Guest post: Reading Whipping Girl 5 – Who ISN’T Transgender?
Guest post by Lady Mondegreen
Time for another whipping of Whipping Girl. We’re on Chapter 1, Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality. As the title implies, it’s about terms, but Serano slips a lot of assumptions into the mix.
If you want to play along at home, we’re on pages 25 – 28.
Serano defines “transgender”–
While the word originally had a more narrow definition, since the 1990s it has been used primarily as an umbrella term to describe those who defy societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness;
Note that this definition would include Portia, Viola, Atticus Finch, Scout, me, and probably you, dear reader.
this includes people who are transsexual (those who live as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth), intersex…and genderqueer…as well as those whose gender expression differs from their anatomical or perceived sex (including crossdressers, drag performers, masculine women, feminine men, and so on). I will also sometimes use the synonymous term gender-variant to describe all people who are considered by others to deviate from societal norms of femaleness and maleness.
The far-reaching inclusiveness of the word “transgender” was purposely designed accommodate the many gender and sexual minorities who were excluded from the previous feminist and gay rights movements.
Excluded? No evidence is offered for this claim.
At the same time, its broadness can be highly problematic in that it often blurs or erases the distinctiveness of its constituents.
You don’t say.
The broadness of the term transgender is a conceptual mess. It confuses issues that should be considered clearly.
For example, while male crossdressers and transsexual men are both male-identified transgender people, these groups face a very different set of issues with regard to managing their gender difference….
Thus, the best way to reconcile the nebulous nature of the word is to recognize that it is primarily a political term, one that brings together disparate classes of people to fight for the common goal of ending all discrimination based on sex/gender variance….
Pay attention to the work the political term “transgender” does in trans discourse. Speaking of which–
Another point that is often overlooked in discussions about transgenderism is that many individuals who fall under the transgender umbrella choose not to identify with the term
O really?
For example, many intersex people reject the term because their condition is about physical sex (not gender) and the primary issues they face (e.g., nonconsensual “normalizing” medical procedures during infancy or childhood) differ greatly from those of the greater transgender community.
Yet still Serano includes them within the “greater transgender community.” Here, buried in a dense forest of wordage, is an acknowledgement that intersex people are not trans and that they tend to reject the term.
This speaks to this ongoing tendency within trans politics to obfuscate the distinctions between sex and gender, as well as distinctions between actual physical differences or disorders and differences in personality or personal style.
The appropriation of intersex people’s reality and concerns is one example. When reading transactivists and their allies, pay attention to how often they use terms that belong properly to intersex people (e.g., the whole “assigned at birth” trope), and give mini-lectures about how not all people fit neatly into the biological categories male and female, however irrelevant that may be to the issue at hand.
Throughout this book, I will use the word trans to refer to people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something “wrong” with the sex they were assigned at birth [!] and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex…For many trans people, the fact that their appearances or behaviors may fall outside of societal gender norms is a very real issue, but one that is often seen as secondary to the cognitive dissonance that arises from the fact that their subconscious sex does not match their physical sex. This *gender dissonance* is usually experienced as a kind of emotional pain or sadness that grows more intense over time, sometimes reaching a point where it can become debilitating.
Serano doesn’t go into detail here about her claim that “many trans people” suffer from gender dissonance because of their “subconscious sex”, but she does discuss her own experience later in the book. I will get to that in another post.
I look at Serano’s constant (and politically convenient) conflation of “sex” with “gender”, and the garbage-can definition of “transgender” (which can easily include everyone, everywhere), and I suspect that she, and the trans movement as a whole, care less about understanding specific disorders that cause people pain than they do about promoting an ideology and maximizing their political clout. The more distinctions – sex/gender, female/male, persistent brain glitch/self-expression – are blurred, the harder it becomes to scrutinize the movement’s claims. And the larger the number of people who can be included under the trans umbrella, the bigger the shady bandwagon.
Serano’s quest to include everyone and his little genderqueer sibling under the trans umbrella continues on page 28:
[M]any of the above strategies and identities that trans people gravitate toward in order to relieve their gender dissonance are also shared by people who do not experience any discomfort with regards to their subconscious and physical sex. For example, some male-bodied [Why not just say *male*?] crossdressers spend much of their lives wishing they were actually female, while others see their crossdressing as simply a way to express a feminine side of their personalities.
Yet again, Serano claims both groups as “transgender”. She continues,
And while many trans people identify as genderqueer because it helps them make sense of their own experience of living in a world where their understanding of themselves differs so greatly from the way they are perceived by society, other people identify as genderqueer because, on a purely intellectual level, they question the validity of the binary gender system.
—HEAD.DESK—
Serano. People. You need to question more than the binary in “binary gender system”. You should not be promulgating and supporting gender by confusing it with sex.
As long as you do that, you are saying, “Yes, some people are male and belong to GENDER MALE (masculine), and some others are female and are belong to GENDER FEMALE (feminine), but me, I don’t.” You’ve simply made a show of opting out of it. As a privileged child of the West, this is easy for you, and it telegraphs your specialness to your friends, but the problem remains.
Let’s say there exists a binary system of stereotypes widely applied to the two most popular household pets. Something like this:
Cats are: cruel, selfish, beautiful
Dogs are: friendly, cheerful, stupid
Say you think these stereotypes are wrong, reductive, unfair, and harmful.
Say your response to this state of affairs is to proclaim
MY COMPANION ANIMAL IS PETQUEER!
Tell me how that helps matters, because I don’t see it.
Holy. Hell. Holy hell. My brain hurts.
We’re still in Chapter 1? ::cries::
Oh well, at least Serano defines me as trans, so I can shed that horrid term cis. In fact, the whole argument proves that none of us are cis, so labeling anyone as cis is transphobic, I’m sure of it!
I am a heterosexual male and have never considered myself to be anything but; I am also married to a heterosexual female who has never considered herself to be anything else. However, I do around 90% of all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, etc., all of which are traditionally considered to be the woman’s role, and I am perfectly happy doing what I do and do not feel at all feminised by taking on these tasks. However, according to the above quote I am clearly transgender, yet I am certain that I’m not.
So, am I in denial? If so, is my insistence that I am male (I refuse to call myself – or anybody else – cis; such an unnecessary prefix) transphobic?
It’s all so confusing.
Does not liking sports, being made uncomfortable by “locker-room” humour, tending to cry at emotionally-charged moments, and preferring cats to dogs, make me trans or genderqueer or something? Because up until this moment I would have thought I was unambiguously cis-male. (Not that I care — there’s an unhealthy obsession with labels going around)
You get to be trans–and YOU get to be trans–and YOU get to be trans–
EVERYONE HERE IS TRANS!!!
Steve, the opposite side of my ‘gender-coin’ (is that even a thing? It is now!) is that I like some sports, used to play rugby union and also boxed at middleweight, am bemused by locker-room talk (or banter, as in the ‘It’s just a bit of bantz’ defence uttered by areseholes unaware that they’re arseholes) don’t cry very easily, have always owned dogs and am ambivalent about cats.
So where the Hell does that place me on the great gender merry-go-round? Am I -fluid, -neutral?
For many non-trans people, the fact that their appearance or behaviors may fall outside of social gender norms is a very real issue.
In fact, it can generate loathing among parents, friends, teachers, siblings, television talk show hosts, and right wing pundits. It can lead to abuse and shunning, contempt and other nasty things.
It seems to me that trans* people and right-wingers are the main people trying to enforce the gender binary; the rest of us are trying to dissolve these artificial barriers between the sexes that lead people to have problems with their gender (not to be confused with body dysphoria).
But what would I know? I’m cis, or so I’m proclaimed, so I must be comfortable with my gender roles. If not, I would be trans, right?
Thank you for writing these posts, and highlighting the problematic parts of this book. And also thanks for the pet analogy–I find it pretty helpful (we’ll see if it works on anyone else).
‘their own experience of living in a world where their understanding of themselves differs so greatly from the way they are perceived by society’
Another experience that no single person in the modern and postmodern world can avoid–Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man is valuable on this subject. And another example where gender isn’t the only way this works. I still imagine myself as the slim young androgynous person I used to be, instead of the fat late-middle-aged woman that everyone else sees now–sometimes (like when buying clothes) I am completely aware of this; sometimes it catches me by surprise.
Within my own lifetime, gender stereotyping has been bad enough that long hair was ‘read’ as female, even when it was the hair of an obvious XY person like me. So I can be conscripted into ‘transness’ whenever Serrano finds it convenient?
This, to me, shows a basic flaw in the reasoning employed by many trans activists, in addition to the constant conflation of terms. They recognise that there is a problem with placing people in a behavioural box on the basis of their anatomy, but bafflingly the issue they take with that process is that the two resulting boxes are insufficient. Never mind that anatomy should not be taken as indicative of behaviour at all, we need moar boxes!
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Trans activists claim to challenge the gender binary, but fail to see that societal notions of masculinity and femininity are the twin suns around which their myriad labels orbit.
Hmmm.
Discomfort with the female gender role was a large feature of my adolescence in the late 70s/early 80s. That discomfort made me a feminist – yet by Serrano’s definition I would fall under the trans* umbrella.
This is where I think the coopting of young people’s struggle against gender conformity into a, “you must be trans” narrative seems to me really fucking damaging. I grew up in feminism with female role models who were lesbian, straight and bi, butch, femme, somewhere in between. What united us was the resentment felt about the social role we were expected to play and the experience of being a member of the political class expected to perform reproductive labour – and all the crap that goes with that. We didn’t think we had the exact same experiences, or upbringings – especially, contrary to the modern rewriting of feminist history – if we were of different cultures or ethnicities.
You can’t say any of that about the trans* movement. It defies a political analysis simply because it is an umbrella term for a widely disparate group of interests. It may be a social movement, but it isn’t, and can’t be, a political force because there is no single focus or goal. And that is a problem when we are asked to centre trans’ concerns within the feminist movement. Feminism is about working for the equality of a specific class of people – those expected to do reproductive labour based on their biology. Trans* people have their own fight – for the equality of trans* people. Sometimes that fight aligns with feminism, sometimes it is opposed to it. Blurring the two does no favours for either. And when transactivists start telling “cis” women what terms they are allowed to use, what experiences it is valid to share it becomes positively harmful.
Acolyte of Sagan @6: Yes, I guess we’re somewhere in the middle of the… GENDER SPECTRUM. 100% of people fail to conform to their society’s assumptions and expectations of gender in some ways or other.
—–
The conflation (or outright confusion) of “sex” and “gender” has bugged me for a long time. But I never noticed it in “assigned male (or female) at birth.” Because except for intersex people, whose anatomy might be ambiguous, presumably what babies are “assigned” is a gender (assumed by society), not a sex (written in the anatomy). Assigned BOY at birth, assigned GIRL at birth.
@John the Drunkard #9
Of course you know there’s a Simpsons for that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_taveZC0Iqk
Obvious? Are you being TERFy now? Just because you look male to most other people, are we to assume you are in fact male? Before you tell us what pronouns you want to use?
Yesterday I read this (year old) post from Feminist Current. It’s relevant here:
“Unlike second-wave feminists, who advocated for women to unite collectively under the banner of feminism, queer theorist Judith Butler touted “disidentification” as a politically progressive act. In 1993, Butler argued that women should “collectively disidentify” with other members of the female sex as a means to “queer” the category of sex itself. Over 20 years later, Butler’s vision has come to eerie fruition, as women proudly proclaim they have nothing in common with other females.
“Butler’s bizarre, seemingly-antifeminist political prescriptions make sense in the context of her wider political project. In her two main works on gender theory, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Butler theorizes that gender is not oppressive due to the sexist, hierarchical stereotypes attached to masculinity and femininity, but because of its binary nature, which she says “violently excludes” those who fall outside the “margins” of the gender binary. For Butler, homosexuality can be equally as “exclusionary” and in need of “deconstruction” as heterosexuality, as both are binary terms that “cruelly erase” other sexualities, such as bisexuality. Butler’s overarching political aim is to render marginalization impossible by making all social categories “inclusive.” This appears to have been achieved in a way, today, as we see the melding together of all categories of sexual orientation into the amorphous “queer.” (Oddly, oppression still exists, despite this magical rewording.)”
http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/08/10/coming-non-binary-throws-women-bus/
And once again, what does it even mean to be “gender non-conforming”, “defy[ing] societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness” etc. if the only thing that makes you “male” or “female” in the first place are the gender norms as well as societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness etc. you conform to?
In the absence of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers the only way these people can claim to be “women” or “female” is to argue that something else makes them “women” or “female”, more specifically something about their way of thinking/feeling/behaving, which brings us back to the old gender norms as well as societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness etc.
But it goes further than that: After all, these people aren’t content to be called the same as the people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers; they want to be the same, which is why they have to argue that the “something else” that makes them “women” is in fact the only thing that makes anybody a woman, including the the people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers. This is why the whole TERF-wars are ultimately not just about whether or not *trans people should be free to define who they are, but whether or not they get to define who the people with physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers are as well.
How does the fact (or acceptance or assumption of) homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories “erase” bisexuality? Here I am, accepting or assuming that homosexual and heterosexual are categories AND acceptoing that bisexual is ALSO a category. I didn’t “erase” anyone (cruelly or otherwise). I think maybe I’m not a thinky enough thinker.
Lady Mondegreen’s and Ben’s comments remind me of something I’m confused about, that maybe someone here can help to clarify. How is sexual orientation supposed to be related to trans- and cis- ? It seems to me like whether you ‘are’ a man or a woman and who you find sexually attractive have nothing to do with each other. I do recall having read both personal anecdotes and research suggesting that, basically, some people would rather be trans than gay; presumably some people who find themselves attracted to their own sex interpret this experience as meaning that they must ‘actually’ be the other sex, to make the world make sense to them. But of course there are plenty of gay trans people, so that can’t be the whole story.
@guest #19
You’re basically right, guest. Theoretically, in trans terms, you can be “cis” or trans and be gay, bi, straight, etc. The categories are separate.
There are a few complications. One happens when a trans person is attracted to people of the sex he or she has trans-ed to. Before transition, they’d have been called straight, if you follow me. Gender critical meanies may still call them straight, while they call themselves lesbian or gay. Researchers might avoid the sticky wicket by classifying them as “androphiles” or “gynephiles”.
There is a theory, held by Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence, that some very feminine gay men transition to trans women, mainly (according to the theory) because they think it will increase their chances of forming sexual relationships with men, specifically straight men. (And part of THAT is based in the fact that there’s a fair amount of contempt, in the gay community, for “twinks.”)
Then there are all the young people who think they may be trans because they have lesbian/gay feelings
and/or tend to be gender nonconforming. In my opinion, when such kids transition, they’re victims of the current social contagion.
Hope this helps–or at least doesn’t leave you more confused!
What happens (in trans theory) if I (a straight, cis man) am married to a straight cis woman who decides/discovers/realizes that she’s trans and is a man? If I still love my spouse and we still have a romantic relationship, am I now gay (or bisexual)? It seems that trans theory must say I am (I am attracted to a man, after all). But how can my spouse’s inner identity change mine?
Re. gay/straight vs. trans/cis, there is also the question of what if even means to be “gay” or “straight” if words like “man” and “woman” no longer refer to anything physical.
Sorry for still flogging this dead horse, but as far as I’m concerned the word “man₁” is just a convenient short-hand for “person with innate physical traits more representative of sperm-producers than egg-producers”* while “woman₁” is short-hand for “person with innate physical traits more representative of egg-producers than sperm-producers”. In Genderspeak, on the other hand, “man₂” means something like “person who thinks/feels/behaves in ways P,Q,R etc.” while “woman₂” means “person who thinks/feels/behaves in ways X,Y,Z etc.”
Straight men and lesbian women are attracted to women₁ while straight women and gay men are attracted to men₁. Substituting women₁/men₁ for women₂/men₂ respectively makes that last sentence no longer true. But this idea that you can become the kind of person that [insert either “straight men and lesbian women” or “straight women and gay men”] are attracted to – even without surgery – just as long as your’re called the same, is another example of the belief in word-magic I’ve been talking about.
*This is certainly the only sense in which I am a “man”. If being a “man” – or any other “gender” – says anything about what’s going on inside my head, that makes me – and I strongly suspect most readers of B&W – agender (and hence also part of the *trans spectrum?)
That’s it. Yes. That’s what I didn’t understand or know how to express.
Italics fail at #20–I just meant to italicize “more”.
I recall there being some outrage a while back about lesbians who didn’t want to have sex with people with penises, even when those people called themselves women. (In keeping with a running theme, I don’t recall there being corresponding outrage about the preferences of men of any sexual orientation.)
Bjarte, ‘word-magic’ brings to mind the set of rules (beliefs?) that were spelled out in one of the Thunderdome threads over at PZ’s concerning transwomen, with or without surgical realignment. Basically, a transwoman does have a vagina and clitoris (that penis and scrotum is just an illusion), should have access to abortion services (why, ffs?), can get pregnant, can have periods and require the related sanitary products, and so on.
Maybe the thinking is less magic and more wishful. I’ve no problem with people calling themselves whatever they want, but for Gawd’s sake try and stay tethered to reality. Oh, and please could they stop insisting we all buy into the fantasy – that’s the job of fundamental religion.
It depends on who you talk to. For my money, I’d say you’re still straight for the simple fact that you’re still a male who is attracted to the female body. On the other hand, a shouty trans activist would indeed declare you to be gay, because the object of your attraction has declared themselves male. If you were to point out that you still regard the female body attractive, after they have stopped screaming at you for implying that there is such a thing as a female body, they will perhaps say that you are bisexual or – that nebulous catch-all – queer. Possibly pansexual.
If your spouse were to switch back and forth between man and woman, then a) she would be declared any number of terms such as fluidgender, genderqueer and the like, and b) the odds of you being declared bisexual, queer, pansexual – or perhaps something even more nebulous and exotic – go way up.
Oh and if for some reason you ever find yourself failing to be attracted to a trans person, regardless of what their biological sex may appear to be, you can bet you will be declared transphobic.
#25
I remember seeing that spill into the comment section of this thread on lousycanuck’s old freethoughtblogs site, a little before The Sundering. Search for ‘cotton ceiling’ or ‘lily cade’ to find the start of that tangent.
And, holy shit, look at all that snide arseholery. This is what PZ’s ‘tear all wrong people to shreds’ comment policy encouraged.
So the theory is as incoherent as I feared? Because before I can declare (or even know!) my own inner, subjective identity, I’d have to know the inner, subjective identity of everyone I was attracted to? And because those subjective identities are not necessarily obvious to an outside observer and are so often (?) untethered to biology, how can anyone know their own inner, subjective identity?
Holms @ 27 – after the sundering actually. That’s dated September 23, I left in early August.
I suspect Holms is referring to the creation of Orbit and its siphoning of a large number of FtB bloggers.
Oops, that should be “its”, and I should have noted that the siphoned included Lousy Canuck. Sigh. It’s (double check, yes, OK) been a long day.
But the siphoning on the other hand was a good deal later. You just can’t win!
It seems bit of a stretch to pretend that definition of transgender as described is broad enough to include everyone (including cis people), especially seeing as it is followed up by a list of groups included, and therefore by omission those excluded from it. And definitions being about usage it’s hardly useful to criticise someone for laying out how a word is used. I mean that’s how the term transgender *is* often used! And there seems to be some misunderstanding on the usage of “male-bodied” and “male” as conflating sex and gender: instead that is conscious decision to use male/female as adjective forms of man/woman due to anti-trans rhetoric describing trans people’s bodies as male or female as assigned at birth and ignoring changes to sexed characteristics for instance during and after transition. Now I see how that leaves gaps in terminology, but more nuance or different language doesn’t equate to a conflation of sex and gender, since in this instance is more of a political decision taking into account the fact that “biological sex” is itself (scientifically) a nonbinary distribution the binary demarcation of which is socially constructed on top of the underlying more complex reality, just as gender still has biological associations despite being largely arbitrarily and artificially socially constructed.
=8)-DX