Comments on: By Any Other Name

By: Blogaround: The Transphobia Brouhaha « Gender Goggles

Blogaround: The Transphobia Brouhaha « Gender Goggles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:05:42 +0000

[...] Next?>: the Focus on the Family transphobia post with errant comment thread on Feministing* [2]By Any Other Name: transmisogyny post with errant comment thread at Feministe [3] Bathroom panic, it’s totally [...]

By: voz

voz — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:09:21 +0000

Oppanox, thank you. I am sorry if I offended the ppl respectin the discussion here.

u should also kno, that the publication, nerve, has a bad history with dealing with trans women.

http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Newitz/trannychaser/

this pub has a history, and it aint good.

By: The Opoponax

The Opoponax — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:55:02 +0000

voz, just FYI, Elaine is a troll who only ever comes around to pontificate about not taking hormonal birth control or how everyone should be vegan. Feel free to ignore her.

By: voz

voz — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:35:05 +0000

Elaine, my name is voz, not vox. I am Latina, not Latin. Believe it or not, there is a difference.

Maybe you should take a lil time to step aside and learn why ur behavior is so upsetting, instead of boring us with ur justications for bad behavior, and o so edgy misspelling of my name.

By: voz

voz — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:25:44 +0000

Elaine, shut the fuck up. Please. Just Stop Makin It All about the Cis.

A completely agree with Lucy, and I would like to add the exotification factor in as well.

The trope of the Mysterious Other is at the root of much misappropriation of minority concerns.

The Magical Negro
The Hot and Spicy Latina (u kno ur Latina is ppl treat u like a chili pepper in language)
and The Trans Woman who pays dearly to teach some stupid cisperson a lesson that they promptly and publicly misuse.

We have heard it all before. Move along. Move along.

By: Elaine Vigneault

Elaine Vigneault — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:26:07 +0000

piny, you asked “But how is it an improvement to treat your reproductive potential as punishment for somebody else?”
I think you misinterpreted my statement. I said nothing about punishment or morality. I talked about responsibility. If a guy I slept with didn’t want me to get pregnant, he needed to do his damn best to prevent that. I never implied that a child was a punishment. You made that inference yourself.

vox, sorry if the conversation derailed. I thought it was just as much or more about the word “cunt” and BC and bodies as it was about trans people. I thought it was all intertwined.

By: piny

piny — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:18:52 +0000

Lucy, that’s a really good way of summing up the dynamic in the article. Thank you. Tourism makes a lot of sense. And Ryan felt free to take what he liked and leave the rest.

Re: Gender Third: I understand how tempting it can be to feel like the constant abuse and brutality has some sort of higher purpose, but…the jester model is not revolutionary. A society that contains critique and difference to that extent is a deeply reactionary society. Jesters had a formal position back in the feudal system. They didn’t challenge the omnipotence of the King. They symbolized it.

By: queen emily

queen emily — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:45:39 +0000

@GG you mean you’re *not* here to show cis people the way to enlightenment, or to serve as a super ace rhetorical model for some feminist and queer writers to break apart teh Gender Binary?

For shame. Me, I stand on the corner doling out fresh lingo for Proper Real People tm to spice up their lives with.

By: GallingGalla

GallingGalla — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:24:24 +0000

@lucy, agreed. he’s turning Diamond into a shaman to give him a Great Consciousness-Expanding Experience, which dehumanizes Diamond. white cis ppl do this a lot, both on the basis of race and gender identity.

what saddens me is how some pretty well-known trans* folk also engage in this; writers like feinberg, bornstein, and bernstein-sycamore position us as Speshul Spiritual Representatives In Communication With The Gods, or Grand Court Jesters of Gender, or The Vanguard of the Binary-Smashing Revolution, when really we are trying to live our lives in peace and in one piece. but i guess this is one of the things that happen when we are colonized by cis ppl.

By: Lucy

Lucy — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:22:19 +0000

So, if we’ve moved beyond the usual cis fail on a trans topic can we get back to the article?

Ryan has written the article as if he’s a tourist who went to a foreign country and came back speaking with their accent and don’t they have such interesting customs there? He met this really beautiful, exotic woman there who taught him an Important Life Lesson. Haven’t we read this story before?

The whole article fails if we don’t engage in Ryan othering of Diamond as outside of our (presumably) shared experience. If we instead see her as a student just struggling to get an education while dealing with the realities of growing up as a trans woman of colour in a racist, sexist, transphobic society, the whole thing falls apart. It works only by engaging in the superficiality of life tourism. Like Laura said above, I really wish this had been written by Diamond instead.