I had something to say.

It was typically trenchant, pithy and sharply observed. It cut to the chase and the quick.

But it was in a voice – this one – somewhat disused, that I have less use for these days. And so I think I’ll take my leave, and own my life and words in other ways.

No last great rant, no Goodbye Cruel World. Not even “never again” because, well, after this many years online experience has shown that such resolutions are fatuous. Which is partly why I’m not even going to bother deleting this blog. Circumstances, however remote, may yet call for the face of the Gorgon… and so this platform will remain, here in orbit.

On my way out, I thought I’d leave behind a few things I’ve learned. They are neither comprehensive nor entirely consistent and are open to interpretation, but I think they are all true. I offer them without further comment:

No one has the authority to tell anyone else who they are. This means you. If you think this means not-you, think again.

Nothing is as irrelevant as undying anger.
Corollary: The more strident and repetitive you are, the less credible you are.

In matters of import, you can love or you can hate. There is no neutrality, nor a merely adversarial stance. Protests to the contrary make everything else suspect.

Transition is transitory. Or should be.

If you’re hung up on categories, you’re an idiot. If you’re so hung up that they’re more important to you than real people, you’re a monster.

Separatism doesn’t work.

Coalition is not equivalence.

Words have consequences, and words of pain are easier for most than words of help.

Keep your damage to yourself.

This is not activism. Not really.

- Val

The newly-kindled bonfire around Julie Bindel’s feet plays right into her hands, of course. It’s the bully strategy: insult a person or group of people deeply enough and long enough, and you will inevitably draw out their weakest or most strident responses, permitting you to demonstrate that in fact they are precisely the furious loons you always said they were. Remember that Bindel sees herself as a kind of insurgent, and the whole point of such action is to draw the enemy into your territory. And make no mistake… to her and people like her, we are an enemy, not merely an adversary. Their purpose is not argument but elimination.

… the ravening fuckwits have made the connection for you:

Would all schools in the U.S., under the muscle of an Obama administration, be forced to drill youth in the talking points of “gay” sex and gender–switching, calling it “justice”?  Would Ayers’ idea that America is an oppressive regime with way too much heterosexuality become a core tenet of your child’s value system?

-Wingnut Daily, via pam spaulding
(emphasis mine)

Of course, there are good reasons to maintain a wary tension within the LGB(T)  [consortium? alliance? factional scrum?]. But bigotry is what it is, and in its face you can either waste your energies trying to buy favor with the oppressor by whining “but I’m not one of them!” or you can get past other people’s labels and just stand on a working ethical sensibility.

The reason I so appreciate bright, perceptive people – as opposed to ideologues whose intelligence does little to illuminate – is that they manage to both instruct and  learn with a  certain grace.  Among such rarities in the transblogosphere is Zoe, whose direct speech and clear humanity always make her worth  reading, even if one doesn’t always agree with her every conclusion.

Imagine my satisfaction, then, when with only a small bit of prompting on my part, she completely “got it,” and returned in her own words the essence of a point I’ve been trying to make for a very long time.

The occasion was a comment thread following her welcome to newer readers of her blog, arriving via a link from a well-known science blog, in which she said:

I don’t reject binary male/female roles, neither does anyone who’s transsexual.

I understood full well the context and point of the statement, but felt that it skirted the kind of language representing a point of view which I have always contested. And so I replied (and here follow three comments of mine, deleting the the intermediate exchanges, in which I pressed the point just a little further):

Does this mean that a willingness to reject such roles disqualifies one as transsexual?

I thought that transsexualism was a medical condition, not a social statement.

I question neither the implications of surgery nor the observable consistencies of behavior.

I was suggesting, rather, a possible issue with framing.

I am trying to suggest a point regarding how language can used to constrain permissible behavior.

I know many cissexual people who to some degree “reject binary roles.” I see no reason why transsexual people may not similarly reject such roles, to within roughly similar degrees.

To which Zoe finally responded:

After giving it some thought, I agree.

There’s a number of issues. The primary one is that not everyone agrees that the evidence for biological causation is so convincing. Such people may see transition as being a denial of the binary, rather than an affirmation. Some of these people will have transitioned, and it would be the height of arrogance for me to say “well, no true Scotsman (or the equivalent) would do that”.

Others may agree with the biological causality, but see Gender Role as it is defined in our society as being so overwhelmingly a social construct that the biological bit can be safely ignored. They may deny the Gender Binary as the result.

I agree, mostly, but not completely. It might be 70% social construct, it might be 90% social construct, it’s certainly mostly social construct, but I don’t think the remainder can be “safely” ignored.

That’s a matter of political, rather than scientific, opinion.

I’m arrogant, but even my arrogance has limits. To state that someone can’t be TS purely on the basis of their beliefs, political or scientific, would make me look like an equine posterior.

Furthermore… I’ve been going on at great length about “biology is fuzzy” with a “bimodal distribution”, but I haven’t looked as carefully as I should about the implications of some people being BiGendered.

It means that some people may transition, not because they have to, but because they want to and are able to function adequately in either gender role. For example, some may really do an FtoM transition in order to partake of male privilege. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.

The Bailey/Blanchard Autogynaphilia theory is mostly bunk. But if a biological causation is true, as I believe it to be, then there really are some bigendered people born in male bodies who are androphillic.

Some of that small minority really may transition purely in order to have straight sex, as Blanchard maintains. They’d be a minority of all young transitioners, but yes, it’s quite conceivable that some may exist. It’s even probable that some do.

Whether such bigendered people should be called “male” or not is another matter. It would be as inaccurate as calling bisexuals “straight”, or “gay” for that matter.

People who transition, and do so successfully, leading successful female lives, well, how can I deny that they are Transsexual women?

Even though if they are bigendered, their transition subverts the whole concept of a strict gender binary?

As always with Zoe, there are plenty of points of departure here, many places where one might wrinkle a brow a bit and rev up with a “well, yes/maybe but…”. But that’s part of the pleasure of an exchange with someone less committed to a particular campaign than to the process of exchange itself.

Because apparently a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Poor Emerson. Having planted the meme that to be great is to be misunderstood, he also unwittingly supplied the much-abused false converse of egoism: that being misunderstood is sufficient to greatness.

I won’t presume to speak for anyone else’s experience, but my own is that those transwomen of my acquaintance who are not completely hung up about the whole “transgender” thing are those who turn out to be the best-equipped to get past it, and who are also the most ethically-inclined toward, you know, real women’s issues.

We’re trans. It is what it is, and in the long run merits neither tortuous navel-gazing nor incendiary proclamation nor righteous denouncement.

Be trans, be real, and get on with it.

The recent congressional election in Tennessee is about as clear an example as I can imagine of just how fucked-up “gender politics” can get. The simple fact is that Tinker ran an atrocious campaign and did not deserve to be supported by a major feminist lobbying organization.

And actually somewhat surprised.

Bloglife is a funny thing.

One of the ways I keep my sanity is by limiting my incursions into the online trans world, the motherlode of high weirdness only briefly touched on in the previous entry.

Or perhaps it’s just a manifestation of attention deficiency – I do tend toward manic cycles – but in any case, it’s time for Ms. Medusa to sleep for a little while.

No flounce here. No raging, self-righteous huff. I’m not even killing the blog… just leaving notice that I won’t be updating for a good month or so, and will probably be scarce elsewhere.

In the meantime, please read Mercedes, and Monica, and Callan, and Zoe, and Emma, and Stassa, and all the other beautiful, fiercely intelligent trans voices that have really changed the shape of the discourse and who struggle every damned day to wordweave the strange fabric of our experience and keep it strong against the shitstorm.

And on that note…

Ciao, baby.

I don’t write about my own dysphoria or transition experience much.

I found a long time ago that while many people insist on the complete validation of their own experiences, mine were considered irrelevant or inauthentic, simply because of certain liberal positions I hold. And on the question of relevance I even agree somewhat, since I don’t share the egoism so many seem to possess, that frames their own experience as universal and definitive. I don’t believe that one has to have had my experience to be authentic… and really, as an anthropologist, I’m much more interested in others’ experiences than my own.

Further, I also learned that there are two poles of trans exhibitionists, both of whom seem equally fetishistic to me: the sexual transvestites, for whom the display of anatomy is a central point of arousal; and those I have called the transsexual fundamentalists, who exhibit an obsession with the condition and provenance of their own and other peoples’ genitals. It’s repulsive, and I determined very early in my transition that nothing in that area would ever be anyone else’s public business. I am not a replicant. I have no incept date.

During my progress I have often found myself between such extremes. For instance, to a radical feminist I am the patriarchy because I express gender, whereas to a transsexual fundamentalist I am a fake because I supposedly deconstruct gender. And choosing to express gender, I find that what transwomen are permitted to be is narrowly and arbitrarily defined by the agenda of the beholder… which really means that what women are is being narrowly defined, since natal women get an automatic pass, but transwomen have to meet criteria.

Another discovery: one of the most facile ways to demonize and dismiss is to accuse someone of being a member or representative of a “movement”, the motives and assumptions with which you disagree. It’s easy then to call for the end of the movement, and avoid responsibility for calling for the erasure of the people supposedly in it.

Personally, I don’t do movements. I’m not a joiner, and the one thing that has always distinguished my attitude is an absolute dedication to my own will and self-actualization. The fact that some other people are doing something similar to me – transition – makes them allies sometimes, maybe even friends once in a great while if some other point of connection is found, but in no way makes me part of any movement.

But these are people, first and foremost, not faceless cardcarrying members of a movement. And it is the reality of people I will always defend against the screeching bullshit.

At the same time, I generally avoid “movement” politics because they are usually advanced by self-described activists. I distrust activists, most of whom appear to me to be motivated largely by ego, and almost none of whom won’t try to deny it. Activists by definition act, instead of listen. They are solipsistic by nature – convinced by their own experience of what constitutes right action, and once on their own paths almost completely opaque to any new vision.

Were revolution usually democratic – were its leaders elected, and hence representative, rather than self-appointed by the simple fact of being the only people who actually do anything – then we would be far better off. Of course, that would require that we all actually do something… and action does require ego, and so it goes.