Problematizing

Oh, see, your comment made it much more accessible. The OP I thought was talking about trans-enough in-group policing. Well, I guess you are, but it’s easier for me to think about the categories themselves and how they relate moreso than who’s putting them on whom.

Oh wow Piny, now I really REALLY have to write an addendum to your post explaining what the hell I was talking about.

So, trans people as a group were required for many, many decades to “prove ourselves” to various medical and legal establishments. This happened in the US, in Canada, in the UK and as far as I know in the rest of the Western world and probably beyond. For a long time, the very thought of wanting to change your gender, or the sexual characteristics of your body, was such a horrifying and outlandish notion to many people that a very strict system of steep requirements were developed to make sure that only the most “extreme” cases of “true transsexuality” were allowed to access trans-specific medical care.

So, proving yourself meant all sorts of things — performing according to really “high” standards of what your new gender was supposed to be like, telling the right stories about your childhood, being heterosexual (in your new gender), being happy happy happy about everything happening to you, becoming a “functional member of society” and last but not least… in a lot of places, one of the requirements was going to support groups with other trans people, not only for support but also so that — no shit, this is spelled out in clinical guidelines from decades past — trans people could compete with each other to be “better” at gender and enforce gender standards on each other.

(If you want to read more about this, I suggest How Sex Changed by Joanne Meyerowitz.)

I kind of feel like all that is necessary historical backdrop for this discussion. It’s very particular, but there’s a more general theme too: like many oppressed groups, trans people have in certain places, times and communities set up hierarchies of who is “more real” or “more trans.” There are plenty of parallels with communities of people who have suffered under racism, misogyny, homophobia, any form of stigma — skin color comes to mind, so does “straight-acting.”

Sometimes for trans people this has had to do with straightforward goals of assimilating, “passing” and generally appearing to be a non-trans person. There’s a lot of slang in some communities about this stuff, like saying someone is “fishy” or “unclockable.” Sometimes it’s had to do with who can construct a more “convincing” story about how authentic their gender is, based on their feelings, their dissonance with their body, what their childhood was like. Sometimes it’s about who has gotten access to surgery, sometimes it’s about who really wants surgery vs. those who don’t. And sometimes it’s about arguing about who’s more oppressed. None of this should come as much surprise to anyone who’s dealt with similar issues around race, disability, class, sexuality, etc.

Like a lot of struggles in which one segment of an oppressed population tries to get a leg up on others somehow, semantically or in terms of cultural approval or even in an “hierarchy of oppressions,” there’s also a lot of rhetoric about how necessary it is to separate out distinct experiences and not confuse two different “kinds” of people. To some extent I think this is totally valid — there are many different kinds of experiences around being “othered” due to not conforming to standards of sex and gender. I don’t think intersex people, for instance, should just be straightforwardly lumped in with trans people without serious education and discussion going on about IS issues. And on top of that, there are innumerable differences in experience amongst trans people. But there are also some serious questions about why, exactly, people choose to slice and dice groups of people who face oppression on similar grounds in the way that they do.

Some more straightforward examples:

– separating trans people into “primary” and “secondary” transsexuals where primary usually carries the old-school clinical connotation of more extreme, more in need of services at an earlier age, transitioning earlier in life, and more likely to have a “successful outcome.” In recent years this stuff has shown up on the internet too, resurrected and mostly about age of transition as well as sexuality (it’s more “primary” to be heterosexual) and femininity. (Somehow this particular stuff usually tends to be about trans women, and mostly ignores trans-masculine folks.) See also: transkids.us — (I don’t disagree with everything on this site, by far, but there are some really problematic aspects, and I am leery of the motivations)

– separating trans people into those who want/have gotten genital surgery and those who don’t. This is the familiar setup of “post-op / pre-op / non-op” — very much in that order, too. There used to be some online messageboards that restricted certain forums to people who had undergone genital surgery, and others to people who intended to, or had. There has been a push from some trans people (including some people who I generally respect, to tell the truth) to draw a dividing line between “transsexual” and “transgendered” based on a surgical requirement, often meaning “you’re only transsexual if have gotten surgery, or you plan to.” Some people have even gone so far as to say any trans person who wants surgery badly enough will find a way to get it, despite any financial obstacles or poverty, so there’s no excuse on grounds of “financial hardship.” Others consider anyone “transsexual” who has undergone some kind of medicalized re-embodiment, usually meaning hormones. Again, a lot of this stuff (genital surgery) excludes and doesn’t really take into consideration a whole lot of trans-masculine folks. And there have even been situations in the last decade where particular trans men have been excluded and ostracized by MTF trans activists as “not really being trans” because they were not “real enough” on grounds of surgery, passing, etc. (Ignoring the fact that genital surgery is often far more expensive and not as technically advanced for FTMs than for MTFs.)

– separating trans people by who passes and who doesn’t. This is maybe the most widespread and affects a whole lot of communities — and arguments go both ways. There are a lot of trans people who simply don’t want even to be SEEN with another trans person who doesn’t “pass” as well as they do, because of paranoia that their own gender presentation might be compromised somehow. There are also plenty of discussions that could be had about “passing privilege” (i.e. ability to pass as a non-trans person) and what that really means. Obviously it didn’t help Gwen Araujo. On the other hand, being able to pass as non-trans really has beneficially affected a lot of trans people. On the third hand, it doesn’t really do anything to work against transphobia, and it can be extremely tenuous — just like “skin privilege” used to be for black folks who could pass as white, and maybe still is in some cases.

– separating trans people based on sexuality, age, age of transition any number of other things, either separately or as part of the stuff mentioned above.

How much of this is necessary? Is it necessary to be able to preserve trans people’s distinct experiences and challenges? And is the best way to really distinguish those things to separate into “types?” Can you have “types” without having a hierarchy of better/worse, more real/less real, more privileged/less privileged emerge? These are the things I really think need more examination.

I believe strongly in self-identification. I’m not sure we can (or should try to) come to common agreement in very specific terms about words we use to describe ourselves. On one hand, being able to accurately describe ourselves is important, but on the other hand, it can also be very limiting when a word loses its flexibility. When one faction gets to decide the entirety of a word, it can be very problematic. Take, for example, the way in which white women got to define feminism for the rest of us, as though their feminism was the first or only or most important feminism. [We are reclaiming it in various ways now (feminisms, radical woman of color feminist, womanist, et cetera).] However, if “feminism” doesn’t adequately describe all feminists, what good is it? Creating new words to describe our feminism is one option, but another option is to reclaim the defining of feminism so that it does include us. Brownfemipower wrote about this, but I can’t find the post.

Or another example: I know that some folks who self-identify as dykes are told by other self-identified dykes that the first group is not really dykes because they aren’t as dykey as the second group. Despite this fact, the first group still has every right to self-identify as dykes regardless of what the second group says about said self-identification.

Just like dyke means vastly different things to different people, trans* language probably has as many definitions as there are trans* people. I think that this is acceptable. Words just have different flavors…connotations…to everyone who says them and I think that there is a general consensus about what, in general, the terms mean and the space to self-identify. Some people are strongly against self-identification, and that is an acceptable stance. But their view doesn’t change my ability to self-identify or know who I am.

At a point, bickering over semantics is counterproductive and we (trans* spectrum and non-cisgender people) need to agree to disagree (to a degree) so that we can be allies with each other. Oppression olympics benefit no one, especially since there is always someone worse off than both people bickering over it, and the fact that someone else is “more oppressed” in no way invalidates one’s own experience.

(I use the asterisk as a ‘wild card’ to allow for a variety of endings/combinations. For example, veg*n is a stand-in for vegan and vegetarian…and other vegetable-spectrum foodies.)

I think it’s useful to differentiate so as to present a broad range of experience and to make room for many different kinds of people. I think/hope it’s possible to do it in a way that is not divisive, as well. ZB, I may fight with some trans people over terminology and erasure, I will always fight alongside trans people against oppression and discrimination. But (and I’m not suggesting either piny or Holly are advocating this), I don’t think the former should necessarily always be set aside, particularly internally, with an eye towards the latter for just some of the reasons triumphantmulatta outlines, above.

Yeah, I guess when it comes to this stuff — either feminism, or definitions of who “is” a woman or a man, or similar questions about legitimacy of trans people as trans people — I am usually in favor of multiplicity. So for instance, we don’t just talk about feminism as some kind of monolith that has consistent, universal properties that can be talked about in a straightforward way — we talk about feminisms, plural. Many different feminisms, with things in common and differences as well.

I think this approach works well when you’re also trying to bring in intersections of other kinds of experiences too — so for instance there are feminisms that are very particular to the experiences of women of color, or disabled women, or trans women, or Palestinian women, etc. And there are intersections between all of those as well. Is there really a need to “globalize” everything into one giant coherent lump? A plurality can be powerful too; a plurality can be clear, and have voice, and speak loudly on many issues, even as it also holds disagreement and different opinions and experiences.

I am much more suspicious of people who try to act as “defenders of the gates” insisting that something will be irrevocably lost, or political efforts destroyed, by including people with divergent opinions in what we call “feminism,” by including trans people when we say “women” or “men,” by including people who haven’t had any hormones or surgery as “trans.” I just don’t understand it sometimes.