feminist blogs

Via Ldragoon, an essay by Julia Serano, “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels.” The essay is long and all of it is excellent, which makes picking a few sample paragraphs while doing justice to the piece impossible. But I’m a blogger, and that’s what I do, so:

Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the “deceptive” transsexual or the “pathetic” transsexual. While characters of both models have an interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they differ in their abilities to pull it off. Because the “deceivers” successfully pass as women, they generally act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for “men.” [..]

Even though “deceivers” successfully pass as women, and are often played by female actors (with the notable exception of Jaye Davidson as Dil), these characters are never intended to challenge our assumptions about gender itself. On the contrary, they are positioned as “fake” women, and their secret trans status is revealed in a dramatic “moment of truth”. At the moment of exposure, the “deceiver’s” appearance (her femaleness) is reduced to mere illusion, and her secret (her maleness) becomes the real identity. […]

In virtually all depictions of trans women, whether real or fictional, “deceptive” or “pathetic”, the underlying assumption is that the trans woman wants to achieve a stereotypically feminine appearance and gender role. The possibility that trans women are even capable of making a distinction between identifying as female and wanting to cultivate a hyperfeminine image is never raised. In fact, the media often dwells on the specifics of the feminization process, showing trans women in the act of “putting on” their feminine exteriors. It’s telling that TV, film, and news producers tend not to be satisfied with merely showing trans women wearing feminine clothes and makeup. Rather, it is their intent to capture trans women in the act of putting on lipstick, dresses, and high heels, thereby making it clear to the audience that the trans woman’s femaleness is an artificial mask or costume. […]

What always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and codirector of the TrannyFest film festival, has experienced several such incidents with local news producers. For instance, when Virago was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community, a newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender activists for an article. However, the paper was interested not in their politics but in their transitions: “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” […]

When audiences watch scenes of trans women putting on skirts and makeup, they are not necessarily seeing a reflection of the values of those trans women; they are witnessing the TV, film, and news producers’ obsession with all objects commonly associated with female sexuality. In other words, the media’s and audience’s fascination with the feminization of trans women is a by-product of their sexualization of all women.

The entire essay includes a discussion of the invisibility of trans men in media depictions of transsexuals, and a critique of the essentialism and sexism of Janice Raymond style anti-trans views within feminism. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

The essay was later incorporated into Serano’s book Whipping Girl, which I haven’t read but now really want to.

From a post I wrote several years ago:

From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.

Boys are also taught that masculinity is fragile and high-maintenance; you work to get it and to retain it, and the slightest slip can cause it to be altogether lost. You can slip instantly, with no transition, from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyone’s jokes: all it takes is a moment’s lapse in which you say or do anything that can be interpreted as feminine.

This is essential: Masculinity is fragile. The man who has lost his masculinity is, in the eyes of male culture, less than nothing, worse than dead. Therefore, force in defense of masculinity - like beating up a boy who accuses you of being a faggot - can feel to boys and men like self-defense.

I was reminded of that post while reading a news story about Brandon McInerney , a 14 year old boy who murdered his openly gay and gender-anticonformist classmate Larry King:

In the days before the shooting, Brandon was hanging out around Silver Strand with his friends, doing what they always did: sitting on the jetty, hanging around the taco stand.

Brandon’s friend Lauren said the rumors about Larry “hitting on” Brandon were heating up. Kids were joking that Brandon must be gay if Larry was acting that way toward him. […]

Brandon joined the Young Marines — the Marine Corps’ equivalent of a JROTC program — several years ago and became a leader in the group, which disbanded last summer. […] His hours in a martial arts studio helped trim his physique into a lean, muscular one.

I’m not saying this alone drove McInerney to murder — it’s almost certainly significant that McInerney’s family life was disfunctional and one or both of his parents were abusers. And it’s possible that McInerney is just essentially a bad person in some way. Nonetheless, I doubt this murder would have happened if McInerney’s friends hadn’t been teasing McInerney by calling his masculinity into question, making McInerney feel that he had to do anything — anything at all — to defend his masculine image. (His hobbies — Young Marines and martial arts — imply that masculinity is important to McInerney.)

From Holly at Feministe:

Seriously, when you think about this kind of situation in all its disturbing dimensions and possibilities, which is more likely? That one of the school bullies decides to take it a step beyond name-calling and shoving, pulls out a gun, and shoots this kid? Or that the killer felt personally threatened for some reason, to the point of bringing a gun into a middle school classroom and shooting someone in the head, first thing in the morning? With the few details that have emerged, it’s impossible to say.

But I fear the worst — and the worst would not just be that some homophobic asshole killed a child. There’s an even worse worst: that a child is dead, and the other child who pulled the trigger did so because he couldn’t deal with his own feelings. And now that second child will be tried as an adult, and another life destroyed.

From the NY Times story:

The gunman, identified by the police as Brandon McInerney, “is just as much a victim as Lawrence,” said Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center. “He’s a victim of homophobia and hate.”

McInerney is being charged as an adult and, if convicted, faces a minimum of 53 years in prison (25 for the murder, 25 for the gun, 3 for the hate crime). The Transgender Law Center is opposing trying McInerney as an adult.

I agree with the TLC. Nonetheless, typing this entry, I kept on having to correct my wording to refer to King in the past tense, and McInerney in the present tense. I feel terrible about McInerney being tried as an adult, and I agree with Masen Davis that McInerney is a victim (although “just as much a victim as Lawrence” is going too far for me). But still.. it’s so fucking unfair that King is the one of them having to be in the past tense.

From Patricia Nell Warren:

The fact is – when school administrators find bullying going on, they often refuse to see the speeding train coming straight at them. Yet they usually get advance warning on a bully or clique of bullies and who the victim is. But they fail to act immediately — to suspend the problem students and get them out of the school without any delay. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with the angry parents of one bullying kid, or the parents of an entire bullying clique, especially parents with political juice. They also don’t want to deal with local church conservatives who insist that protecting LGBT students is equal to saying that homosexuality is OK. Not to mention the fact that every student not in school that day is ADA money that the school doesn’t get. Teachers, too, are often afraid to speak out against bullies, because they know that teachers are assaulted at school as well.

Big Mouth at Big Queer Blog on the non-mysterious way that no journalists ask, in anguish, “why?,” when a gay kid is shot:

Look, I don’t think for a second that music or clothes make a killer. I also realize that there are plenty of bipolar folks in the world that wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not that I want these connections to be made; it’s just that they always are except when it’s a gay kid getting killed. How can we not see the silent implication here?

Meanwhile, from the insano-Christian Right: Michael, in the comments of California Catholic Daily, wrote:

What an incredible tragedy for all concerned. However, as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen has noted, “Love is not tolerance” and, “a cry for tolerance never induces it to quench its hatred of the evil philosophies that have entered into contest with the Truth.” This situation calls for so much more than “tolerance” . At a time when young people are becoming aware of their own sexuality, a confused, apparent young teen aged boy is allowed to come to the school environment dressed suggestively as a member of the opposite sex. Who allowed this? Was it the home where he was being cared for, the school,etc. Obviously,he was troubled and needed help..indeed his behavior cried out for it. That this behavior was confusing and threatening to other boys, going through the so-called latency period of their own sexuality is not unusual or unexpected. He should never have been allowed into the school environment in the first place. His apparent dress was begging for a confrontation, it appears, and the home and the school allowed this to happen. Why? This situation should not have been “tolerated”. It should have been addressed and stopped before it led to this tragedy.

To be fair, several other comment-writers there scolded Michael for his comment. Then “John L. Sillison” wrote:

I don’t see homosexuals going after the killers of American troops who are fighting and dying while trying to protect the free world. I don’t see homosexuals organizing to keep old people from being euthanized. Where are the homosexual lobbying efforts to stop abortion? There is a kind of political alliance between homosexuals and blacks … but what about alliances between homosexuals and Mexicans, Asians, Indians, Native Americans? Why can’t homosexuals stand up for themselves? Why is it so hard for them to persuade so many other people that they deserve to have greater political power than anyone else?

Via Fetch Me My Axe, this interesting article in Colorlines Magazine:

Trans people of color are finding that they have an extremely different relationship to gender transition than white people. London Dexter Ward, an LAPD cop who transitioned in 2004, sums it up this way: a white person who transitions to a male body “just became a man.” By contrast, he says, “I became a Black man. I became the enemy. “

In short, people of color know that racism works differently for men and women, and transgender people like Mitchell and Ward are getting to experience this from both sides of the gender equation. […]

Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of which happened.

What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.
Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,” says Mitchell, who is Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Targeted for “driving while Black” was not new to Mitchell, who is 46 years old. For example, a few years before transitioning, he had been questioned by a cop for simply sitting in his own car late at night. But “he didn’t really sweat me too much once he came up to the car and divined that I was female,” Mitchell recalls.

Now in a Black male body, however, Mitchell has been pulled aside for small infractions. When he and his wife moved from California to the East Coast, Mitchell refused to let her drive on the cross-country trip. “She drives too fast,” he says, chuckling and adding, “I didn’t want to get pulled over. It took me a little bit longer [to drive cross country] ‘cause I had to drive like a Black man. I can’t be going 90 miles an hour down the highway. If I’m going 56, I need to be concerned.” As more people of color transition, Mitchell’s experience is becoming an increasingly common one…

From Rozk:

All of the religious factions and militias and Kurdish nationalists and government police in Iraq have one thing that they can agree on, which is killing queers.

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

From today’s SF Chronicle:

“Leading gay rights organizations, with the pointed exception of the Human Rights Campaign, withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.

The intense backlash by the gay community surprised House Democratic leaders, forcing them to postpone what had been intended as a big House vote this week to include gays and lesbians in the nation’s job discrimination laws for the first time in American history.

The debate playing out between gay rights activists and two of their biggest supporters in Congress raises a classic political question: Are activists better off compromising and accepting progress or continuing to fight for everything they want?

Gay rights groups have been waiting for a decade for the bill to pass, and many say a few more months to try to build support for including gender identity would be worth the wait. They say transgender people will have little chance of winning protection from discrimination if they aren’t included in this bill.

Pelosi and Frank, however, fear the inclusion of gender identity will kill the overall bill - again denying gays and lesbians protection against job discrimination.

I can understand the fear that if lesbians and gays don’t take what they can get now, perhaps they won’t be able to get anything at all. How many years more will it take?

Nonetheless, opposing a Federal anti-discrimination bill that excludes transgendered people is the right thing to do. The reason that it’s harder to pass a bill including transfolks — which is that open bigotry against trans people remains entirely acceptable for bosses, corporations, governments, and congresscritters — is the same reason legal protection for transgendered people is essential.

I’m thrilled to my bones that the queer rights groups have refused to sign on to the Democratic Party’s compromise. It’s solidarity in action. And it’s fucking great.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings suggests that us blog readers can show a little solidarity, as well:

If you think that people should not be fired because they seek gender reassignment surgery, or have some other sort of gender misalignment — if the very idea of choosing one of the toughest parts of a person’s already tough life to take away his or her livelihood for no good reason makes you as mad as it makes me — then now would be a good time to write your Representative and ask him or her to support the extension of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to transgendered people.

UPDATE: I must quote “Edward,” from Obsidian Wing’s comments:

As a gay man, I don’t mind saying, I have no interest at all in becoming a “first-class citizen” if it comes at the expense of someone else’s status. I’ll happily take my chances with the current law before I’ll passively support the hideous assertion that gays and lesbians are kind of ok now, but transgendered Americans are still very much not ok. That folks can’t see why that’s so offensive to many gay folks suggests to my mind they don’t see why the current lack of protection is offensive to us either. It’s not about us. It’s about what’s right.

What this boils down to, quite frankly (no pun intended), is that I trust the motives of the transgendered community in this battle much, much, much more than I trust the motives of those among general public who are coming around and now ready to condescend to suggest I might be worthy of some of the same civil liberties they take for granted. In other words, if the sh*t hits the fan again, I’d rather stay aligned with the folks who’ve shown me constant, genuine support, regardless of how small a minority they may be, than be worried my new allies are still harboring bigotry and might turn against me again.

In her response to Barry’s cartoon, Seelhoff writes, “To compare radical feminists to the Religious Right is propaganda, it is a smear campaign, it is disingenuous, and it is transparently and hatefully misogynist.”

I disagree.

In some discussions of transphobia, I’ve seen radical feminists say things like what makes a woman is her ability to bleed and have children. Here’s one such comment, made by Sally C on I Blame the Patriarchy.

“Knowing that someone is a woman does not tell me anything about her fate, but it does tell me she knows what I know about what it’s like to bleed.”

I am a woman-born woman who experiences problems with mensturation and fertility. Sally C goes on to call women “the tribe that bleeds.”

I do not bleed.

What galls me about this logic — apart from the fact that it’s bad, as no one proferring this definition means to exclude me from being a woman (my existence is being ignored/erased, rather than repudiated) — is that it’s extremely similar to the logic, the specific logic, that I hear from the religious right who also claim that a woman is defined by her uterus and reproductive capacity.

I don’t know what defines woman. As commonly phrased, it is a boring and irrelevant question, as has been acknowledged. It is attempting to take a semantic concept — woman — and reify it in a way in which it can not be reified. The truth is that the concept woman is complicated. It is not binary, it is not either/or, it is not on/off.

When we add the concept of gender, the whole of it becomes even more complex.

The question of womanhood is interesting for class analysis. But we should always expect there to be outliers. There are children with ambiguous genitals. There are XX infants that develop with male external genitalia and uteruses. There are infants whose gender identity does not match their physical bodies. There are women who can happily don male clothing and live out a masculine life — and there always have been. Equally, there are women who could never bear that. I am not part of “the tribe that bleeds,” but I am feminine. I abhor the oppression of women, but I want to live as one.

My external genitalia can tell you certain things about me. It indicates likelihoods and probabilities. It indicates that I am part of the class that is likely to undergo sexual abuse or harrassment, although I have been fortunate enough to live most of my life free of these things. It indicates that I probably was urged toward the arts and social sciences, instead of the hard sciences. It indicates I was probably touched less often as an infant than my brothers were; it indicates that I am likely to be paid .76 on the dollar compared to men in my profession.

It indicates these likelihoods, but it does not make them fact. I am an individual. Some probabilities apply. Others do not.

The idea that biology bleeding creates women is part of an essentialist stance — a stance that is shared by many sectors of the religious right. It reduces my varied experiences to the fact of my blood or lack thereof: an inadequate measure.

Sex is a continuum, with most people falling to one side or the other. Gender is a constellation.

I am feminine, and I am sexed female, but I do not bleed.

I have never been raped. I have never given birth to a child. I have dominated class discussions. I have been opressed. I have been a bully. I have endured undesired sexual contact. I have slapped a sexual partner. I have come top in my class in math and science, as well as english and history. I have used my privilege to make assinine comments about other women to try to gain favor in social power structures where I was floundering. Equally, I have ridden on top of other strcutures.

A transwoman may have a different set of experiences and privileges. Yes, she will have been raised with some version of male privilege — although, if the women I know are any indication, the male privilege they will have received will have been much closer to my memory of childhood than my fiance’s. They will have been bullied and abused for being too feminine, and sometimes treated as though they were girls because their sense of femaleness was present even when they were male-bodied. A transwoman I know well wrote female characters in our creative writing classes; where other men were petted and praised for “daring” to cross gender lines, her cross-gender writing was never highlighted; it seemed more easy and realistic than her male narrators.

A transwoman and I are different. She will have to struggle to overcome the male privilege of her childhood. But we are not different like on and off on a flipped switch; we have both had our turns at oppressor and oppressed.

More, we are not totally defined by our childhoods. How I act now affects my life. Someone raised with male privilege can repudiate it in part, if not in whole. A transwoman will have an easier time rejecting the social aspects of male privilege, as she likely will cease to be accorded them. Internally, she may struggle with ghosts of old experiences. But her childhood is not the whole of her experience. She will continue to be shaped.

Your rejection of her is based in biological essentialism and binary thinking. Your argument shares traits with segments of the religious right, who also view gender as binary and physically based. These are similarities. You may shudder under that comparison, but it remains. It’s legitimate to compare things that are similar.

True enough, that comparison doesn’t continue to hold true. Radical feminists are not like the religious right when it comes to acknowledging and fighting against the oppression of female subservience in the home. But the comparison does not need to be true in all points for it to be legitimate; it only needs to be true at the point of comparison. No one is claiming that radical feminists and the christian right are wholly indistinguishable. The only claim is that on the single point of transphobia based in biological essentialism, both transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives sound the same. Transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives are united in the biological essentialism that leads them to the bigotry of transphobia.

A note to commenters: I am locking this to feminists only. I would like this to be a safe space for radical feminists who are interested in seeking dialogue, and also for transsexuals. If it’s acheivable, I would like Daisy and Nexyjo to feel safe in the same discussion. Please avoid saying things like “this exemplifies everything that’s fucked up about radical feminism” — that’s incendiary and unfriendly. Please also don’t mistake my own positioning; I often agree with radical feminists over people who identify as sex-positive. While I don’t necessarily believe that oppression of women is the original oppression (I don’t see how such theories can ever be proven), I do have a number of philosophical points of connection with radical feminists, as well as great respect for radical posters here including (but not limited to) bean, QGrrl, Bonnie, Ms. Xeno, Pheeno, and Ginmar.*

However, bigotry against transsexuals is intolerable to me. I have a close transsexual friend who avoids most feminist blogs because of the nastiness that happens in threads like these. I refuse to support the kind of hatred that pushes people like her, already subject to isolation and bile from the rest of the world, closer to despair or suicide. Please remember we are discussing real people and real people’s lives.

*My apologies if any of you don’t identify as radical. I’m making some guesses.

(The cartoon these folks are discussing can be read here.)

Laurie and Debbie at Body Impolitic (a blog I’m a fan of) argue that the cartoon is “the politics of hypersimplification.”

…The reason the two characters in the cartoon appear to agree is that their positions are hypersimplified. We seem to be living in a time where most political/social/gender opinions and expectations have been reduced not just to the sound bite but to the bumper sticker. Oversimplified opinions lead to false agreement and false disagreement.

Piny at Feministe responds:

Radical-feminist transphobia is not distinguishable from conservative Christian transphobia because they’re both transphobia. I hate to be as uncharitable as Amp here, but my experience has borne that out in many cases: tap the facade of philosophy and/or tradition and it cracks to reveal a deep and powerful current of simple hatred. All of the positions argued by the characters in the cartoon are shortened, but they’re not actually all that hyperbolic, and they don’t actually distinguish themselves in the longer version; take the “silencing/transsexual agenda” concurrence, for example.

Meanwhile, Littoral Mermaid suggests that I’m beating a straw radical feminist. She and I debate the question in her comments. Other comments on this post range from a smart criticism from Cellycel (whose blog I like, mainly because it’s well-written, but also because it includes references to role-playing games and “Avenue Q“) to impressively venal anti-fat bigotry from someone whose name I’ve forgotten.

Anyway, here’s a quote from my exchange with Cellycel:

Why compare it to the Christian right? Isn’t transphobia bad because of things like say, oppression and discrimination? Not “Because Conservative Christians thing it’s bad, so it must be good. Also radical feminists agree with conservative Christians. That makes radical feminists bad.”

I think this is the most substantive criticism of the cartoon I’ve seen so far. (A few people have made it, including my “Alas” co-blogger Maia). The cartoon would have been better if it had somehow closed off this interpretation.

My intent with this cartoon wasn’t “conservative Christians are bad, therefore anyone who agrees with them on anything is bad.” That would be a ridiculous argument (is giving to charity bad because Christians do it?), and it’s not what I believe.

My intended point was that transphobia is wrong no matter who the speaker is; and that if these arguments are bigoted when they’re coming out of a conservative Christian’s mouth, then they are still bigoted when they are spoken by feminists.

Click on the image to see a larger version. (I think the drawing is nicer than my usual on this one). (Of course, it’s still new; in a month I’ll probably hate the art.)

Comments will be tightly moderated on this one; insulting comments are subject to being deleted at my whim.

I attended the launch of All Our Rights - a campaign to repeal the “Homosexual Panic” defence. This defence is used by straight men who murder gay men. The argument is basically that for some straight men, the mere existence of a gay man causes the straight man to panic and beat the gay man to death. Therefore there was no intent to kill, therefore the killer deserves a lesser sentence. All Our Rights - a campaign to repeal the “Homosexual Panic” defence. This defence is used by straight men who murder gay men. The argument is basically that for some straight men, the mere existence of a gay man causes the straight man to panic and beat the gay man to death. Therefore there was no intent to kill, therefore the killer deserves a lesser sentence (No Right Turn has a good post on the campaign).

It is less than a week since Judge Michael Lance imposed no penalty on Craig Busch for assaulting his partner. The judge said that Craig Busch’s violence was the ‘human and inevitable’ response to seeing his partner in bed with another couple.

I don’t believe jail does anyone any good. I don’t support the judicial system. I’m not even really arguing for tougher sentences. If Craig Busch’s sentence was the standard sentence for assault, I wouldn’t complain.

What I am arguing against is a judicial system that openly states that some of us are not fully human and deserve violence.

It is less than a week since Judge Michael Lance imposed no penalty on Craig Busch who was convicted of assaulting his partner. The judge said that Craig Busch’s violence was the ‘human and inevitable’ response to seeing his partner in bed with another couple.

I don’t believe jail does anyone any good. I don’t support the judicial system. I’m not even really arguing for tougher sentences. If Craig Busch’s sentence was the standard sentence for assault, I wouldn’t complain.

What I am arguing against is a judicial system that openly states that some of us are not fully human and deserve violence.