LGBT – Page 10 – Wis[s]e Words

“It’s just a boy mind in a girl body”

Published on May 22, 20123 Comments

Via MeFi, the touching story of a four year old girl who was sure he was actually a four year old boy and whose parents were sensible enough to believe him:

They took Kathryn to a psychologist outside of Philadelphia who specializes in treating the transgendered. Michele Angello confirmed what Jean had long suspected: Kathryn had gender dysphoria. She recommended that Kathryn be allowed to live as a boy, a prospect that filled Stephen with dread but his 4-year-old with elation.

Kathryn wanted to be called “he” right away. And Kathryn wanted to be called Talon, then Isaac, but finally settled on a permanent boy’s name in the fall. (The Post is using Tyler, the name his parents say they would have given him if he’d been born a boy.)

“When we finally let Tyler shop in the boys’ clothing department, it was like the skies opened up,” Jean said.

They switched to saying he/him/his and stopped using the name “Kathryn” at home.

It was a huge upheaval, a change Jean and Stephen had to remind themselves of every day. Then came the next challenge: telling family, friends, teachers and other parents that their daughter had become their son.

Spoiler: their family, friends and wider environment reacted admirably to this change.

Progress is made from stories like this; it wasn’t too long ago that the only newspaper articles you saw about transgendered/genderqueer people were about their horrific murders. In the last decade there seems to have been a decided swing towards acceptance of transgendered and genderqueer people, though of course they’re still some way away from even having the same sort of acceptance as gay people have now. Nevertheless, real progress has been made and one of my pet theories (it could be bunnies) is that the continuing struggle for gay marriage has something to do with this wider acceptance, in that it has kept both queer people and the idea that actually, you know, they’re rather normal people and not horrible horrible freaks leading a deviant lifestyle in front of the public consciousness. Only a committed bigot could’ve seen those pictures of happy gay and lesbian couples getting married and not felt some sympathy.

But while transgendered people are finally getting some acceptance, the idea of transgendered children is still strange for many people. Our gut instincts tell us that four year old children can’t possibly understand gender dysmorphia or being transgender, that “indulging” children in changing their gender is a bad idea, especially when such scary terms as “puberty blockers”, drugs to delay the onset of puberty to make it easier to undergo the full physical transition towards a new gender, are thrown about. That we really feel is wrong; and by we, I mean I and this squirrel in my pocket.

We’re wrong though; in the Metafilter discussion one commenter linked to this scientific study on “clinical management of gender identity disorder in adolescents”. This argues and provides some proof that yes, it is worthwhile to get younger children and adolescents to start transitioning, to put them on puberty suppressing drugs rather than start transitioning when legally and physically adults, as transitioning this way is much more likely to be successful in the short and long term both:

It is conceivable that lowering the age limit increases the incidence of ‘false positives’. However, it most certainly results in high percentages of individuals who more easily pass into the opposite gender role than when treatment commenced well after the development of secondary characteristics. This implies an improvement in the quality of life in these individuals, but may also result in a lower incidence of transsexuals with postoperative regrets or poor postoperative functioning. Clinically, it is known that some patients who were treated in adulthood regret SR because they have never been able to function inconspicuously in the opposite gender role. This holds especially for MFs, because beard growth and voice breaking give so many of them a never disappearing masculine appearance. But, since the number of ‘false positives’ should be kept as small as possible, the diagnostic procedure should be carried out with great care. Until now, no patients who started treatment before 18 years have regretted their choice for SR.

In situations like this we are inclined to treat the probability of a “false positive”, somebody who starts transition when “not really” transgendered as much greater and much more serious than the damages that are done or might be done by not allowing somebody to transition or to transition too late. We worry too much about “man bites dog” to see that “dog bites man” is much more common.

Lola

Published on May 16, 20121 Comment

There’s an interesting discussion about “Lola” on Andrew Hickey’s blog, mainly about whether or not it’s problematic in its depiction of trans people:

I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of

Which might just be laying too much weight on what’s largely an ironic song gently mocking a young boy having his first encounter with what I always thought was a male transvestite, what with the last line of the song being “But I know what I am I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola”. It’s the old story of boy meets girl, boy discovers girl is also a boy, boy discovers he couldn’t care less: well, nobody’s perfect.

If you look at it unfavourably, I guess you could say that it enacts that hoary old homo and transphobic fear of straight men being “tricked” into having sex with somebody who’s “really” a man, something that used to be a staple of bad American raunch comedies (or even the Police Academy series).

But I think that’s completely missing the point of “Lola”, which is really about love conquering all, gender not mattering and becoming fluid anyway (“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola”). It’s all done with a wink and a smile, but at its heart it is accepting of trans people more than you could say it is damaging.

How hard is it to be polite?

Published on January 26, 2012Leave a comment

It’s steam engine time when it’s time for steam engines and right now it seems to be “being creepy around transgendered people” time. This time it’s a Canadian gay and lesbian magazine ignoring one person’s request to address they with the pronoun of their choice:

It started in November when Xtra refused to honour artist Elisha Lim’s request to be referred to by the pronoun “they.” Although the magazine did run a story quoting Lim saying these words, it would not honour the pronoun switch. A few weeks later Xtra interviewed Lexi Tronic, a trans and sex worker’s rights activists. Edmontonians may remember her for the time she spent hosting weekly drag shows here and others might have caught her as one of the original stars of Showcase’s breakthrough sex series KinK. The story’s editor, Danny Glenwright, decided to share the story on his personal Facebook wall and when he did so he added Tronic’s birth name. Tronic was naturally uncomfortable with this, especially since it turned out the two had known each other since childhood in Winnipeg and shared many acquaintances. Glenwright, an editor at an LGBTQ paper, claimed he didn’t know sharing the birth name of a trans person was a faux pas, which would mostly be OK if he had just removed it after Tronic asked. Instead he defended himself profusely, used the creepy “some of my best friends are trans!” argument and basically reacted in a variety of transphobic ways.

Among the excuses offered for this faux pas has been the argument that singular they isn’t good English, an ugly neologism that’ll confuse readers. Something that, as the Wikipedia article on singular they shows, would be news to some of the greatest English language writers:

Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock! — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
That’s always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Caesar: “No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.” / Cleopatra: “But they do get killed”. — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)

Even if this argument did hold merit, surely a basic politeness should trump a rigid adherence to inadequate grammar rules? If it is all that confusing, just explain it up front. There seems to be a certain mulish willingness here to cause offence, an anger at people being so awkward as to insist to want their identity represented a certain way, something a bit surprising in a magazine for people who quite likely have some experience at being misrepresented… It’s not active malice perhaps, but more the sort of stupidity you get when you do something dumb and insensitive, get called upon and get angry about being shown your errors. It’s a trap progressive people especially can fall in when we do say something unwittingly racist/sexist/othering, because it’s obvious we’re not bigots and how dare people assume we are!

It shouldn’t be hard to be polite and respect the wishes of others about how they would like to be addressed, but we can get right nowty when we do get it wrong and are corrected, something I still struggle with myself.

Get it out of your cis-tem

Published on January 23, 2012Leave a comment

It’s been somewhat depressing to see how fast a Metafilter post on the obstacles put in the way of (young) transgendered people wanting to start transition can dissolve into a food fight about the use of “cisgendered” as the opposite of “transgendered” and how unreasonably angry it makes some people. I expected different from MeFi, which is both fairly liberal and hip and open to all kinds of people.

It all started with a post paying attention to a problem many young transgendered people face: continuous societal pressure not to start transition, to start living life as a member of the gender they feel themselves to be. As one commenter put it, “the entire foundation of transsexual health care is to protect cis people from making a terrible mistake, rather than to help trans people transition with as little added pain as possible”. It is a huge problem, because it means many more trans people are stuck with the wrong gender for longer than necessary, all to avoid the much rare false positives, those cases where somebody believes they are trans, but are wrong, before they’ve made an “irrevocable mistake”. It’s not necessarily done out of malice, more out of a sort of twisted interpretation of the Hippocratic oath of first do no harm.

A nice meaty and important subject for Metafilter, but within a few posts it was disrupted by people annoyed at the use of the terms “cisgendered” and “cis” to mean non-transgendered people. Some just objected because it was supposedly bad English, or because they disliked neologisms, others because they disliked having politicalised language forced on them, or because it “othered” them or they didn’t recognise themselves in the label. It really was derailing 101 in action.

Truth of the matter is that yes, while but “cis” and “trans” are imperfect labels (for starters, they imply a binary opposition between themselves, rather than a spectrum of possibilities between being fully trans or fully cis gendered), they are the closest we have to non judgmental, neutral terms for these conditions. Anything else is either a slur, or unwieldy to use, or both. And of course we’re all special little snowflakes unable to be caught by any label, but it can be very handy in political debates to have these kinds of easy to understand, easy to use, non-insulting terms to use to groups of people that have something in common important in the context of the debate. Nobody should feel insulted by being called cis.

I certainly don’t.

Radical feminism and the transgender woman

Published on January 18, 20121 Comment

Radical feminism is a form of feminism that’s, to put it politely, black and white in its view of the battle of the sexes, black and white enough to be able to use that outdated term with a straight face here. Radical feminism attempts to reject all gender roles and anything that smacks of sexual essentialism — men drive like this, but women drive like that — and argues that all such roles are socially defined, part of an overarching male dominated value system that defines women as inferior and which glorifies those characteristics that are stereotypically male and pillorises those that are stereotypically female. The breakdown of these structures and existentialist gender roles is what radical feminism attempts to do.

And if anything breaks down existentialist gender roles, it should be transgender people, shouldn’t it? What after all shows the idiocity of gender existentialism more than somebody who by their very existence shows that physical sexual characteristics does not a man or woman make, that you can be born and raised a man yet know yourself to be a woman or vice versa, let alone those who know themselves to be neither, or both, or something else entirely?

Yet radical feminism has huge problems with this. On the one hand, it insists that transgendered people are victims of exactly the patriarchial society they’re fighting against, confused by the gender essentialist social roles that insist that if you like pink dresses and My Little Pony you’re a girl, to the point that you’d use dangerous hormonal therapies and even surgery to change your physical gender, yet on the other hand it also insists that there’s no such thing as transgender women, just men masquarading as women (and vice versa). Both views are insulting and repulsive to say the least. Either you’re a duped and confused victim of social brainwashing, or you’re a hideous freak trying to fool real women you’re one of them.

This poisonous attitude is even on display in the writings of more moderate radical feminists, of those who have found that it is no longer possible to ignore or laugh off the “problem” of transgender. Which brings me to what inspired this post, radical feminist Nine Deuce’s sincere attempt to find some way in which transgender can be reconciled with radical feminism. She does this by stating her own position on the issue and seems to believe this should offer some way in which radical feminists can positively engage with transgender “activists”. Yet the bigotry is still palpable:

That there are people who feel so uncomfortable with the difference between their sexed bodies and their socialized conception of themselves that they would choose to risk deformity, death, and disability is to be deplored. Women have been conditioned to harm their own bodies in service of a social gender role grounded in misogyny and male supremacy. Radical feminism seeks an end to this practice. Women seeking surgery in order that their bodies will appear like male bodies, or men who undergo surgery in order that their bodies will present as female bodies, face huge psychological and physical risks and social ostracization. Adamantine gender roles are the source of the demand for these medical procedures and the dangers that attend them. Radical feminism also seeks an end to this practice.

That’s the idea of transgender women –transgender men not being of much interest to radical feminism, other options rejected entirely — as brainless victims having to be saved from themselves.

When trans activists bully radical feminists and attempt to force their way into women-only spaces, women should be angry and should speak up — and should express anger when they do speak up — but should do so responsibly and intelligently, so that the radical feminist perspective won’t be written off.

That’s the idea of transgender women as intruders, as charlatans pretending to be female in order to infiltrate “women-only spaces”. There’s a bit of projecting going on here as well, in an earlier comment Nine Deuce made:

Men absolutely loathe and fear trans people. Transmen are seen as intruders, but transwomen are seen as traitors. Men cannot understand why someone born male would choose to take on what they see as a subordinate position in society. It threatens their sense of order in a fundamental way.

Note that this is men, not some men or many men, but men. In Nine Deuce’s worldview, we all hate and loathe transgender men and women.

Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that this whole exercise is more about a way to improve radical feminism’s image as an ideology that is bigoted towards transgender people, without actually wanting to lose this bigotry, viz:

What cannot be allowed is for the public face of radical feminist theory to appear reactionary, and right now it does.

I think radical feminism has lost that battle. It was a product of second wave feminism, a separatist ideology that has long outlived any merit it once had. For younger women, who grew up in a world in which the ideals second wave feminists fought for have been largely realised and for whom gender and sexual identity has always been a much more fluid thing than radical feminism thought possible, it’s just not an attractive ideology anymore. It battles the wrong things and seems to have no answers to real problems facing women today, welded as it is to a view of gender that’s just as existentialist as the patriarchial system it tries to overthrow.