I think that it’s better to air the cisgender aversion and confusion along with the alliance and compassion than to suppress it.

There is a certain way that this comment section seems to me the mildest, most covert display of bias against transpeople–compared to the flesh-and-blood world off-blog.

It reminds me, a 30ish Black cisgender queer Southern woman, of talking with progressive white people about racism:

There’s enough comfort that I am calling them on their shit, or they are calling each other on their own shit, with each other’s permission, and yet I hold them to a higher standard of nt-being-a-hot-mess-ness than the average whitefolks I might meet for only a few minutes in an average day …

I guess the expectation of safety and comfort here is a bit high. It is a relief to find all the positive parts, though.

As for me and transfolks, I have been attracted to them (more FTM, but some MTF and genderqueer) and done activism with them, but not yet forged closer friendships with any of them– not anyone who was out and identifying as trans anyway.

For me, the worry when people are up in arms about the so-called butch attrition or the (MTF) transsexual menace, is feminism really. I worry that even if these transitions are properly done out of self-love and not self-hate, that the individuals transitioning will not be feminist or progressive in the social realm. We feminist cisgenders have to constantly ask ourselves, though, if we are being feminist and respecting human rights of transfolk.

I also worry about the racial and middle-class cultural biases I see in the pubic discourse about the gender and sexual roles or identities available. To top it off, the lived experiences of intersexfolk are elided in most of these conversations altogether!

The panic to identify everyone in a hierarchy etc. is at the root of so many social pleasures and destructive measures. We humans think if we can just simplify the world–just read the patterns– we can figure it all out or control it. I know everyday, I navigate people’s positions to search for allies, enemies, etc. It’s a way of short-term and individual survival that is not neccessarily a way for long-term thriving as a human community.

To me, however we all identify is always understood in the historical and social realm even if it has biological elements. Often the social power is in who can read us as what. In a week in the city streets, I may be read as a Black young man by cops, or a Black femme-of-center dyke by someone flirting, or a middle-class aspirant straight Black Latina Sunday school teacher and mother when I am hanging with my niece. In these situations,despite of my political consciousness and Southern hometraining, I only have so much control over how others read me, and only so much desire and time to correct everyone. Don’t get me started on the public readings of my beloved midlife soft butch partner with her broad shoulders and narrow hips.

I mean, we *are* all “carbon-based life forms” but there is not yet any outside human cultural history to measure against, so we have to remember cultural context. Part of me laments that a broader range of people is not celebrated and that cataloguing people is never neutral. Part of me laments that we cisgender feminists, lesbians, bisexual, and queer women have a lot to process to admit and attack our privilege!

One thing that help me to do this constant process is feminist science fiction (like _Life_ by Gwyneth Jones or most anything by Octavia Butler or _Filter House_by Nisi Shawl) and another thing is film. These media help reorient and vary the pathways set up earlier for what is possible and good. I want the basic human needs of every person to be met, as well as plenty of pleasure.

Thanks.

It’s unusual of course, and not something a lot of us growing up knowing anything about.

As Maggie (231) notes, we do not get to make judgements about others. As a gay man, I know that half of Americans find that unacceptably different, foreign, a “disqualification” of me as a person worth getting to know.

I do still think like Sparrow (I hate the idea of surgical changes to meet societal categories).

But I won’t let myself slip into judging and being part of the oppresor’s side. I’m sure nobody transitions before careful thought, and they know who they are inside more than I do.

To question their decision would be like people who still insist being gay is a choice – like I don’t know myself inside, know who I am.

The bittersweet side is that Chaz has the status and support to be a “Transitioning Star.” I wish all the non-celebrities going through this amazing passage could have at least a little support and understaning.

The trans people I have known are given about as much support as gays and lesbians were in the 1950s (i.e. none) – and that was in San Francisco and Boston, not in Alabama. Let’s stop judging.

The belief that being Jewish was innate, traceable through blood lines and genetically-determined “proclivities”, was absolutely no protection for 7 million in 1930s Europe.

You have a right to live as who you want to be (as long as you do no harm to others), regardless of the source of your identity. If we focused on that instead of proving our “normality” and ability to look like what the boxes say, we’d have a radical edge and a built-in constituency called the human race.

I caught a few minutes on one of those trashy Extra kind of TV shows a few nights ago, flipping through — apparently Chaz did a reality show at some point, and they repeated showed footage of him (or it is proper to say her if she was still identifying as a woman then? or did she ever identify as a woman, I don’t know) getting out of a hot-tub in a woman’s bathing suit, with an infuriating close-up of Chaz’s large breasts. Over it was running an interview with some loser on the reality show going on about how much Chaz hated his breasts, and the final line was “I hope she’s (sic) transitioning for the right reasons.” I screamed at the TV and clicked away.

We do NOT get to make these judgments for other people. Not identity, not lifestyle, not medical, not moral. NOT our right.

But not all ignorance or discomfort is judgment, and we need to parse out the distinction in order to create informed allies.

“…it is also becoming increasingly problematic to assume that grounding an identity in biology or ‘essential nature’ is a stable way of insulating it from societal interference. … Increasingly it is the conjecture that a particular trait is genetically or biologically based, not that it is ‘only cultural,’ that seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy in the technological institutions of the culture. … What whets these fantasies more dangerously [than the AIDS fueled vision of a world free of queer people], because more blandly, is the presentation, often in ostensibly or authentically gay-affirmative contexts, of biologically based ‘explanations’ for deviant behavior that are absolutely invariably couched in terms ‘excess,’ ‘deficiency,’ or ‘imbalance’ – whether in hormones, in the genetic material, or, as is currently fashionable, in the fetal endocrine environment. If I had ever, in any medium, seen any researcher or popularizer refer even once to any supposed gay-producing circumstance as the proper hormone balance, or the conducive endocrine environment for gay generation, I would be less chilled by the breezes of all this technological confidence. … In this unstable balance of assumptions between nature and culture, at any rate, under the overarching, relatively unchallenged aegis of a culture’s desire that gay people not be, there is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for a concept of gay origins.”

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (RIP), Epistemology of the Closet, 43.

I think in this context, her point about the resonance of a desire for elimination in both cultural and biological models of gay origins applies equally well to models of origin for transsexuality. Just because something is framed as innate, doesn’t mean that the framing itself won’t work in the service of eliminating it.

@ksbel6: Point taken! Imperfect science is better than no science. A flawed study, a misleading interpretation, a false presupposition, once they are laid out for the world to see, can be examined and corrected.

Also, they actually do have evidence that a male fetus can be changed into a female after brain development but before sexual organ development. Those studies came out in the mid 70s after women who became pregnant while on birth control were only giving birth to girls. During those times, birth control pills were still VERY high in estrogen and that extra estrogen sent the incorrect signals to the fetus. Those original studies have been repeated with the same results several times over the past 40 years.

I guess my point is, I was born this way. If the science ever becomes perfect, then great. Until then, when the APA publishes research that tells me what I already know, I will happily nod my head and say, “yep, that’s what I said.”