Yael Bartana's upcoming movie, True Finn

I won't be writing about this at length, as I don't have the time, but a single quote should suffice.

A Finnish-Québécois man states, in an interview (in Finnish, sorry): "Finland is prejudiced. I stumble constantly into expectations of what I should look like and how I should behave. I get to hear often that I can't be a Finn because I don't look like one. Then they try to find a suitable box to fit me into. A box that can be called anything but Finn.

Search-and-replace "Finnish" with woman, and "Québécois" with "trans".

The movie screens in Bio Rex, in Helsinki, on 31st of March. It sounds like it'll be brilliant.

I'd like to leave this trans crap well alone, but it won't leave me

Here's what, you Good People:

• I'm not your, or anyone else's, badge of tolerance
• neither I'm a collectible item to add to your collection of "different" friends that you can then parade in front of people you want to impress with your, I dunno, breadth of humans you know. Should you do this to me, let me assure you you're no friend. Friends don't objectify their friends.
• I'm not different, unique, or anything else special. I'm a normal human being who's had incredibly strange things happen to her.
• Aaaand finally bugger all this trans shit. Shove it where the sun doesn't shine and leave it there.

The last hurrah, or opt me out

It's highly likely I'll just bugger off and stop blogging about teh trans, but before I go, I'd like to say this:

Trans is a term of oppression.

This is why:

• it hides very real differences between rather disparate groups of people. Lumping together crossdressers, trans men, trans women, genderqueers, third genders and what not makes just one unhappy bunch that has one thing in common: oppression. But even that oppression isn't the same for all concerned; the things that can be of utmost importance to some trans women (for example, vaginoplasty, or HRT) might be totally irrelevant to some other group.
• it lets the cis very conveniently off the hook: it lets them treat us as the other, the false to their authentic selves.
• the constant dissension between disparate groups thus forced together destabilises and undermines attempts to fight oppression.
• it keeps us trying to find common ground in identities when there is none.

I'm not expecting much love for saying this, but I think these identity-things have to go. Identity politics does not work.

I'm proposing fighting specific problems, one at a time, until they're all solved. The solutions must be such that they don't oppress other marginalised groups. "Trans" as a concept is mostly useless for this. Access to care is not a trans-specific issue, it's a healthcare issue. Violence is not a trans issue, it's a power issue, even if it affects trans-identified (identified as trans by others - most people can't tell how you identify if you don't conform to their stereotypes) people more than usual.

I'm also bone-tired of this stuff. I need to rest from this and live my life and protect myself and my sanity. I didn't ask my life to be centred around trans, and there's not that much stopping me from decentring trans in my life. Which is what I've been doing more lately (thanks go to my wonderfully sane and caring therapist, too). So - off I go, thanks for everything, I might not return.

Oh, and I love the acronym CAMAB. It just about sums up my experience.

Sod visibility, too

(It seems I'm growing this into a series!)

International Transgender Day of Visibility? Count me out. I need visibility as trans like I need a hole in my head. I don't want pity. I don't want condescension or some fucking understanding, which is what actually happens almost all the time if I'm outed as trans. Oh, and don't forget the perverse questions and looks you get from people when they start furtively looking at your crotch, or the condescending remarks of the "welcome to womanhood" -variety. Yeah, I'll pass.

Here's yet again what I do want. I want the same decent treatment, same privacy and same rights and duties as everyone else, trans or cis. In my utopia, the whole concepts trans and cis would not exist at all, because if needed, we could just say "oh, they effed up my legal sex, but it's corrected now" or "I had this congenital defect fixed last month and was thus unable to work". If we, the people undergoing this stuff, so chose to.

If you absolutely have to have a day, have one called "International Day of Cis People Having a Hard Look at Their Oppressive Behaviour and Perverse Curiosity".

Oi, journo, U R doing it wrong.

Even if you mean well.

Yes, it's the eternal "people who changed their sex" -trope. The latest incarnation of which surfaced in my morning newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (1st of Nov, 2010, page D1. Sorry, can't find a copy available online, available as dead trees, or behind a paywall only). The story is about three people at different places in the trans universe - a trans woman, a trans man and a male transvestite (well, the male bit is never said aloud, it's just assumed. I suppose the writer has never heard of female transvestites). The story's stated aim is to enlighten the readers on what sex/gender roles look like, but in fact it doesn't analyze the sex/gender roles and the accompanying gender policing much at all. It just displays these three subjects in a human interest angle.

They're not treated too shabbily on the whole, but yet again, it's the framing of the story that sucks rotten eggs. The story is presented as "people who've experienced living as both a man and a woman..." (see page A3 if you've got the dead tree edition), there's the "changed their sex" -subheading (page D1: "Two people who've changed their sex and a transvestite tell what sex/gender roles look like") - in short, it's all about the voyeuristic, sensationalist cis mentality and blatant use of cissexist power to frame things.

I'm pretty sure the journalist in question means well. It isn't quite the hate-filled piece that misgenders and ungenders the trans subject constantly, but it fails nevertheless: the whole ciscentric premise that people really are of the sex/gender they're assigned at birth is just so full of fail. The story leaks at the seams: the trans woman is allowed to say she "had manhood pounded into her head" - but still the story assumes and reinforces that she actually was a boy/man (there's the stupid "biological male" -thing, too, but as that seems to be her own description of herself, I can't really comment on that), and can, therefore, tell what it was like to be a man. Not what it was like to be mistaken for a man. If she really was a man, why was the pounding necessary? And who, exactly, did the pounding? She herself, perhaps? I think not.

People assume all kinds of things about other people's sexes, genders and bodies. They assume, for example, that if someone "looks like a man", ze must be a man, and male, and assigned male at birth, too. That is simply not true. Looking like x is not the same as being x, and woman does not equal femininity does not equal female does not equal being assigned female at birth - all those bits may be related to each other, and they often are. But that's no universal rule. So it's rather stupid to assume that - and to assume that a trans man, for example, might know what it's like to be a woman.

I'd even hazard a guess that he does not know what being a woman is like, as he may never have been a woman. He's been mistaken for one, but that's not even remotely the same. Being of a sex is not the same as (mistakenly) being perceived as of a sex. The subject is not the same. I am a woman. You probably perceive me as a woman. My being and your perception probably agree, but even if they didn't, your perception does not automagically trump my being, not even if you force your perception on me.

So, dear journalists, please. Listen, carefully, to the people you interview. Especially when you're basically venturing out of your everyday experience (yeah, I'm assuming the journalist plus possible subeditors in question are cis - I think that's a pretty safe assumption). Your assumptions on how unfamiliar stuff works are, more often than not, simply wrong.

(Not that I'm expecting these things to change anytime soon - after all, I'm just a lone trans woman with a blog, and a cis journo with a big newspaper on her back, compared to me, is a bit like a soldier driving a battle tank towards a girl with a rock in her hand).

Educating people doesn't help

That's a bit of a lie, actually. Education does work, it educates. But it doesn't work in the way many (middle class) activists think it does. Education doesn't stop people from discriminating against each other. In fact, it may well make people more proficient at discriminating.

The crucial question is what you're educating people in.

If you raise people's consciousness about, say, trans women, you're doing just that, and no more. You're not fighting oppression. Your consciousness-raising may have some effects to that end, but it's in no way guaranteed, nor is it certain in any way that your consciousness-raising isn't having the exact opposite effect of making the discrimination even more acute.

This is why: giving more information on trans women (I'm using our experiences as examples because I know those the best), our bodies, our hardships and lives in general makes us even more of a target. The more we are exposed to scrutiny, the more visible we are as trans, the better chances the oppressors have of spotting us as potential targets for discrimination, and there's just so much more surface area to attack, too. The mundane things you do with your body become available for public consumption - your relationships start taking all kinds of weird colourings in the minds of the majority. Majority starts seeing things that aren't there, but that doesn't stop the majority from seeing nonexistent things as real, such as the sex you were forcibly assigned at birth, or sexualities you would never know for your own. Educating people on what is doesn't necessarily change their cognitive frameworks in the least - it might reinforce the (false) frameworks instead. It's the old "don't confuse me with the facts" -thing that leads to "but you were a man, right?" -questions, and to endless headdesking on the part of the trans woman. As if it were so simple. As if the majority got sex and gender right in the first place.

Giving people more information about oppressed minorities also doesn't call the discrimination itself into question in any serious way. The focus is on the minority's deviance from the (unquestioned) norms of the majority, not on the prejudices and asshattery of the majority. Yet it's the behaviour of the majority that is the problem - the existence of the minority and its habits, phenotypes and stuff are incidental. Exposing the oppression borne by the minority may work as an appeal to pity, but it doesn't address the actual problem much at all.

The actual problem, of course, being discrimination and other reprehensible behaviour. Raising consciousness on that might help, but stopping oppression is not about the oppressed, it's about stopping the oppressors.

On relatives, and their tediousness wrt transition

This cropped up in a discussion with a friend - you know who you are.

One of the major reasons why transitioning is such a shitty business is the people who are, in principle, close to you. The logic behind this statement goes like this: when people view themselves as close to a transitioning individual, more often than not they are not close to the individual hirself at all, but to the rôle this individual has played in order to survive without too much harassment. And there lies the rub.

Transitioning requires that that rôle, that act has to be stopped. But, because the close ones are usually heavily invested in that rôle, stopping the act is not necessarily seen as stopping a lie, but is seen as a betrayal instead. The person transitioning, of course, betrays no-one by transitioning, but stops betrayals instead, and this might be the reason why transition is so hard for the near and dear to accept. If they accept the transition for what it is, they also tacitly admit to fooling themselves and their apparently near and dear transitioner, often for decades. They also admit to having policed sex and gender, often in quite backhanded and devious ways - transition brings out all this for everyone to see. It's probably not too easy for the cis people around.

The natural reaction seems to be to blame the transitioner for being manipulative, difficult, intransigent and deceptive. In reality, the transitioner is anything but: a transition is probably the ultimate statement for stopping manipulation and deception.

Another common thread in trying to hold onto the lie is emotional blackmail, and not letting go even when it's perfectly clear that the transitioner wants to have nothing with hir relatives unless they accept the reality of transition. "We do this because we love you" might hold water if transitions were a whim, a passing madness, but as far as I can tell, transitioning is neither - we don't do this stuff just to piss you guys off, y'know.

Eliot put it nicely: "human kind Cannot bear very much reality." (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 42-43)

Unfortunately I, and my fellow trans people have to live with this.

[ETA] This trouble with reality seems to undergird a common journalistic trope of trotting out person's trans past, no matter if it's relevant to the discussion or not. It's just so damn impossible for the cis to get that they do make mistakes when gendering other people, it seems.

Carto goes gender (and grows iden-titties), #3

This is partially a response to a discussion on active and passive identities, but this is where I was headed anyway: why I prefer, and rather strongly at that, no identity actively whatsoever.

Firstly, on a philosophical level, I don't think identities are very real, or anything you should attach yourself to. I consider my identity to be rather ephemeral and passing, and I can't pin it down anywhere. To me, the question "what do you identify as?" is a bit meaningless: what would it change even if I did identify, say, as a woman? It might be a means to an end for me, sure, if I felt like I wasn't a woman already - a means to map out possible ways of being. But I can do that in other ways, too. If I feel like putting on culturally coded stuff, be that behaviour, looks, anything, I already can, resources permitting. If I want to behave in a genderqueer way, there's nothing stopping me. The question of what am I, what do I identify as is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to me, and if forced, I'll just say I identify as myself.

This approach has its caveats. Firstly, there's the question of resources, and safety. I can very well say I can do whatever I want, but the fact is that if I haven't the resources needed - say, social networks for going out and partying the night away - I, in fact, can't. So the freedom isn't quite as expansive as it could be, if given infinite resources. Secondly, there's the question of me doing stuff that provokes reactions from other people: I, for example, cannot fuck around with gender in just any way if I want to live unharassed. The two are not mutually compatible in practice.

Secondly, what people in linked posts call passive identities tend to trump any active identity any time you're dealing with potentially stressful situations with people not entirely respectful of you. What you're being passed as tends to overrun whatever identity you claim whenever it'd be really important for you to be recognised as, passed as what you are (or identify as, in identity-speak). Whenever there's a disagreement, the majority vote seems to hold the sway. Now I don't think this is right, or an agreeable situation, but I think this is the way it is, here and now. For examples, have a look at stories on trans women in your local newspapers. Are they misgendered? Sensationalised? In my corner of the world, those two things are almost a rule. When the local newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat, 24th of Jan, page C1 in case you're interested) did a whole page piece on Jin Xing (she's coming to dance in Finland), what did they write about? That's right - it was her transition that got the attention - dancing was mentioned in passing ("the best dancer in the world"), and the writer didn't connect the two in any meaningful way I could decipher. Why bring her trans status up at all, then?*

Thirdly, I'm not that hopeful on humanity. I really don't think we can stop other people clinging to their silly ideas about how everything in the world is easy to chop into discrete sets of stuff: men, women, girls, boys, sick, healthy. It might be possible to change it if there was the good will plus willingness to understand and the humility to accept we're colossally wrong every now and then, but I don't think that exists. We're not always good, we're certainly not humble every one of us and the willingness to understand people different from you is seriously lacking. So I don't think the respect for other people's self-declared identities is going to be the be-all, end-all solution to the problems of segregation, violence, oppression and discrimination.

I guess I'm less interested in frameworks, and more interested in solving practical problems, mine included. Like getting journalists (Wikipedia's another repeat offender) to stop shitting on trans women because we've transitioned every time one of us manages to do something wonderful and amazing and noteworthy - anything at all. Not everything we do can be derived from our transitions.

Writing the last sentence felt like talking down to someone particularly thick - I really think cissexuals should be able to get that bit on their own.

*yes, a trick question. Of course it's important to put the uppity trans woman in her place as a circus freak. God forbid they'd just write about her dancing when there's this unspeakable act of daring to raise against the gender forcibly assigned to her at birth. It's the modern-day equivalent of blasphemy.