Educating Suzanne

There has been a spike in the ongoing stream of ignorant and transphobic sentiments from various people lucky enough to have a platform to express their views to a large audience over the last few days. A casual transphobic slur from Suzanne Moore seems to have sparked off a wave of apologism and defence of a worldview in which, somehow, cisgender feminists are threatened and oppressed by transgender people. In which the existence of gender reassignment surgery is bad for feminism, and in which it’s OK to make disparaging and vitriolic comments about the trans community in order to get your point across because, well, reasons. FEMINIST REASONS, YO

I’m not going to waste my time or yours pointing out that this is bullshit, that I’m angry or that people have been hurt by this. If you’re one of the half dozen readers of this blog, you know all that.

What I want to talk about is what we do about it.

Because Suzanne Moore didn’t mean any harm.

She didn’t.

She CAUSED harm, she exacerbated the harm she had done by refusing to accept that it was harm and reiterating the original harm done.

But she didn’t wake up one morning and think ‘Ho ho ho, I’m off to dehumanise a community I’m not altogether comfortable or informed about, and tomorrow I’ll drown some kittens and kick a pensioner!’

She did harm out of ignorance.

Which does not make it OK, but is important to factor into our response.

When someone is called out on transphobia, or any other breed of bigotry, they very rarely understand that they have learning to do. Because of the reactions to their comments, both negative and positive, they see themselves as courageous, controversial figures being attacked and rallied round by their detractors and allies respectively. This does not lead to a teachable frame of mind.

And the thing that always gets said about now is ‘but people can easily educate themselves about (in this case, trans issues). It’s not the responsibility of an oppressed minority to educate their oppressors.’

And I have a massive problem with that.

Because if you CAN educate, I think you should.

And if it’s never the job of the oppressed to educate, then it’s always the job of the privileged. By that argument, outside of official educational establishments, (which, as you know are packed to the RAFTERS with oppressed people in positions of authority, right?) only cis people should educate on trans issues. Only white people on race, only men on feminism.

If you are oppressed, but at the same time privileged enough to have a voice, a level of education/intelligence sufficient that you can express yourself effectively, and an audience, then you can be part of the solution.
No. You don’t have to, of course you don’t have to. And nobody wants to constantly be an educator on behalf of their minority. It’s a massive pain in the arse, sometimes.

But people who are ignorant, and, crucially, ignorant OF their ignorance – unconscious incompetence, I think it’s called, AKA ‘thinking you know it all’ – those people don’t seek to educate themselves. They don’t sign up to ‘awareness sessions’, they don’t read improving books, they don’t come humbly to the most appropriate person and respectfully beg for wisdom and insight any more than I, as a frustrated undiagnosed dyscalculic 12 year old, looked forward to maths lessons or sought out alternative learning styles. Instead, I ‘hated maths’. I resented my teachers, resisted their efforts and generally felt hounded. I didn’t think I needed maths, and I wanted nothing to do with it. As such I was not easy to teach, but thankfully, the school system managed to get past my resistance to impart just enough understanding for me to, in some small way, ‘get it’.

But people who ‘don’t get the trans thing’ aren’t forced to learn about it at school. If anything, their prejudices and misconceptions are strengthened and corroborated by those around them. There is no compulsory formal education about gender variance. The study of such is often viewed as a frivolous, newfangled subject for people to get meaningless PHDs in. In order to seek out this kind of learning, you have to be passionate about it.

In other words, the people who need the most education are the people who resist it the most.

That’s why being a teacher is hard. It’s not filling the vessel with knowledge that’s a challenge, it’s getting the lid off the jar.

And if you can’t do it, if it’s too painful, triggering, or something you simply don’t have time for, then don’t.

But if you can, teach.

Teach with patience, perseverance, in the face of resistance and resentment. Teach if you’re trans, teach if you’re cis. Teach if you can.

Fight discrimination with education.

It’s the only hope.

Being Come Out To: A Cis Perspective

I want to write a positive piece for this blog. Not bemoaning some transphobia I heard about, read about or witnessed, not debunking a cruel and ridiculous myth or challenging an institutional bigotry. There will be other days and other blog posts for that,

Instead I want to tell you something nice. I want to tell you what it’s like to find out someone you know is transgender. I don’t mean when they have transitioned and you didn’t know and they tell you, enormous compliment though it is to be trusted like that,

I mean when a kid, often, or a teenager, chooses to tell you that they’ve always felt that their assigned gender was the wrong one and they want to start living as themselves.

Because I meet these teenagers, often I’ve been asked to talk to them because a teacher is worried, or they’ve come, by choice, through the door to the lgbt youth group I help facilitate. I meet my friends’ kids who, knowing what I do are that bit more comfortable taking about sexuality and gender around me.

And so many of them are trying their hardest not to exist.
It’s like some kind of psychic camouflage. They sit, head tucked, speaking exactly enough that their silence won’t draw comment, letting everyone in just enough that nobody will think to delve deeper. Never quite meeting anyones’ eyes, hiding in plain sight.

And I’m not saying I’m some kind of Youth Whisperer who notices what nobody else does. I’m not. Most of the time I miss it too.
Unless they trust me enough to tell me.
And let me tell you, there is nothing more beautiful.

There is nothing more beautiful than the determined, confident gait, the cocked head, the fear acknowledged, still present but conquered for the moment, of a young person revealing who they truly are.
I’m not talking “I think I might be…” although that’s valid and brave and important too.
I’m talking “Screw it. Look: THIS is who I am.”
It’s like the bit at the end of Return To Oz where Ozma goes from being a flicker in a mirror to being a glorious and confident smiling queen of all she surveys.

It’s like watching a personality coalesce and solidify in front of you, seeing something leap out that was always there, suddenly being brought in on the optical illusion you thought was the real thing for so long.

I can’t possibly know what it’s like to be transgender. I recognize that. But I can know what it’s like from this end, when a trans* person allows me to see.

And if your child, your student, your patient, your social work case, your therapy client, your friend… tells you they’re transgender, it’s not pity you should feel, or anger, or concern. It is gratitude.

In Memoriam

This Transgender Day Of Remembrance, I’d like to tell you about Rachel, who died on the 6th of April 2010. She was 53 years old.

Rachel was a volunteer and service user at my workplace. She was kind, generous, sensitive and – once you got to know her – wickedly funny.
Rachel immediately made me feel welcome in my new office, and we bonded from the outset. A shared interest in creative writing, admiration for the work of Kate Bornstein, and a fondness for cutting asides (which were often missed by most of our colleagues) drew us together. We had a similar taste in clothes, but she was the more flamboyant in this regard, and I often envied her sense of style and the flair with which she wore her bold, bright colours.
Despite her stylish exterior, though, Rachel was always very down on herself. She was, in most social situations, incredibly introverted and shy, and carried herself rather as if she was constantly expecting to be kicked. Rachel suffered badly with stress and depression brought on by gender dysphoria, and by the judgements on her gender identity she knew were made by others around her.
Three days before her death, Rach emailed me in great distress. She had just undergone vocal cord surgery in Thailand and was feeling ill, depressed and isolated. We emailed back and forth for a while and then she stopped responding, which I put down to the fact that she was getting some much needed rest. A few days later I learned that she had suffered a massive heart attack and died.

Rach had multiple stress related health problems. While I was distraught to hear of her death, it was easy to see that the danger had always been there.
At her funeral, some guests misgendered my friend and used her old name. I know that it would have caused her such grief to hear that, and that those in her family who had come, at last, to acknowledge love her as her true self would have brought her such peace.
The stress caused by the operations she’d undergone, and the deep emotional distress I saw in her emails must, at last, have been too much. The Rachel I knew was a strong and vibrant woman who was true to herself and gracious everyone she met despite a constant onslaught of transphobia.
Rachel was like a warrior undergoing battle after battle. Although I hoped, each time, that she’d come home with more tales of narrow escapes and courageous confrontations, there was always that nagging fear that, one day, she wouldn’t.

The following is an extract from
Rachel’s final email to me. I believe that she’d be willing to share this part with you, as she had shared similar thoughts at the poetry open mic nights we went to together.

“When people stare at me and make their instant judgements I see what they see in their eyes, the attempt and the failure. The women feel smug because they have identified a flaw as they
perceive it and thus feel secure because this flaw distances them from what they see.”

I wish I could say that Rach was wrong, but as her friend I often saw the derisory looks and mouthed jokes aimed at her back. I saw the disgust, the fear, the hate.
Rachel was mocked, excluded, avoided – just for being who she was – by people who would call themselves open minded and unprejudiced.
When she died, our friendship had just begun to truly blossom. As much as I miss Rach, I miss the long and close camaraderie that we might have had, if things had been different.

In her last email to me, Rachel called me her sister. I was, and am, proud to call her mine.

On Trans People and the Male Privilege Accusation

There’s a thing I keep hearing about trans women. That they approach life with too much male privilege. That their assigned male upbringing informs their behaviour – in short they act like they have more rights than cis women and like the world somehow ‘owes’ them.

There’s a thing I keep hearing about trans men: That they are sort of abortive feminists: instead of joining the good fight for gender equality they have elected to break ranks and join the winning side. To identify as male purely to get their hands on some of that male privilege the trans women are having such a hard time letting go of.

Now. Odds are that you interact with and live in a society that glorifies the gender binary and, by and large, treats women worse than men. You will be aware of certain traits and roles that men and women respectively are ‘supposed’ to have and, if you’re reading this, you have probably questioned those gender role assumptions to some degree or other.

So it’s not a big leap to assume that if you were assigned male at birth, you had a different experience of being brought up than if you were assigned female at birth. If the former, you might have had more emphasis placed on your career choices. You might have been encouraged to be less emotionally expressive. If the latter, you might have experience d people having lower expectations of you. You might have found yourself more objectified and sexualised from a younger age. If, at some stage, you found that your gender identity was not what people had originally assumed it could be said that you were likely to have learned some of those ‘male’ or ‘female’ traits, withut even consciously realising that’s what they were.

This leads to an idea that trans women have something they shouldn’t and that trans men want something they shouldn’t have: male privilege.

I can see the allure of this idea. I can see why it’s got some traction. I know trans women with a confident, entitled manner and I can imagine that their upbringing contributed to this. I can totally see that being constantly told they were something they felt deeply and certainly that they were not absolutely infused them with privilege.

I know trans men who have gone from shy, withdrawn “girls“ to confident, cocky lads. High on massive societal approval showered on them when they came out as transgender, no doubt.

Here’s the thing. It is not wrong for a woman to have a sense of entitlement and self confidence. If, regardless of gender, you have been brought up to value yourself, that’s good. If you’ve been brought up to disregard others, that’s bad and you need to fix it but it’s got tit all to do with your gender. I hear women who call themselves feminists complaining –COMPLAINING!- that some women are too confident and assertive, because they are trans. “You’re not a proper woman, you’re not oppressed enough.” As well as being patently ridiculous (since when are trans women known for their high, oppression-free status in our society?) this is horribly misogynist. Why aren’t such ‘feminists’ looking at how ALL women can be more empowered, not how some women should be “taken down a peg or two”? Maybe that would be too radical?

The thing about trans men cynically exploiting the medical system to get hold of this elusive male privilege is equally surreal. Going by that trans woman male privilege idea, surely all trans men should be shy little mice who enjoy embroidery and self deprecation, no? All that female non-privilege should inform their every movement, and be totally insurmountable, right?

Then there’s the frankly bizarre supposition that trans men decide to be trans men. No. They are trans men. They decide to tell you that, or not as the case may be. It’s not a ploy to get privilege. If it was it would be the least well thought out privilege-getting ploy ever.

It’s almost like these people get angry whenever trans people display signs of happiness, empowerment and confidence. Classy.

Changing The Changing Rooms (or Transphobic Toilet Panic II)

Am I weird? Am I actually transphobic? Do I have internalized homophobia? Am I a massive prude?

What has sparked this cavalcade of doubt? The Jezebel post on the story about the complaints about a trans woman sharing a space with teenage girls.
This blog post came to my attention because of the outrage on Twitter about it. I don’t believe in linking to articles to point out how bad they are – (why send more traffic?) but it’s easily findable if you’re interested. The main criticism was that after calling out other coverage of the story on transphobia, the Jezebel writer repeatedly misgendered the trans woman involved. Accusations of sloppy and inaccurate reporting were also leveled by the twittersphere.
But, correctly or incorrectly, in the Jezebel version of events, the trans woman was walking around the communal changing space naked. She’s pre op, so her penis would have been visible.
I can actually see this being upsetting. As someone with (i hope) a nuanced and sensitive understanding of trans issues, this story raised a primal “someone showing their knob to teenagers aaarghhhhh” response. How much are we expecting of the teenage girls involved?

BUT BUT BUT in my other blog post about this I totally took that argument down: having a penis does not make you a rapist! so what’s going on, brain?

I think part of this stems from feelings about the inherent physical power imbalance at play here. A male assigned at birth adult and cis female teens. I think what bothers people here is that the power is perceived to be with the person with the larger frame and the penis. SHE is making the choice to be in that bathroom, and SHE is choosing her behaviour around those teenagers. Instead of the smaller, younger, vagina having people being in control. This perception is flawed in that a trans woman has far FAR less societal power than a cis man, or a cis woman, or a cis girl, but the physicality thing is a factor. For example, imagine an Assigned Female At Birth trans person asserting his right to change in front of a male sports team. Different vibe.
I believe that the answer to this lies in the education of the general population about trans issues, rather than the restriction and oppression of trans* people’s lives. But we have a long way to go.
Another issue with this story has been that the woman in question prefers women, leading to the horrible assumption that lesbian trans woman = cis straight man saying he’s trans to GET YOUR DAUGHTERS.
This nasty train of thought leads me to the question that if this trans woman’s sexual orientation is relevant in the changing room, why isn’t mine?
I see naked women in the changing room at the gym. It makes me feel uncomfortable and I often change in a cubicle and spend as little time in there as possible. I quite like the idea of being naked around other naked people in a queer friendly space, but in the palaca of heteronormativity that is the gym, it seriously gives me the creeps. Basically, my internal monologue goes “These women might be homophobic. I can see their bodies. If they knew I was queer they might freak out and I’m all naked and vulnerable right now!” add in some school PE changingroom PTSD (seriously, 5 years of twice weekly emotional/physical hell. Still have nightmares) and the one place where public nudity is acceptable becomes the least safe space EVER.
I think it’s this whole thing of “sex segregation = safety” that’s so deeply ingrained in our culture.
Once you question it, the false consciousness that assumes everyone to be straight and cis and assumes that men CAN’T CONTROL THEIR MALE URGES starts to crumble.
And with it, assumptions we didn’t even realise we had about ourselves come to the surface.
Something has to change.

Snarks And Reclamation

Disclaimer 1: In order to talk about homophobic and transphobic slurs, you kind of have to use homophobic and transphobic slurs. I’m not asterisking things out; I feel like that gives the words in question a “he who must not be named” type power.
So if reading slurs in this context is likely to upset you, now’s a good time to stop reading.

Disclaimer 2, This post is, in part, about the difficulties a trans ally can face. I know, I know. The poor, oppressed ickle cis girl. Privilege-o-rama. I’m not for a second forgetting that.

This is something I see from both ends. As a queer woman (some might say lesbian but “queer” is my preferred label if I’m wearing one) I don’t like hearing gay, queer, etc thrown around as negative slang.
As part of my job I talk to teenagers about why homophobia is bad, m’kay? One thing I talk about is how using gay to mean bad is homophobic even if you DON’T MEAN IT TO BE. Because if you know that “gay” means “same sex attraction”, that it hurts people for you to use their identity as an insult, and you STILL can’t be bothered finding a better way to express yourself, then you’re being homophobic.
At this point people often bring up reclamation – black people using the word “nigger/nigga” being a favourite example. Is it ok for white people who are part of a social group that includes black people who use “nigga” affectionately to join in with that? If so, the convoluted teenage logic goes, it’s ok for people who don’t regard themselves as homophobic to fling “gay” around like a verbal hand grenade. I can usually debunk that one in a matter of seconds, but it does raise an interesting point. As a kid said to me the other day “Say all my mates are gay, and we’re meeting at a gay pub, and I go in and say “Hello, you gayboys!”, and we ALL know it’s a big joke, I think that would be OK”
I had to agree with him. Not that it would be OK, but that, depending on the people there, it might be. But that generally, reclaiming was reserved for the people who were affected by the slurs in the first place (at which point another little smartase pointed out that I’d said that homophobia affects everyone. D’oh!)
Why this long and confusing preamble?
Tranny is why.
The word “tranny” and I have a complicated relationship.
It’s a slur. It’s used, horribly, against transgender people. It’s not ok for me to use “tranny”. Just like a white person saying “what up my niggaaas!?” I’m probably going to come off as unbelievably crass at best, nastily prejudiced at worst.
Here’s the thing, though. I would say that a slight majority of the trans people I am aware of in my social and work circles sometimes choose to reclaim it. One or two of them choose “tranny” as the word they identify as. I also know people in the transgender community who hate the word regardless of cobtext, who feel that there’s never a context when anyone can use it, regardless of what their gender identity might be. It’s been suggested to me that tranny is just too triggering to reclaim, and that the right of some not to hear the word trumps the right of others to identify themselves that way.
So I, as a cisgender person, have friends whose gender identity I fail to respect if I refuse to use “tranny” and friends whose history of oppression I fail to acknowledge if I agree to use it. It’s a weird head space to occupy.
Also, as someone who identifies as queer, I’m aware that I make some people who have had that word used against them uncomfortable.
But that’s the thing about reclaiming. It’s prickly. It hurts to pull words used in hate back and make them a source of strength. And for LGBT people, there’s the issue that practically all the words we use for ourselves are also used as slurs, or as pathologising diagnoses. ALL our words have to be reclaimed, and ALL our words have the potential to hurt us.
Like I said at the top of this post, I don’t believe in asterisking words out. I don’t believe in giving slurs the power that censoring lends them. I’m with (cis, white, rich, hetero male) George Carlin on this. There are no bad words. It’s context that makes them good or bad .
So I’m going to come down on the side of my trans friends who DO identify as “tranny”, and defend their right to do so even if that offends other trans people.
Which leaves me in the position of sometimes, just sometimes, saying, and defending “tranny”.
Which I have absolutely no right to do.
Ho hum.

On Transphobic Toilet Panic

There’s an ongoing debate, particularly heated in the USA. It goes like this: “Should transgender women who have a penis be allowed to use ladies’ toilets?”
Let’s get one thing out of the way: my opinion on that…

Yes. Of course they should.

However, many people would disagree with me there. One such is Roseanne Barr. Ms Barr feels that affording a trans lady the basic human right to curl one out in peace, her gender identity respected, is tantamount to having a penis waved in her and other (cis) women’s faces. Seriously. That’s her position.

So let’s deal with that first.
HOW MANY WOMEN IN PUBLIC BATHROOMS DO YOU THINK WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THEIR KNICKERS ROSEANNE?
seriously, we’re all just there to spend some quiet time getting slightly, temporarily lighter. Nobody is waving anything in anybody’s face. Least of all anybody dealing with transphobia and gender dysphoria every damn minute of her life. I mean, come ON.

But Roseanne isn’t worried about a trans woman literally waving her penis around, sticking it in the Airblade, pissing in the lady-sinks like they’re urinals. Not really.
Roseanne is worried about men coming into the ladies’ toilet with the intent to assault women.
Roseanne and those like her think of trans women as men.

Penis = man.
Man = rape risk.
Penis free zone = risk free zone.

So let’s go stage by stage here, so as not to get lost in the abyss of bullshit we’re staring into.

1) Trans women aren’t men.
2) Having a penis doesn’t make you a rapist.
3) Having a (home grown) vagina doesn’t make you unable to assault people.
4)Trans women aren’t men.
Clear?

An issue Ms Barr likely hasn’t even begun to consider is that there are people who don’t identify as a gender catered for by single sex bathrooms. There are people who are only just taking their first steps toward transition. There are genderqueer people and people to whom gender is an irrelevancy. The either/or culture of public toilets, changingrooms etc. hurts all these people.
So, why not gender neutral toilets?
The reason usually given is that some cis males rape and assault women, and some women feel safer going into a female only space like a toilet if they feel threatened by some creeper. Knowing that the guy isn’t allowed to follow them in there gives them a sense if security gender neutral toilets would erode.
Here’s the thing. HE ISN’T ALLOWED TO RAPE YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE. you REALLY think a picture of a bald woman with one leg is going to stop a determined attacker? I’m sorry to tell you this, but gender segregation doesn’t tend to make for a happier, more liberated society. The safety you feel in a room with a sign that says men can’t come in is false.
Assaults happen in ladies’ toilets. you can be assaulted by a cis woman, or by a bloke who’s come in after you. Assaults on cis women by trans women? In a ladies’ toilet?
Not.
One.
Case.
The reverse? Quite a few.
I believe the answer lies in a radical redesign of how we build toilets. It’s possible. People thought the indoor flush would never catch on, and now look.
So lets aim for all new builds having individual lockable stalls, well lit, open plan hand washing areas, open to all genders, and pre existing buildings providing at least one gender neutral toilets, and everyone growing the hell up about self defined men and women using the toilet that’s right for them.
Seriously, who is that oppressing?

Hello!

So, I’ve been threatening this for a while. I’m cis. This is going to be a blog about trans stuff.

If my privilege shows, tell me. I’m not out to do harm, but you never know.

If you don’t think a cis woman has any business talking about gender and trans issues at all… maybe give this blog a miss.

If you think I’ve been brainwashed by the evil transgender plot to destroy feminism, yeah, probably also the wrong blog for you.