Authentically Me

In a lengthy comment elsewhere, someone said:

All need freedom of expression, to be actually free… Those people still deserve rights and advocacy etc even if they are being discriminated against for a falsehood than an actuality… They are just people…

This is something that I think gets lost in the theoretical fog, and bears emphasis.

I really don’t care much whether anyone believes that people born with penises are “really” women or not, though of course I have my own opinions on the matter. And I dismiss the “wangs in the loo” argument as a stalking horse for deeply rooted and widely applied transphobia.

But what some individuals require is that other people behave the way they say they ought to, that others be the kinds of women or men that they are willing to recognize, before they will begrudge even the minimum respect or dignity. These people escalate their denial of “authenticity” of one kind of expression or another to a denial of citizenship, of sanity, of personhood.

The fact is that most people are just trying to be… and while I, for one, don’t insist that anyone concede to my claims about my own sense of myself (though it would be appreciated, if my reciprocity is to be expected), I do object to their categorical prejudice, and as long as I do no actual harm I expect not to be actively hindered.

I am “authentic” insofar as I am authentically me, and reasonably well socialized. No item of my expression is “fake” or an affectation… it is a legitimate response to my relation to the culture in which I find myself, and results in equilibrium: my behaviors and expressed identity are fed back to me by my interactions with others, and they match up, where they did not before.

And that’s all anyone can do. That’s what being real is.

[Edited from the original. And for the sake of substantial credit, I need to point out that when I first wrote it,  in response to the original comment, I had this entry from the incomparable Callan very much in mind:]

Every time you see someone express transgender, they are expressing something they know to be true about themselves in the best way they know how to do it.

No matter how dramatic or cartoony or contradictory or ambiguous factually false someone’s trans expression may seem to you, no matter how it is laced with shame, self-loathing, and rationalizations, it is an expression that comes from deep inside of them. And only by being affirmed in that expression can they find deeper meanings, become more mature in their self knowledge & expression. If they feel repressed, they will remain clouded and confused in their understanding and their choices.

Every time you see someone express transgender, they are expressing something they know to be true about themselves in the best way they know how to do it.

A Unifying Force

What is the one thing on which, despite their own completely contradictory ideologies, transsexual fundamentalists, gay elitists, radical feminist lesbians and rightwing conservatives can find common cause?

A thorough loathing of trans people in general, of trans women especially (though not solely) and in particular of trans women who identify or who are identifiable as trans.

Of course, some might pretend to despise “the movement” and not the people… but such borrowing on the part of allegedly enlightened individuals from the rhetoric of the religious right is telling in itself.

And this is why I will never drop my own affiliation with trans identity, regardless of my own privileges: because it pisses people off. Anti-trans postures are one of the last truly universal, acceptable prejudices – witness the widespread mockery of the “man in a dress” icon. And by the same token, being trans strips away all the superficial differences between opposing ideologues of all kinds and collects them all neatly in the same tiny, airless box – the one labeled “Don’t Complicate Our Lives” -  where we can point at them and laugh while we go about the business of living in a much more interesting world.

The central importance of love

Fundamentalism requires inflexibility… a personal dedication, not only to being anything but fluid, but to the refusal to acknowledge fluidity in those things in which one is invested… as, say, the interchange between sex, sexuality, gender and identity.

Of course, if one were to be “real”, and not a self-manufactured idea of something, then one might be as interesting, complex – as fluid – as that which one claims to be.

As, for instance, a woman:

Sexual Fluidity
Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
Lisa M. Diamond

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.

This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one-hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.

Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality–and of the central importance of love.

“I fall in love with the person, not the gender.” Something I hear a lot from ciswomen… and from transwomen less politically committed to “being real,” and more, well… just real.

Between the Trenches

An entry of Stassa’s reminded me of an interesting character I ran across once, in my own wanderings about.

She is a full-blown “true transsexual” in all the orthodox ways, and she hates trannies… or, more specifically, “transgender” as a context, and most of the people associated with it, who are as toxic to her as ammonia. Though to be fair, most transsexuals of any kind are almost equally caustic to her nerves.

She is also defiantly dykey, and refuses to conform to anyone’s idea of what a woman “should be”… except that of similarly butch women, whose culture she has worked incredibly hard to gain trust in.

Needless to say, she had a hard time with the gatekeepers, who in her area are particularly devoted to the normative paradigm.

Although she and I always disagreed on points of ideology, we found that we respected each others’ capacity for self-actualization and resistance to doctrine from any side. We also found agreement on the basic observation that really, there’s just a heck of a lot of crazy out there.

Each of us thinks the other a bit nuts… but we have called each other friend.

Free Speech

“Free speech” refers to only one thing: limits on the government’s power to limit speech. All other contexts are independent, and to be ethically evaluated by the agents responsible for the channel.

Universal free speech has never and will never exist. All media are a reflection of their owners’ or operators’ values.

The net does permit freer speech than we’ve seen in a long time. It’s radio. It’s the handbill. But it’s still limited in its own way.

The most annoying thing about the chimera of free speech is when someone raises it in response to having been actively edited on – or even removed from – a forum or blog. Everyone has the power to create their own forum or blog, and no one has an inalienable right to full participation.

We are all guests in each others’ houses now.

What Mercedes Said

Mercedes Allen is the reason I am here. Even before I knew about her blog.

It’s voices like these that, as with Lisa’s, make it possible to conceive of sanity and compassion in all this mess.

If the brainpounding – even mine – gets you down and you just need to hear it from the heart, lucid and true, go read what Mercedes said.

HB Speaks

The closing comment on an exceptionally lengthy thread on Transadvocate prompted me to examine more closely the Words of Harry… that scripture of which, as I’ve said, fundamentalists are the least reliable interpreters. I found there quite a lot that ideologues would choose to ignore, focusing instead on the one statement that they believe authorizes their egoism, supplying as it does the phrase “true transsexuals”… a phrase which they take to have been written not with pen on paper as a result of a study, the author of which was a man of flexible and compassionate intellect, but rather to have been inscribed in fire on stone by the All-Father of transsexualism.

Of most interest to me at the moment was this little nugget:

The first type to be described under “transsexual” would be one of the intermediate stages, one that wavers between transvestism and transsexualism, and in whom the cross-dressing is in all likelihood not of fetishistic but of basically transsexual origin. He lives as a transvestite but, if honest with himself, he would want to be sex-changed, that is to say, operated upon. External factors or fears of pain may, however, prevent him from actually seeking surgery. With “dressing” and under estrogen treatment, he manages to live in reasonable comfort.

Of course, one of the essential doctrines of transsexual fundamentalism is that there is no such thing as a non-op. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s own formula happens to describe a number of transsexuals of my acquaintance, who also happen to be those who are comfortable with the term “transgender.” To a fundamentalist, of course, a transgender person is by definition not transsexual at all. Clearly, this is not supported by scripture. If anything, the error is simply one of reversal… it is not that “transsexual” is hijacked by “transgender”, but that a portion of “transgender” is really just a kind of “transsexual.”

The fundamentalists will of course seek to narrow the distinctions (specifically limiting their interests to Benjamin’s “later stages”) until they define themselves out of existence, since they require fealty to an “averaged” narrative that in fact none of them have in common in all its particulars.

One of the principles of that narrative is that the True Transsexual, since she (or he, in Benjamin’s own language below) was fully gender-aware from early childhood, must never have had anything even remotely like a male identity or life… and is thus required to have transitioned as early as possible, and to have never “performed male” with any veracity. However:

An example of a full-fledged transsexual, a S.O.S. VI, is that of Harriet…Hoping to cure his TVism and TSism, H. married at the age of nineteen a completely unsophisticated, seventeen-year-old girl whose femininity he envied with irrational possessiveness. With the help of fantasies, he succeeded in fathering three children.

Emphasis mine, and so much for the principles of the falsely normalized narrative held by some of those who insist that they, and only they are the True Transsexuals today.

Next, transsexual fundamentalists – and there really is no other way to describe them – go on to insist that their “true sex” is completely and without qualification that which is assigned by surgery, not birth. And yet Benjamin describes the working situation of some of his patients thus:

At least ten or twelve male transsexual patients that I could observe lived and worked as women in legitimate jobs, usually office work. Most of them still do at this writing, their true sex status unknown to their employers or associates.

Again, emphasis mine, and no support in scripture for the the fundamentalist position about which they are invariably the most shrill.

The same passage goes on as follows, and sheds an interesting light on the social context of Benjamin’s own thinking about men and women, which seems to have found some of its way into the normativity of the fundamentalists’ worldview – or at least their rhetoric, since their actual verbal behaviors are hardly as gender-bound as the “binary” they allegedly defend:

A few of them have been unusually successful in their work in spite of the handicap of their emotional instability. Sometimes I have wondered whether their success may not be due to a fortunate mixture of male and female traits in their psychological makeup (male logic and aggressiveness, plus female intuition).

There is one area in which Benjamin’s own words do appear to lend some credence to possibility of a categorical distinction. It seems that True Transsexuals have always come across as self-serving and antagonistic as they do now:

Another handicap for many transsexuals is their character and their behavior. From a so-called “character neurosis” to outspoken hostile, paranoic demands for help from the doctor, all kinds of objectionable traits may exist. Unreliability, deceitfulness, ingratitude, together with an annoying but understandable impatience, have probably ruined their chances for help in more than a few instances. Many transsexuals are utterly self-centered, concerned with their own problems only and unable to consider those of anyone else. A surgeon wrote once to me: “Our experience is growing in regard to the fact that most of them (transsexual patients) are willing to do anything on earth before operation, but nothing at all afterwards.”

“The often infantile and completely self-centered attitude of many transvestites and transsexuals is occasionally and strikingly illustrated, together with a deeply disturbed, unrealistic, frustrated frame of mind which is the more outspoken, the more the writer inclines toward transsexualism.”

Finally, however, I return to the original point that Dr. Benjamin actually had a much more nuanced and humane understanding of gender, sex and the complex dynamics of identity than do the claimants to purity who most like to invoke him:

“If these attempts to define and classify the transvestite and the transsexual appear vague and unsatisfactory, it is because a sharp and scientific separation of the two syndromes is not possible. We have as yet no objective diagnostic methods at our disposal to differentiate between the two. We – often – have to take the statement of an emotionally disturbed individual, whose attitude may change like a mood or who is inclined to tell the doctor what he believes the doctor wants to hear. Furthermore, nature does not abide by rigid systems. The vicissitudes of life and love cause ebbs and flows in the emotions so that fixed boundaries cannot be drawn.”

Emphasis mine, and let me suggest that you knit it into a pillow somewhere so that you Don’t Fucking Forget It.

A New Kind of Crazy

I wonder what special species of derangement it is that not only insists but may actually believe that, if a rebuttal does not amount to a capitulation – does not assent unconditionally to the usages, premises and essential rightness of a deeply prejudiced worldview – that it has not been made at all?

It seems the very definition of a paradigm: a kind of mental filter, defining what qualifies as a question and a permissible answer, which when it does not hear what it already knows, believes nothing has been said at all.

At least, that’s the more generous interpretation. I am equally inclined to think it a symptom of Great Assholeness.

Record Keeping

I keep copies of many of my comments elsewhere, so that I can keep track of how my own thinking evolves, and also just so that I can remember what I’ve said in various circumstances.

A recent entry on Transadvocate has given me a good opportunity to expand on a few things in a different mode than purely reactive, and I’m going to take the occasion to reproduce my comments here:

Thank you, Arlene

I used to get terribly upset over this age old battle.

One day while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store I took a good look around. It was then I realized 99% of the world doesn’t know or care about any of this.

When the day is done the only people that continue to fuel this fire are those that live to see things burn. I prefer not to be one of them.

She’s absolutely right, of course. Online debate is the literal “tempest in a teapot,” especially when most of those involved in it are not involved in anything else relevant to the topic. This is something that people who care about me keep reminding me, whenever I get too caught up, and confuse the screen with the world.

Mercedes may be right. I don’t think I’m quite ready to pack it in yet – I have a few things yet to address, and not all of them related to the Trans Wars – but I think this may be a strictly limited phase.