperson – piny is the only transperson Ive ever *known*. Since reading his first post, I have begun to read about the subject and watch several documentaries. Point of fact, Transamerica is on my Tivo it just hasnt come on yet. Im not gonna stop learning Im just gonna stop commenting on trans posts here because it’s obvious to me that I am offending people/being obtuse. I have a similar problem with infertile women and have learned the error of my ways when commenting on an infertile blog. I just have to keep reading until it becomes clear because Id rather not engage with someone if the very way I engage them hurts them or their feelings.
Third, and most important, I have come to see that I was wrong about several things just in this post but in the meantime I feel like I have been unfairly slammed over others. It’s hard for me to admit when Im wrong especially when I feel that A) I will be ganged up on by several commenters and B) that nothing I say will “count” if Im wrong about other things. So in the comments I found myself defending stuff I dont even agree with. Totally my sin and easily solved by SingTFU.
Short version: Im sorry, sorry, sorry and I will not comment again and Im sorry for furthering your oppression and anything else I may have done to offend you, including apologize.
Wow, this conversation thread is intense. You children don’t play over here, do you? Pop, Dip, Spin! Work it, children!
I probably have nothing productive to add here, other than I think that human sexuality is incredibly complicated, and any perspective is likely to be changed or shifted many times over in one’s life, that is, if one’s brain is fully switched on. Let’s face it, in a coercively heteronormative society such as our own, sometimes just getting through the day is a small victory.
And thanks to Piny for comment #11, which I think hits the nail on the head about my own ambivalence about gay sexual popular culture (Reading Faggots and Dancer from the Dance side by side will do that to a girl), which I attempted to build into my entry on Transamerica.
Transamerica, like ALL commercial and popular media, is flawed. Then again, I gave up on the quest for the perfect representation a while ago. My discussion of the film and the handsome transman who electrified my thinking in the fall was a modest attempt to begin to think through the Trans in LGBTQAI coalition building, and the conflicts and collaborations possible within the acronym, including the slide from sexuality to gender across the acronym (L to I) and the challenges of finding commonality without hegemony, as well as the relationship of these challenges to my own sexuality.
Also, while I personally like Transamerica (in spite of its many noted flaws), no movie will ever change the material conditions of our lives in toto. We have to do that difficult, crucial work ourselves, part of which is happening in this comment thread and on Feministe in general.
That Girl, it sounds like you’re getting closer. Keep posting and remember that those of us with priviledge (and I have damn near all the usual kinds — white straight cisgendered male, so on) have the responsibility to recognize the authority and validity of oppressed voices, meet them in their terms, and not get defensive or muddy (at best) the debate with issues of our comfort. I don’t necessarily mean to say you’re guilty of any or all those things, but if you see any of yourself in it (and all people with priviledge will at different times over different issues, if they’re examining themselves critically and ingenuously) then it’s an opportunity to learn from it.
And learning is better than shutting up.
Once again, piny, you’re the shit.