Trans Studies Reader #4: Serano

Yup, there's nothing from Serano in the book. Serano's Whipping Girl was published in 2007.

But it's effect on my reading is rather thorough-going and pervasive.

Firstly, there's the terms. Cissexism, transmisogyny, misgendering - all very pertinent, all very much unavailable when Trans Studies Reader was published.

Then there's the change of attitude. And boy, is there a change! I can tell that this change of attitude has made me realise I can reclaim my past from the cissexist, misgendered, misogynist narrative as it's been told to me, and have it for my own. My life, as the female I was born, forcibly masculinised, boy- male- and man-ified by the society hell-bent on erasing my experience. Oh, the power of words!

"Trans" is an adjective. "Transsexual" is not something I have to identify with - other people can and do use words in some ways I find totally unacceptable, but before Serano I didn't have other options. I did know my experiences couldn't be described in the language I had, so I had to make do with what I had, but that's no longer the case. I can describe myself as cisgender, trans-bodied woman - it just sounds right and correct. It doesn't have the idiotic insistence on me being male - which I, most empathically, am not. It describes me and my relation to other people rather well, and it's not too difficult even for cisgender cisbodied people to understand, once they can wrap their heads around the idea that yes, we humans do misgender people, and that there's no way of knowing that until the affected people say so - and we should stop the hurtful (and stupid) misgendering from that point on, pronto.

Subversivism is another fine addition: whenever I'm seen as subversive because of I've "changed sex" I'm like, "say what?" I haven't changed my sex. I was born female, into a female body - our dear cissexist society just couldn't grok it and promptly assigned me male, and fought me tooth and nail when I wanted the mistake corrected. There's nothing inherently subversive in getting your records and body straight. There's nothing particularly antisubversive about it, either: it's neutral as far as I can see.

Anyway, back to the Transgender Studies Reader - it feels quaint, even, because of this. The language sounds a bit ancient, faintly insulting: ungendering trans women and men is such a common theme that runs through the book, as is giving precendence to birth-assigned sexes and genders - the implied headspace is pretty thoroughly cissexist, apart from certain exceptions (Jacob Hale and Donna Haraway, for example).

I feel a sea change coming. Into something rich and strange, perhaps?

Ideals and realities, BDSM, feminism and "safe"

Well, ideals and realities never live up to each other, do they?

I've been discussing BDSM plus feminism a bit at another place (in Finnish, sorry), and I thought it might be worthwhile to write a bit about ideals, and especially about our (that is, all humans) permanent failure to actually live up to them. Fact is, we can't. Most of the time, we won't, either, and the fail that is us doesn't stop even there - we, in fact, make excuses for our failures, too.

So, not only do we fail at ideals, but we often don't even want to, and when we fail, we try to cover up our tracks, too.

I think this has a number of consequences. It means, firstly, that anything and everything we do, especially stuff that we pronounce to be strongly good, or bad, is probably somewhat suspect. We may well be right in our proclamations, but there's a distinct possibility we're just acting on our own interests, and not in a good way.

Secondly, I think it means we shouldn't be too surprised to find out that humans are fallible. That we make mistakes, sometimes honest, sometimes not - that other people eff up and then proceed to make it look like a tiny, understandable mistake when it in fact is not - is a basic fact about the way life is.

And thirdly - this fallibility is firstly and foremostly about you and me. Look in the mirror first.

I seriously think this applies to everything we do. Feminism, BDSM, Christianity, you name it, we can fuck it up.

I also think there's hope. Many ideals have the seeds of self-criticism built into them - feminism being one fine example. If you start by believing it's important to have a proper look at how gendering and sexing works, and how it benefits some and others not so much, you already have the necessary tools for having a look at your own privilege. You probably have to own up to some privilege yourself, too - and that's precisely what makes you safer to be with, from my point of view.

I feel safer with people who have had, and are having, a hard look at themselves. Sure they're bastards like everyone else, but they know they're bastards, so perhaps they are able to do something about it instead of watching themselves just do stupid, evil things and then excuse themselves with whatever (the old saw was "the Devil made me do it", but substitute Devil with an excuse of your choice). Bastards like me.

This is why I find BDSM not entirely incompatible with feminism. As long as practitioners can own up to their fuckups, take responsibility for them, make amends, recognise their own fallibility in all matters on this earth, and don't blame others for their own abuses of privilege, they're mostly safe people. Just like feminists. Or Christians. Or anyone.

Things I should've been writing about but haven't

I'm reading more of Haraway and liking it quite a bit. Do yourself a favor and read her, if you can.

I should write something about Serano. Whipping Girl is turning out to be a watershed for many trans women, myself included. It's not so much about the content - many bits of the terminology were out there before Julia took it and put it together in such an appealing way - but it's precisely the totality of it that opened my (and by the look of it, many others', too) eyes to the depth cissexist thought permeates the world around us. Some good bits about how plain ol' sexism works, too - even in progressive circles.

I should write something about spirituality. All this politics dovetails my beliefs and they influence each other. I'm probably a Marxist, too, it seems. :D

I probably should write a bit about my new hobby, but I'm not too sure if I want to because of the problems disclosure might cause me. I should write about the difficulties a trans woman faces with health care professionals and other, supposedly helpful, people.

I'm physically too tired to do most of this. I'm not ill, just exhausted, but in a good way. I'm doing sports. Which is another thing I probably should reflect on. Oh well.

Cyborgs'r'us - Haraway's Manifesto: Transgender Studies Reader, #3

This is one good bit of work: Haraway's concept of cyborg is very apt, and fitting of the trans condition in many ways, and it's hardly limited to that (I think it can be applied to cis womanhood easily, too), but as I'm not cis, I'll limit my comments to the bits that interest, fascinate and engage me, 'cos I'm so me me me, me.

Anyway: what I really liked about her piece, and what really spoke to me was her central concept of cyborg. That none of us cultural creatures are "natural" or can be clearly and cleanly differentiated from machines, or animals. That we don't exist as natural bodies, 'cos "natural" (as in opposition to unnatural, bit like "unfallen" vs. "fallen") does not exist for us, anyway. However we view it, the world is not separable from the concepts we use to map it, communicate it, think about it.

The other thing that I find real useful is the notion that there are no overarching systems of thought - no system can explain everything, and indeed, should not even attempt to do so - and that every system will distort whatever it views in some way. That systems of thought should be developed with this in mind, that there is no privileged narrative, no (absolute) ground on which to stand on, is so bang on in my mind I'm tempted to join some Haraway fan club and send her cookies.

This is the text that shows more than a modicum of understanding how science (as in physics, computer science, biology) works: that's excellent in my opinion, too - this text also isn't frightened of technology and the possibilities it offers, but seeks to subvert the aims for its own use, and embraces technology as a useful extension of our embodiments: this was written in 1984, and here we go, extending our embodiments in the cyberspace like this blog post, for example. If you think this text you're reading does not embody me, think again - who has written this? Who controls what happens with this text, here? Whose thoughts, whose formulation of them are you reading? How is this not embodiment? Where do I stop and you begin?

Then there's the "sod organic families" -bit that makes me cheer: "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project." (105) The organic communities some of us are trying to find are simply stated completely unrealisable - give up: they're not to be found on some organic ground of being: we have to make them ourselves if we are to have them at all. There's no "natural" womanhood - there's only the womanhood we make, ourselves, and we should build it knowingly, accepting our real differences, building an alliance of women instead of an total, organic community, which would be an extension of the patriarchal origin anyway, a return to the primordial paradise which never existed.

I found some spiritual Christian value in Haraway's manifesto, too (113): I realised that in my theology, God/man binary does not exist - I don't do that dualism. For me, God is about incarnated God, God made flesh, God becoming human - there's no clearly defined limit, or a border, between God and human, which, incidentally, is reflected in the 5th century CE Chalcedonian Christological formula: "We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation. The distinction between natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person and one hypostasis." It's a contradictory formula, and precisely that is why it's so perfect: there can be no clear border, nor no no-border between God, and human, the tension remains. A rather cyborgian view of God and human, I'd say.

I can only agree with Haraway's call for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction": precisely that. Confused boundaries, esp. with regards to binaries, and responsibility in their construction are exactly what I'd prescribe to this society, and they're what I'm working towards, too: for my own small part I'm re-educating the doctors I meet on the need to draw the border between "men" and "women", between "female" and "male" in a responsible way that does not erase people and their experiences, nor endangers their access to health care. That such borders will inevitably be confusing and confused is, I think, a cause for celebration - a binary system can never hold the riot that is human sex and gender, nor should it try to: such subsuming would (and is), in my opinion, be of an extremely totalising and patriarchal in nature.

I wonder if there'll be anything better in the book? If there is, it has to be something totally gobsmacking.

with a h/t to Paula Sankelo.

Why so many people do accept one of the two socially sanctioned genders (myself included)?

I realised I hadn't given this much thought, and I'd perhaps better. After all, I went through all that bother of transitioning - why settle for something relatively simple and normative, even, when I have had all the possibilities and dislike giving in to the norms, too?

Much as it shocked me, transitioning felt right when I did it. It wasn't just another of those things you do because it's convenient, because it saves a lot of hassle (although it did do all those things, too): I hugely enjoyed, and still enjoy, the results. I know it sounds trite, but this is how I was meant to live. This is the body I really needed to have. It felt physically good. I know, words don't seem convey what I'm trying to say, but it's like getting a proper meal after being hungry for a long time, and not knowing what food is like, even. Something you never knew even existed clicks into place and you realise what a huge, previously unknown hole there had been before.

And I don't know why. I really don't. All I have is speculation and conjectures.

Silly as it sounds, after vaginoplasty I felt whole. Part of it was no doubt psychological - no-one can take me back - but I suspect that wasn't all. How does one describe a body that feels right?

And, to continue the silliness, being a woman in this society feels right. It fits. While there still are very real problems in my life, there isn't the feeling of not fitting in, of not belonging. I still keep wondering if this how cises feel all the time. If they do, let me tell you they don't know how lucky they are.

This feeling highlights, of course, the horror that was living with untreated transsexuality. More on that elsewhere on this blog, and numerous other places - no need to go there now.

[ETA]

The reason why I accept one of the socially sanctioned genders is 'cos it fits. For the lack of better words, it just fits. I guess developing a proper answer to the question in the headline requires a theory I'm not sure even exists - a theory of fitting in, of normalcy. No-one seems to examine that. I wonder why?

On the limits of theories, both social and biological

I quoted Nan Boyd in my last post about desperate attempts to save the foundations of sexual nationalisms. What I mean, more specifically, is that I find the attempts to save a clear-cut binary sex, or gender division rather funny: no clear binary exists, not in a biological sense (there's the pesky intersex, plus we don't exactly know how bodily sexing goes, and in order to have a clear binary, you really do have to know), and certainly not in a social sense - just go see your local genderqueers for a proof.

Moreover, there are some other fundamental problems, too: when we speak of biological sex, we are applying human-invented categories to phenomena we observe in nature, and it's pretty clear to me that the categories themselves are socially constructed, too - they're sure rooted in biology, but they're just as deeply rooted in human needs to categorise and dominate the world. There's no disentangling the social from the biological, or vice versa.

Which brings me to my point: sex and gender are interrelated in multiple ways, and we don't have a complete picture of how this happens - and it may well be we shall never have the complete picture. You see, when we're observing something outside ourselves, we have to classify it to be able to express the observations to anyone else in language - and when we do this, we're already bringing in the socially influenced apparatus of language, and, in effect, shall never have such a thing as pure, unbiased results. We can certainly try, and I'm not so pessimistic as to think we'll always be badly wrong, but I am confident we shall never get it totally right. We'll always be somewhat wrong. Strangely enough I find the thought comforting.

My second point is, social construction is on its own insufficient to explain sex or gender. If all gender really is socially, and socially only constructed, why does it fail so badly? Why does the construction make such a botched job of building two, and two only, genders and sexes? Why do people rebel against it? And on the other hand, why so many people do accept one of the two socially sanctioned genders (myself included)?

What I see, in my culture (big city, middle class, educated - I'm basically your privileged white girl except for the trans plus queerly sexual bits) is people who mostly toe the line when it comes to gender. They seem to be mostly happy with their sexed bodies, too. This is not to say they're happy with the very real inequalities between sexes and genders, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a substantial amount of women, or men, who are intensely unhappy about there being sex/gender combinations such as "women" and "men". The unhappiness lies - or is made to lie - rather solidly in the margins: those who do not want to, or cannot live the binary in the way they want, or need to.

Thus, the (political) problem of sex and gender is manifold: part of it is just plain ol' oppression - patriarchal, cisarchal, classist, the lot. Part of it is that binary sex and gender really seem to fit a large majority of people, and thus it's rather hard to see a future development where sexes and genders would be significantly more complex, and would thus open up the possibilities more easily for those who need or want them. Thus, a wholesale queering of everyone and everything is, in my opinion, an utopia: all very nice, but it's not going to happen because there's insufficient demand, and the benefits are not tangible enough for the majority to get really excited about. Heck, there's very little tangible benefit from seriously queered gender and sex to me now, as it is.

Going back to theories, a large part of the reason why current theories on sex and gender are so insufficient in my opinion is that there's so little research into how gender and sex works for the majority. So far, almost all research into sex and gender has focused on the "non-normative", on the "abnormal" bits, and as far as I can see, majority sex and gender has largely been ignored - it has been taken for granted, as if it was a simple question: "duh, everyone knows what a woman is". As if! I'd really like to see, say, a majority feminist organisation, or our national health system, really dig into its own practices of sexing and gendering - how does it do those, who are included in practice, who are excluded, why, what are their solutions to the practical problems of sexing and gendering that happens on the margins - as far as I can tell this isn't even documented, let alone analysed. The results should be interesting (probably shocking, too, in many ways).

Transgender Studies Reader, #2: Patrick Califia gosh darn

What he writes about hormones is, like, that's what it's been like for me, too. Hormones change you in so many ways, and what they do to your thinking and to your sexuality is interesting (not to mention a huge relief, a lot of fun, and deeply satisfying to boot). For me, the direction was, obviously, different - I went from T to E. I cannot but feel a deep sympathy for Califia as he writes: "Perhaps transition will be an ironic experience for me, and I will discover that I remain the same person, having changed only my physical appearance. Now, that's a depressing thought!" (436) I thought like that, and I was right - and deeply wrong, too, as Califia himself suggests in the following passage about the effects testosterone (T) has had on him. Where he went, I have been - and I'm entirely of the opinion that if you're a man, that's the place for you, and in retrospect, I'm glad men really enjoy it - I couldn't, but no sour grapes over that: I'm not a man.

Nan Boyd's piece on the claiming of historical figures for lesbian, or transsexual visibility is good, too: a solid account of the facts, and it does seem I'm not the only one thinking "...despite anti-essentialist gestures to the contrary, contemporary sex/gender politics often document the absolutely desperate reiteration of bipolar gender as a foundation for sexual nationalism (431)." Bang on!

This is not quite the book I thought it'd be - I'll say right now I've been wrong on academic trans studies. There's a lot more to it than these literary theorists I've known about so far.