Suddenly, Transmisogyny: “Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls” by Alissa Nutting

I can't find the link now, but it was one of those lists of “the 10 best young writers you've never heard of” or some such. Because I often find literary fiction exhaustingly pretentious and dull, I had indeed never heard of any of them; because I am a sucker who keeps hoping to find the latest metaphor-ridden fiction by straight white cis people as mindblowing as the literary establishment tells me it is, I decided to try reading some of them.

My first choice was Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting. I have mixed feelings about the short story as a genre. There seems to be a specific niche for collections of spec-fic-ish short stories that amount to little more than, “Say, look at this idea! Isn't it WACKY?!” For maybe two or three of the stories, it's striking enough to hold my attention, but somewhere along the way I start to feel like I'm listening to an Oingo Boingo album or teaching a class of six-year-olds: everything is trying a little too hard to get my attention, but doesn't actually have anything of substance to say to me, and I just want to go read long Russian novels and listen to Vivaldi for a while to recover.

I had hoped that Unclean Jobs would be an exception, based solely on the title. It sounded like it would have good feminist cred. It was a book of short stories about women, right? It would use skewed, magical-realist worlds to make trenchant, blistering commentary on our society's sexist hegemony, double-standards, and impossible expectations of female humans. It would be great.

And, if you were so inclined, I'm sure you could make an argument that it does that. Lots of people have. But me? I just couldn't fucking get over the penultimate story in the collection, which is called “She-Man.”

I just. Can I count the ways in which this is wrong?

• It's called “She-Man.”
• The narrator opens by telling us, “My boyfriend … doesn't know I'm really a man,” but the rest of the story makes it entirely fucking clear that she isn't “really a man.” She's a woman.
• The narrator refers to her birth-assigned sex as her “gender.” No, she is a woman. Her gender is female.
• The sentence: “The estrogen has done such a great number on my voice.” Estrogen doesn't work like that.
• The focus on make-up and painted nails and “look[ing] put together” (ewww) plays directly into gross transmisogynistic narratives of trans women's femininity being somehow artificial, lurid, or even grotesque.
• Okay, so the whole story is this: Narrator is an ex-prostitute trans woman living stealth. She gets outed and murdered. That's it. That's the whole story. I guess being sex workers and “tricking” cis men are the only two things trans women are allowed to do in fiction?
• I mean, fuck. All the other stories in this book are about grotesque bodies, and most of them involve supernatural or science-fiction goings-on. One story is about a woman whose skeleton houses an ant colony. One story is about a woman who watches her garden gnomes come to life every night and gets off on the sight of them fucking. One story is about a woman who is so consistently off her tits on literally every ingestible substance that she thinks her twit of a rock-star boyfriend knows the way to enlightenment. Apparently a trans woman getting outed and murdered belongs in the same ballpark as all of this.
• Trans women are not “she-men.” Trans women are not “really men.”
• Trans women are women.
• Trans women are women.
• Trans women are fucking women, Jesus Christ.

I do not in any way understand what Nutting was trying to do with this story. In a collection of stories that otherwise use improbable scenarios to lampoon societal expectations of female beauty, sexuality, and employment, this story doesn't accomplish anything except be fucking terrible.

One month on T

The little hairs in the crook of my elbow: have they always been there? The slight increase of hairiness on the back of my hands: am I imagining it? The fluff on my face might be mostly wishful thinking, but my sideburns are definitely growing square-cut now, instead of to those girlish points.

I can't be sure whether the tiny, barely-perceptible changes I see are actual physical changes caused by the hormones, or just things I never noticed before, because I never before paid this much attention to my body.

Whether the changes are physical or cognitive, this is a shift. After a lifetime spent daydreaming myself into other bodies, other selves, I think I am finally beginning to live into my own body.

(I can even call it "my body" without a shudder, without my usual periphrases: "this body," "this sack of meat," "the body with which I have been burdened.")

*  *  *

I keep seeing this FTM ur-narrative, this life story that seems to be the "perfect" FTM story. It's the "always knew" narrative: the guy who has known he was a boy for as long as he can remember, whose parents pooh-poohed his repeated assertions to that effect, who got in trouble in kindergarten for joining the boys' line, und so weiter. That's a fine narrative if it's true for you, but it troubles me that it seems to be upheld as the only or best trans* narrative.

It's not a true narrative for me. For starters, I fear it risks reinscribing the exact mind-body dualism that I'm trying to deconstruct through my transition. Part of the point of transitioning for me is to reject the mind-body dualism to which I had always subscribed. I mean, I have two brothers. The ways in which my body differed from theirs were always very apparent. I couldn't have said I was a boy when I was a child, because my understanding of what it meant to be a boy was predicated on the physical things I didn't have.

Nobody told me about gender. I think I thought gender was only a grammatical thing until I was like 19.

Sometimes that makes me angry. I feel such contempt for my younger self, for what I see as this cow-like placidity, this fear of rocking the boat, this acceptance of The Way Things Are which for so long kept me from even knowing I could do anything about it.

Other times, I hate my present self for what I am doing to myself and my family and those around me. After all, if I went for so long without rocking the boat, couldn't I have just kept it up for the rest of my life?

I can't, though. Not with what I know now. For all that it makes everything needlessly complicated and difficult, for all the shit I have to go through, I can't not do this.

I am becoming an embodied self. It's kind of amazing.

Intersectional Christianity

Shortly after I told my parents about my transition, I was holding forth on some issue of feminism (as I am wont to do), and my mother asked me, “Can you still be a feminist?”

“If anything, I'm even more of one now,” I replied. “I know how hard it is to be a woman, and since I've failed at it I really admire the people who haven't.”

I was joking, mostly; but my mother's question is a legitimate one, though perhaps not necessarily for the reason she asked it.

Plenty of justice-oriented, critically-minded people reject “feminism.” The f-word is so thoroughly implicated in the worst failings of the second wave – racism, transphobia, classism, essentialism, general failure to give a shit about anyone other than cis white socioeconomically privileged Western women – that a lot of people who are not cis white socioeconomically privileged Western women have no use for it. These are the womanists, the social justice activists, the people who need to distanciate themselves from the ugly history of oppressive bullshit with which the term feminism is so laden.

Me, though? I'm a feminist, and everything that goes with it.

When I first entered the magical world of feminism, it was with an understanding of myself as one of those cis white socioeconomically privileged Western women. I am still a white socioeconomically privileged Westerner. I have certainly been guilty of the same myopia, the same thoughtless reinscription of oppressive dynamics that characterizes the worst of feminism. I am an inheritor of a deeply problematic tradition, too steeped in it and shaped by it to reject it outright, and I own and acknowledge that tradition every time I use the word “feminism.”

But I love feminism. I really do. Old-fashioned feminism, warts and all, is what caused the scales to drop from my eyes and launched my social, political, and ethical concerns as they are today. I've become a much more sophisticated SJ-er since those first exciting days of beginning to see the FedEx arrow of patriarchy, but I would never have gotten anywhere without those clumsy first steps into an unrefined feminism. It's because I love it so that I don't want to break from it. I want feminism to be better, and I want to be one of the people working to make it better. I want to join in the battle cry of Flavia Dzodan: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!”

I started calling myself a feminist around the same time I started calling myself a Christian, and the two things grew in tandem (no thanks to either my church at the time, which was moderately conservative, or the feminist discourse I initially came across, much of which I perceived as very hostile to religion). I can't separate my feminism from my Christianity, and this intertwining gives rise to some interesting parallels.

As a Christian, too, I am heir to a history of oppression and hatefulness, of the kind of counterproductive zeal that has served to betray everything the movement hopes to stand for. As a Christian, I am inexorably aligned with people who use the very thing I love to promote values I abhor. Just as, every time I call myself a feminist, I want to qualify it with “intersectional” or “third-wave,” so when I call myself a Christian I hasten to add “progressive” or “leftist.”

Sometimes, though, I think it's necessary to just let it be there. I am a feminist. I am a Christian. Yes, I want to distance myself from the awful aspects of the movements' history; but I wouldn't be here, calling myself a feminist and a Christian, without that same history, bad parts included. If I'm going to have any kind of integrity, as a feminist or as a Christian, I need to acknowledge the history in which I share, and work to counteract it.

This is where I think Christianity can learn something from current social justice efforts. Too often we leftist Christians talk a nice talk while failing utterly on the walking front. Christianity needs to be intersectional in the same way that feminism needs to be intersectional. We need to work toward redeeming our history of oppression by hearing the voices of those we have tended to exclude. We need to fight for the marginalized on all axes of oppression. We need to commit wholeheartedly to interfaith dialogue. We need to speak out loudly against the people using our name to promote hatred. We need to fully integrate faith into justice and justice into faith.

My Christianity will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.

Theologies of Uncertainty

This past week, I began the final semester of my master's degree.

I can't believe how quickly it's gone by. Seems like only the other day I was sleepless with excitement, the night before moving to California to start my grad-school career. This little master's degree has changed me in some huge ways – I suppose the big ones are the gender transition and the acquisition of something resembling a life ambition – but it's also interesting for me to reflect on how my theology has changed.

The biggest difference is my wholesale embrace of deconstruction, doubt, (de)negation, paradox, and contradiction as crucial aspects of my theology. For fun the other day, I tried writing out a creed that expressed the core of my beliefs as succinctly and honestly as possible, and this is what I came up with:

I believe in(to):

         God is (not)

         Jesus is (not) God

        We are (not) God

Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.

Pretentious? Sure. I'm a humanities grad student. But it's also heartfelt.

I made this brief creed because I go to an Episcopal church, and every Sunday I recite the Nicene Creed with my fellow worshipers. I like it when my studies and my church complement each other. Studying Classics in undergrad, I needed a church where the sermons were 45-minute exegeses of the scriptural text. Now that I study theology formally, I need a church where the sermon is not the point at all.

I am very happy with my church here. I've begun to develop a theology of the Eucharist based on the weekly Eucharist (unlike my church in London, which had a neverly Eucharist). I love sitting in the pews alongside some of my closest friends, sharing commentary on the service via whispers, texts, and notes written on the bulletin (which I consider my week's best constructive theological work). I love the contrast between my rad-lefty school and my christologically orthodox church.

Maybe this is naivety born of my two years at an evangelical church, but I've been genuinely surprised at the lack of christological orthodoxy among self-described Christians. Before committing to Christianity, I spent a couple of years exploring my Jewish heritage. The thing that drew me to Christianity specifically was, y'know, Jesus Christ. I don't talk about this much, but I have a very high christology. I think Jesus is God. That is why I am a Christian. It's weird to me that you would be a Christian if you don't think that. I mean, believing in the God of Israel, or the Universal Spirit, or the Creator, and thinking Jesus is a top bloke but not divine/Messiah/only-begotten Son of God? That's a great belief and I'd never tell anyone they're wrong for having it, but why is that Christianity? If I believed that, I'd call myself Jewish.

I guess I still have a lot to learn. Good thing I'll be going on to doctoral studies this fall.

Wishes For My Godchild

I keep calling him "him." I keep talking to him in the ways that people address male-assigned children and tend not to address female-assigned children: "Little buddy." "Little guy."

I should know better.

I know how much it hurts – how deeply it gets interiorized, how desperately hard it is to root out – to have it constantly reinforced that you're A Boy or A Girl based on what your body looks like. When there isn't strict behavioral policing or immutable gender roles; when you're taught that boys and girls are equals, that there's nothing one can do that the other can't, but also that you're either the one or the other, because biology.

When you so profoundly internalize the ubiquitous cultural lie, sex=gender, that you're terrified to even articulate your deepest desire of crossing over.

I love my godchild – more than I knew I could possibly love a tiny, smelly, messy human who doesn't do much other than sleep, eat, and then expel what he just ate out of both ends. He's seven and a half weeks old, and, according to my totallyobjectiveometer, he is the cutest miniature hominid ever made. I love my tiny person, and I don't want him to ever feel the things I have felt.

I want him to grow up knowing – not just knowing intellectually, but really gut-deep internalizing – that, just because we've been calling him "he" his whole life, that doesn't mean that's who he has to be.

I want him to grow up in a world where being he, she, they, zie, ey, or any goddamn pronoun and gender you please is fully accepted and welcomed anywhere you go.

I want him to grow up in a world where being trans* is just as easy as being cis. Hell, I want him to grow up in a world where "cis" and "trans" don't exist, because gender is finally accepted by all as the nine-dimensional hypercube it is, not the binary it's made out to be.

And probably he's not going to get any of those things, because our world is pretty shit; but God knows I love this baby, and I'm afraid for him, and no matter what, I'll be there for him/her/them/hir/em/...

Callings

People at seminary talk a lot about “callings.” I guess it makes sense: why would you become a clergyperson if you didn't feel called to it by God?

One day, after hearing a lot of talk about people being “called” to various things, I said to a friend who, like myself, is looking to a life in academia, not ordination: “I wish I had a calling.”

My friend said thoughtfully, “I kind of feel called to academia.”

“I feel like academia is a black hole,” I said. “No matter how desperately I try to escape it, its gravity just sucks me back in.”

“Um... That is a calling.”

Dammit, I always thought a calling would be something nice. It sounds so friendly! Sunday school lessons about God calling Samuel in the middle of the night always made it sound pretty cool and desirable!

It was supposed to be this^. Instead I got this:

 

I've discussed callings with a number of friends since, both the future clergy and the future professors, and everyone agrees: the smiley-face God-is-my-besty model is a pile of horsefeathers. The black-hole/lightning-sand analogy is far more accurate.

Except for how there is no Westley to rescue you.

 

This rather unhappy understanding of callings does make sense of something that previously eluded me, namely Justin Tanis' idea of gender as a calling. If a calling is something that sucks you in willy-nilly, that drags you along kicking and screaming, that you can fight and struggle against but never escape – well, then my gender is definitely a calling.

I understand that in some denominations aspiring clergy are told not to seek ordination if they can possibly do anything else with their life. I feel that way about academia – if I thought I could do anything else at all, if I even had a plan B, I would certainly do that instead – and at the moment I feel that way about transition.

Maybe it gets easier farther on, when you're passing more often and you've already dealt with crap like legally changing your name. Right now, though, transition and academia both feel like my ineluctable destiny. They both feel like things that have beaten me into submission. Submission is exhausting, but resistance is both exhausting and futile.

Fine. I give in. Academia, transition, you can have me. Not my will, but yours.

A Short Reply To Julie Burchill's Hate-Spew

I shouldn't be responding to this. [ETA: The piece in question has been pulled, thank God. Gif-filled summary here. And, wow, now I'm linking to Jezebel as an example of not intersectionality!fail.] It's vile, it's hateful, and it's a naked attempt to court controversy and grab attention (which has succeeded).

(Shame on you, Guardian. You're supposed to be a leftist alternative to hate-spewing rags like the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, not a platform for their ideas.)

I should not be linking to this article, discussing it, or wasting precious brainpower thinking about it; but, like the rest of the multiverse, I am going to do so. I've been letting a lot of things slide lately without comment or correction: this is merely the most high-profile and the most repugnant, and I am not going to stay silent about it.

Julie Burchill is awful, and needs to fucking fuck off.

How can I pick a favorite part of that horrible, horrendous, disgusting, loathsome article?

There's the bit where she calls trans women “a bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing.”

There's the bit where she asserts that “a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I'd imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look.” (My eyes very nearly popped right out of my head at that. Jesus Christ, how dare Burchill write that sentence? How fucking dare she?)

She calls trans women “screaming mimis,” “a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs,” “trannies.” She justifies that last one by saying that “having recently discovered that their lot describe born women as 'Cis' – sounds like syph, cyst, cistern; all nasty stuff – they're lucky I'm not calling them shemales. Or shims.”

Y'all, she's onto us! When the Secret Cabal Of Evil Trans People invented the term “cis,” we picked it specifically because of those sound associations. It had nothing to do with FUCKING LATIN PREFIXES.

Julie Burchill, let me personally apologize for referring to you as “cis,” instead of using descriptors you'd no doubt prefer, like “normal” or “not a freak like you disgusting trannies.” In the spirit of appeasement, here are some other words that describe you accurately:

• bigoted
• hate-mongering
• chauvinistic
• revoltingly prejudiced

If I ever have the misfortune to meet you in person, I will throw up all over you.