Seen and Not Seen: On Toilets, Transsexuals, and Terrorists

In the last week or two, a lot of my friends have been sharing this image:

[Image description: two young Black girls are holding hands and laughing in front of a GIRLS LOCKER ROOM sign. The caption above reads, "So, tell me, which girl shouldn't be allowed in?", while at the bottom of the picture are two hashtags, #beautifulgirls and #transgenderisnotscary. Facebook commenter 1 writes: "People would feel differently about is if they showed an actual transgender person in the picture, not that I'm against it at all but if you're going to make a pro-trans page then you should use actual transgender people." Commenter 2 replies: "This ad features my trans niece." Commenter 1 responds: "Oh, my bad then."]

I find this image, especially in conjunction with the accompanying comments, extremely revealing of the visual logic that underlies cis images of trans people. In light of the ever-growing spate of anti-trans bathroom bills (and certain responses to them, of which more below), I think it's worth unpacking what precisely we can deduce about how cis people do and don't see us.

For the commenter who objects to the photo, "an actual transgender person" is someone who is visibly recognizable as gender-variant, someone who can be seen to be non-cisgender. "People" (not himself, he insists) "would feel differently" if the picture portrayed an "actual" (i.e. visible) trans person -- and on this point he's not actually wrong, because the ad wouldn't make any sense if one of its subjects were visibly trans. The caption "So, tell me, which girl shouldn't be allowed in?" only makes sense if neither girl is visibly trans. The logic of the ad demands that transgender people be indistinguishable from cis people. This ad couldn't work with, and doesn't speak to, visibly trans people: people who are not conventionally "beautiful girls," people whom the cis gaze does designate as "scary." The commenter understands the category "trans people" to contain only visibly trans people, while the ad refuses any identification of trans people as visibly different from cis people.

At base, there are two disparate logics of gendered visibility at work here, and their disparity can be traced to the fundamental contradiction in the medical establishment's manner of bestowing gender on people. Birth-assigned genders rely on a logic of pure visibility: the doctor sees the fetal genitalia on an ultrasound and declares a gender on that visual basis. Trans people's genders are recognized on the basis of invisibility, on the pure interiority of a self-declared psychic gender (I'm talking here about the medical recognition of trans people's genders, which is usually required in order to receive hormones, surgeries, and a change of legal gender).

Now,  my reaction to the incommensurability of these two models is that the birth assignment model of gender is deeply flawed and harmful, and ought to be phased out. But a lot of people -- who may on some level be aware that there is a contradiction here, but who may not have thought through the exact details of it; or who may simply find the idea of such a radical overhaul of our gender system too scary -- respond by doubling down on birth-assigned genders (or "biological sex" as they like to call it), seeking some kind of deeper reality in which to anchor birth-assigned genders, whether that's chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, gonads, etc. The problem with this approach is that chromosomes and genitalia and internal reproductive organs and gonads don't align neatly in a binary-sex model. There's a lot more variation than that.

For those who are wedded to the concept of a biological sex binary and everything it represents, visibility is the primary metric of gender. This logic assumes that all trans people are instantly recognizable, "scary" and certainly not "beautiful" to the cis onlooker, and this is ostensibly what underlies bathroom bills like that of North Carolina. Some pro-trans responses to the bathroom bills -- like the ad above, or the phenomenon of cis-passing trans men taking selfies in women's restrooms -- react by privileging the logic of the non-visibly trans person, where the very invisibility of one's transness reveals the absurdity of the bill.

For one group, trans people's visibility is the problem; for the other, trans people's invisibility proves that there is no problem. The reality of cis views on trans visibility, however, is decidedly more complex than either side concedes.

Quite apart from throwing visibly trans people under the bus, the "we're just like you!" response overestimates the rationality of anti-trans bigotry. The increased visibility of transness in the public eye may have shaped the climate in which current anti-trans rhetoric is formed, but being anti-trans has never just been about cis people's fear and disgust of visibly trans folks. Arguably, the "trap" narrative of the cis-passing trans person who "tricks" a cis person into intimacy has a much longer pedigree in the bigoted imagination. For anti-trans bigots, the "man in a dress" (their view of a visibly trans person) is pitiful and laughable, but the "trap" (their view of a non-visibly trans person) is a devious degenerate.

In Assuming A Body (a book about which I am, incidentally, highly conflicted), Gayle Salamon invokes the figure of the terrorist as an analogue for anti-trans fears:

The primary anxiety today is not that transpeople [sic] will fail to pass, but that they will pass too well -- that they will walk among us, but we will not be able to tell them apart from us, an anxiety that mirrors current apprehensions about nationality, border control, and the war on terror with uncanny precision. [192]

If Salamon is right, then responses like the ad above or the bearded trans guys in women's rooms are not only unhelpful, but precisely counterproductive, stoking cis fears of trans non-visibility. And it doesn't take much reflection to recall that US cultural signifiers for terrorism float free of actual terrorist acts -- brown skin, thick beards, turbans -- such that bearing one or more of these signifiers marks one as Other, as enemy, completely independent of the actual definition of "terrorist." The anxiety that terrorists walk invisibly among us is cathected onto visible traits. People who attack a Sikh man don't care whether he is or is not a terrorist; they care that his turban is popularly construed as a visible symbol of an invisible threat, and they care about the message they can send to the invisible threat by attacking the visible symbol. In the same way, people who propose bathroom bills don't care whether or not they target actual trans people; they care about sending a message to us, and the message is that our existence is an affront to them.

Look: they know, okay? Anti-trans bigots know that some cis people "look" trans and some trans people "look" cis, and they do not care. Our visibility isn't the point. Our existence is.

On Biomedical Technologies of Gender

I have a bad habit of accumulating interesting journal articles on my computer and only reading them months or years later. Such was the case with a 2012 Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health article called "Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age" by one Kay Siebler. The title is clumsy, but the convergence of transgender studies with internet studies is a research interest of mine, so the other day I finally got around to reading it.

I was disappointed. Siebler's argument boils down to a rehashing of that boring, ignorant claim that people who medically transition are reinforcing gender binaries, and if we were ~real true queers~ we wouldn't get hormones or surgeries (and we certainly wouldn't talk to each other about them). This idea is weirdly pervasive in queer circles, and it's predicated on fallacies.

What I find most troubling about this claim isn't its oversimplification of the relationship between individual's actions and the system of enforced gender binaries; nor its naive valorization of nonbinary identities as always inherently better and more liberatory than binary identities; nor even the way it holds trans people to a different standard than cis people. It's the way that, even as it purports to dismantle the gender binary, it naturalizes the sex binary and the cis body. For Siebler, and for many others who think similarly, binary sex assignment at birth is self-evident; the cis body and its gender are natural, a blank slate on which hormones and surgeries constitute unnatural intervention (if not mutilation). These are pernicious misconceptions: the cis body as given, unmarked, its sex preexisting and floating above the socio-material discourses in which its life is lived. These are the (platonic) ideals clung to by the "don't call me cis" crowd (with, and I always promise myself I'm not going to compare gender and race but I always end up doing it anyway, its irresistible echoes of "I'm not white, I'm Irish").

Look: all genders are biopolitical fictions. It's just that some are more strictly regulated and suppressed than others. The body is never a blank slate and genders are never natural. There's no ontological difference between a trans person taking hormones and the assignation of an infant to a socio-material category based on its genitalia, as discerned by the medical gaze at birth or before. Both are biomedical interventions. Both are leaps into the rapid-running river of the sex/gender system, and both require intense struggle to keep your head above the suffocating flow of discourse. The only real difference is that the birth assignment is socially and institutionally supported.

Ironically, I find a parallel frustration in the work of someone who is both acutely cognizant of the fictitious nature of cis genders and extremely in favor of doing whatever the hell you want with synthetic hormones: Paul Preciado. Preciado's Foucauldian analysis in Testo Junkie is so brilliant, such a lucid and convincing account of the operations of pharmacopornographic biopower, that it's kind of hilarious how thuddingly flat his conclusions fall. All that dazzling description of the global assemblages of sex and gender, and then all he can offer is a revolution through drag king workshops. It's like a parody of everything he has devoted the preceding 350 pages to dismantling. Perhaps I am jaded by too much queer theory of the "my preferred gender/sexual practices just so happen to be the most politically subversive" variety, but I find it hard to get excited about any revolution that entails occupying the postures of toxic masculinity, whatever the intent behind so doing. Bragging about your dick(s) and mistreating your girlfriend as revolutionary praxis? Count me out, bro.

For Preciado, biomedical technologies of gender are inherently revolutionary. For Siebers, they are inherently reactionary. Both of them are ignoring the ways we interact with existing gendered power structures.

Biomedical technologies of gender are systems in which we all partake, trans or cis, knowingly or otherwise. The cis/trans axis of power requires that trans people fight harder for their genders, prove and justify and earn them in ways cis people aren't required to do. The male/female axis of power denigrates women in material and discursive ways. Trans women's oppression at the intersection of these axes is multiplied as transmisogyny. This is, like, feminism 101. It's incredible how quickly it gets forgotten by people who want to make sweeping claims about trans folks.

CONTEXT: Postmodernism's Material Benefit to Society

When I tell people I'm a doctoral student in theology, with a particular interest in poststructuralism and queer theory, they have an inevitable follow-up question.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Sometimes it's asked with a detectable sneer, an undisguised contempt for the waste of a good brain in such an arcane discipline. Sometimes it's asked quizzically, with genuine puzzlement on the part of my interlocutor. Never is it something I want to be asked.

I mean, there are only three possible answers, right?

1. Ordination (and that one is clearly out, if you've known me for five minutes).
2. Academia.
3. "No idea. HAHA oh god you're right, I'm wasting my life, let me switch to STEM despite not having studied any science since the age of 15."

It's the people who seem to be hoping for answer 3 who really bug me. There's a broad cultural trend here in the US toward the devaluing of humanities and especially of anything with a postmodern bent. I think it's part of a depressing economism undergirding US society (even more so than UK society, in my experience): if something doesn't have an immediately apparent material benefit, people genuinely can't comprehend why you would do it.

But the fact is, postmodernism does have a material benefit, if we would only apply it. The primary lesson of postmodernism is still what it was in 1967: il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Detractors use Derrida's words to dismiss deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the whole project of postmodernism as sophistry, caricaturing our work as immaterial language games; but the point is not "there is nothing outside the text," but "there is nothing outside context."

(Yes, there's a not inconsiderable irony in the fact that a statement about the supreme importance of context is so often taken out of context.)

The lesson of postmodernism is: Everything we do, say, and think is historically and contextually contingent -- profoundly, radically so. Is that the same thing modernism was trying to say? Kind of yes; but we're trying to say it in ever new ways, because clearly the lesson hasn't stuck.

For example, I woke up yesterday to this infuriating story: "Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" The BBC, of all things, recites a new iteration of the same tired neurosexist hogwash that was so comprehensively debunked in Cordelia Fine's wonderful book Delusions of Gender. It's terrible science and terrible reporting on science. It's cissexist, it's reductionist, and it's just utter BS.

My criticisms are ideological, of course. That's a term lobbed at postmodernists by detractors who like to think of themselves as unbiased viewing subjects who coolly take in all the scientific evidence before forming a judgment based on the facts. What these small-o objectivists don't realize is that this is an ideology too. It's more insidious, because it's an ideology that disguises itself as an objective view-from-nowhere. Feminists have long been aware that there is no view-from-nowhere, and to claim otherwise is an at best disingenuous, at worst nakedly malicious perpetuation of oppression.

The gift of postmodernism is epistemological self-awareness. Everything we think we know as an objective, timeless truth is radically contextual, and postmodernism is the practice of constant vigilance, of consistent suspicion of truth-claims.

"Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" There are so many profoundly contextual assumptions packed into that short headline: that "men" and "women" are clearly definable, discrete categories; that there is meaningful difference between men and women, rather than wide variation among all people; that the wiring of the brain tells us anything useful about human personalities; that brain wiring is predetermined and perhaps immutable; that there's a "right" way to be a man or a woman; etc. etc.

And there are so many real-world injustices that are perpetuated by the uncritical parroting of this ideology. The murder of trans women, the wage gap, the war on reproductive freedom -- none of this takes place in a void. It's all a part of the context within which it's seen as acceptable to report cognitive bias as scientific fact.

Postmodernism is not a disconnected, immaterial, ivory-tower discipline that's all about proving how clever you are. It's a tool for justice, and it matters.

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.

Dear God, Please Make Me A Cis Boy

I don't want to be a trans boy.

I want to be a boy. I've always wanted to be a boy, as long as I can remember; and, as long as I can remember, I've been told I was a girl. From the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhymes kids used to chant about me and my closest male friends, to my mother's repeated statements that “boys are great, but I'm so glad I have you for a daughter,” my femaleness was constantly reinforced. Not maliciously, not with any ill intent, but just as a taken-for-granted, self-evident fact of reality. Of course I was a girl.

I wish – I've always wished – that I'd been born a boy.

The truth is, I don't want to be trans. It's hard and scary, and it's a life sentence. Right now I have the immense good fortune to be living in a hugely supportive and understanding community, where most people's only question with respect to a name change is “What pronouns?” – but at some point I will have to face the rest of the world: uninformed relatives, future employers, TSA agents and bank tellers and bartenders. And it's a lifetime of being misgendered, of disclosure and fear, of trying to explain, of dealing with legal names and legal genders, of fighting constantly with bank accounts and passports and driving licenses and filling out forms, of doing Trans 101, of CONSTANT BULLSHIT from a society built for cis people. I don't want to do it.

I feel as though I start each day with a certain allocation of spoons, dependent on my mood and dysphoria level, and then the rest of the day is a zero-sum game of gender-related spoon accumulation and loss.

Getting called “her”: -1 spoon for each pronoun.

Getting called “sir”: +5 spoons.

Getting called “missy”: -9000 spoons.

Etc. etc., and if I get below a certain number of HP spoons, it throws me off for the rest of the day and completely wrecks my ability to get anything done apart from brood and listen to “My Body Is A Cage” four million times.

For certain tasks, I know I have to prepare myself psychologically. Anything where I have to show ID is tough: a trip to the bank, a beer run. There have been days when I wanted booze, but didn't buy any because I couldn't face showing somebody my driver's license with its MISS [FEMALENAME]. (And anyone who knows anything about my relationship with booze will know that that really means something.) I dread going to the bank; because of course when she calls me “she” the teller is only acting on the information available to her. She doesn't know that it feels like a blast of “Harrison Bergeron”-esque white noise to my brain, throwing me for a loop like an air-raid siren going WRONG WRONG WRONG. She can't know that unless I tell her; and who has the spoons to explain their preferred name and pronouns to every bank teller? It's hard enough explaining that stuff to your friends and your parents, the people who know you and care about you and will want to get it right.

People say stupid things. Even here, even where I'm surrounded by trans people and supportive friends and students of queer theory, people say really stupid things. Gold medal thus far goes to the person who earnestly told me they could “kind of understand” what it's like to be transgender because they “changed religious identities.” (Silver goes to the dearly beloved friend who reacted to the very mention of top surgery with a frantic, “You know people pay thousands of dollars to have breasts like yours??”)

I have so much left to figure out. I have to get therapy. I have to get on hormones. I have to try to get my name and legal gender changed, while living as a non-resident alien on a student visa. I have to decide how to fill out my PhD application forms. God help me, I have to tell my parents.

I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and have always been a boy.

Three Dreams

I dreamed that I was back at the conservative evangelical church I used to attend in London, visiting all the people I used to know there for some event. When people greeted me as "Anna," I explained that I'm not using that name anymore and I now go by Max. Then I had to use the bathroom, and went to the Gents'. When I got out, I found that everyone had piled into a coach and left to go elsewhere. Only D, my old mentor who used to do one-on-one Bible study with me, had stayed behind, to explain to me that everyone at the church found my trans*ness unacceptable and would no longer be able to associate with me. I was gutted. Their transphobia really hurt me, even though I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

***

I dreamed that I'd come out to my mother. She wanted me to perform in a piano recital, even though I protested that I had nothing performance-ready, and she forced me to wear a dress. I managed to escape to the men's restroom, which was an endless corridor with urinals and stalls on both sides. I walked through the vast men's room in my dress, looking for the perfect stall.

***

I dreamed that my old high school was having an alum event, for which you were required to wear your old uniform. I still have mine, but I only have a girl's uniform and I needed pants. I don't have any smart pants, so I thought I'd borrow some from one of my brothers. But my younger brother's school uniform pants were far too big, and my older brother's were nowhere to be found. I realized I would have to buy my own trousers.

Not Taking Anything Away From You

I've been a little astonished by the response to my trans reading of Brave. Some people have been remarkably warm and affirming, for which I'm very grateful, but it's also generated more controversy (and more comments) than anything else I've ever posted on this site. People, it seems – many of them cis women – are really, really personally invested in this film, and some of them are Not Happy with my unorthodox interpretation. Looking beyond some nasty knee-jerk cissexism, I think I understand why the angry readers are angry:

They feel like I'm taking this film away from them.

Brave is Pixar's first movie with a female protagonist. Cis female viewers have watched Pixar release twelve prior features, most to critical acclaim, all to boffo box office, and all with male protagonists. They have seen Brave, hoping to see themselves and their family relationships reflected for the first time, and then they have had to endure feminist criticism drawing attention to the film's every single imperfection, while mainstream critics responded with a broad “meh” (perhaps because of “the average male viewer’s lack of practice when it comes to reading female-centric narratives for geopolitical content”?). And now they come across yours truly, suggesting that this movie doesn't even have the female protagonist they so desperately needed.

I get it, I think. It feels as though I am appropriating their property. The heteropatriarchy finally throws women a bone, and I snatch it away and give it back to the guys.

My gut response to seeing people's indignation was along the lines of, “Um, hi? You know who gets even fewer bones from the heteropatriarchy than cis women? Trans* people!” But now I'm playing oppression olympics, which has never been nor ever will be constructive.

Q. Who's more oppressed, cis women or trans* guys?

A. TRICK QUESTION! While we're fighting it out among ourselves, the heteropatriarchy is oppressing the shit out of all of us!

I am a fervent believer in textual indeterminacy. I believe that there is no single, singularly authoritative, “correct” way to read any text. I believe that hermeneutic polyvalence is a good thing, and that multiple different, even contradictory readings of a text can, should, and must coexist. I think that any reading is possible, even unto blurring the line between “(re)interpretation” and “fanfic,” and I think that readings we find difficult and challenging – even infuriating – are essential. But I also believe in judging the ethics of textual interpretations.

When we encounter a (re)interpretation of a text, we should ask the questions: Who does this interpretation serve? What cause does it promote? Why does it exist – what is it doing? Who is being given voice, and whose voice is being suppressed?

In leftist lit theory circles, we have a tendency to pretend that this is easier than it really is. We say, “Well, you can have a reading of the Bible that endorses slavery, or a reading that condemns it, and obviously we choose the reading that promotes liberation for the marginalized and disenfranchised.” That's an easy choice when it's “endorse slavery” or “condemn slavery,” but it's rarely so cut-and-dried. What do you do when it's a choice between “a voice for the cis woman” and “a voice for the trans* guy?”

This is the point at which I turn to polyvalence. You don't always have to choose. The cis woman and the trans* guy both desperately need an interpretation that gives them voice and meaning (and, holy hell, do trans* women ever need one too). My reading (which is mine and belongs to me) is done from my own social location and for my own purposes. Other people don't have to agree with it, because other people have other social locations and other purposes and therefore other readings; and we can do all these readings, and push and challenge each other with the kaleidoscope of ways we make meaning, and we don't ever have to say, “This trans* reading is suppressing / supplanting / invalidating my feminist reading.”

When we say that, we're accepting the idea that there can only be one interpretation. But texts are not the Highlander. “The” (single, authoritative, correct) reading of the text is a false and oppressive construct of the kyriarchy. Don't be taken in.

Bear, Bow, And Boy: Queering Pixar's "Brave"

I finally went to see Brave. My expectations were complex: I'd been salivating for Pixar's first female protagonist since the film was called The Bear and the Bow, but the criticism had been mixed. Some praised the movie for its heroine's nonconformity to traditional princess behavior; others critiqued the same thing as further denigration of conventional femininity. It's the same old same old that you get every time there's a Lone Female: she has to be all things to all people, and is doomed to failure from the start.

(Easy solution: have more than one female character.)

Initially I hoped to love the film. Then I realized that, with a hope this strong, disappointment was inevitable. Then I began to think that expecting disappointment might result in satisfaction after all. (This is why you shouldn't think too hard about these things.) I hoped that Pixar's first female protagonist would be awesome; I expected to be disappointed.

What I did not expect was that this would turn out not to be Pixar's first female protagonist at all.

On my reading, Merida is a boy. This film is about a trans boy and his relationship with his mother.

Every use of the word “princess” makes Merida cringe. Why? Because he is a prince. The threat of betrothal sends Merida into a flat panic. Why? Because marriage codifies the enforcement of compulsory cissexuality and heterosexuality.

Merida has no real role model of masculinity. Although his father jokes with him about the useless suitors, and provides him with the bow he longs for (which becomes, along with his gorgeous mess of unruly hair, a totem of his freedom and his true identity unencumbered by the pressures of coercive gender assignment), ultimately the king, like all the other male characters, is a figure of comical ineptitude. Queen Elinor is the primary figure shaping Merida's life, both because of her general competence and because Merida is the first-born (and the only AFAB) child.

Thus Merida's mother is the focus of all his fears and anger. After all, his father is surely just as responsible for the insistence on marriage, but the queen alone draws Merida's rage. She is both the person he wants to be (competent, in control, confident in her identity) and a person he would rather die than become (a woman).

Merida externalizes his desire for the world to see him differently, and projects it onto his mother. Thanks to his actions, his mother and brothers are all physically changed, forced to undergo the trans* experience of being seen by the world as something different than what you truly are. It is this profoundly painful experience of dysphoria – and the fear of becoming something you know you are not, simply because of how you look to those around you – that finally causes Queen Elinor to understand her oldest child's perspective, and to grant him the freedom to break with tradition and be who he truly is.

There is a constant thematic drumbeat throughout this film of fate and how it can be changed. Fate be changed: look inside... It reminds me irresistibly of the feminist mantra: biology is not destiny. Merida does not have to be the princess he was assigned to be at birth; it will take a lot of courage to defy traditional, societal, and familial expectations, but he is brave enough to do it.

I need this reading. I need this reading because there are no mainstream pop-culture narratives of how to be a trans*masculine person without a femme sister, of how to be a trans*masculine person relating to the mother who loves you but wants you to be her daughter. (Of course, I'm not sure what this narrative has to offer in terms of practical advice. How do you de-allegorize turning your mother into a bear?)

Trans*masculinity And The Pop-Culture Gender Binary

It may shock you to learn that I have been thinking a lot lately about trans*masculinity. (Holla at Genderfork, who recently ran a terrible photo I sent them probably a year ago! I look a lot more androgynous now, but my webcam is still just as terrible!)

It's occurred to me that there's an interesting pop-culture trope around trans*masculinity: it's okay to have a tomboyish/trans*masculine character, provided there's also a really femme-y girl to balance things out.

Like – okay, don't judge me too harshly for this, but between the ages of seven and maybe nine I was super into The Famous Five, and my favorite character was (of course) George. George had short hair, a rough-and-tumble attitude, and enormous pleasure at being gendered male. “I won't be a girl; I'm a boy!” I can remember her shouting at some point in the endless book series. George also had a cousin named Anne, who was timid, pretty, and conventionally feminine. (Anne was the one who was always, “Please let this be a normal field trip...”)

Or look at A Song Of Ice And Fire. Aggressively gender-non-conforming Arya wants to fight, hates sewing, and presents as male for a while. Meanwhile big sister Sansa is about as conventionally feminine as you can get. (I actually love what the series does with these tropes – it presents both of these choices, as well as those of other women like Cersei and Danaerys, as part of a range of possible options for AFAB people trying to stay alive and reclaim a little agency in a ferociously misogynistic society.)

Last year's lovely French film Tomboy also uses this trope, and it even crops up among portrayals of girls who are strictly on the cis end of the tomboy spectrum: Jo March has her sister Amy, Buttercup has her sister Bubbles, Petrova Fossil has her sister Posy.

I understand why it's a trope. I get that it's an easy source of conflict, a stark way to characterize two people as different, and an attempt to avoid accusations of either stereotyped femininity or femme erasure. But all too often I think it ends up reinforcing the masculine/feminine binary, even in instances where it might have been intended to disrupt it, because this constant pop-culture pairing of GNC girl and femme sister implies that the (conventionally) masculine and the (conventionally) feminine have some kind of yin-yang relationship that needs to be held in delicate balance. Plus, the hierarchized nature of the binary opposition means that all too often the femme gets denigrated (see: half of fandom on Sansa – including, admittedly, yours truly in the first book).

Then again, maybe there's also a grain of truth in this trope. I know I personally would have felt able to embrace androgyny a lot earlier in life if I hadn't been beset with the (probably instinctive, certainly not malicious) gender policing of parents toward their longed-for and only daughter. Maybe I am setting too much store by a pop-culture trope; maybe I am just making excuses because I am afraid; but every time I try to imagine having a conversation about gender identity with my parents, I think:

This would be a lot easier if I had a sister.

So It Begins

So, I finally bought a binder.

I've been wanting one for so long, but I was too afraid to actually get it. Oh, they're too expensive. Oh, figuring out the sizing is too confusing. Oh, making one is beyond me because I have no arts-and-crafts skills. (Am I still allowed to be part of the queer and/or blogging communities if I admit that I have no arts-and-crafts skills?)

A week ago, the excuses ran out. I just couldn't stand it any longer. I ordered one online, and yesterday it finally arrived.

I'd been really on edge waiting for it. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just felt like putting it on for the first time would be this ~magical moment of truth~, an epiphany where everything fell into place and I would be able to stand up straight and tall and say LOOK AT ME, WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I AM.

Of course, this is not exactly what happened. It's a nice thing to have; I like what it does to my body shape a lot; but it doesn't make me completely flat, and it certainly doesn't solve all my issues in one swoop. But I did think that my first day wearing it out would be a day without (or, okay, with less) dysphoria.

It started out grand enough. I went into the city with a group of friends. It was a beautiful day, and I was wearing my new binder under one of my favorite T-shirts. I felt okay about myself, or at least as close to okay as I ever get.

Then we went to a bowling alley, and I nipped to the bathroom. There were non-gendered bathrooms, which was nice. I adjusted my binder and made sure I looked okay, and then went to join my friends in the bowling alley. They'd already paid for two lanes and entered everyone's names. They'd split up the group into “men” and “women”, and included me among the latter.

Do you want to know what the dysphoria felt like? I will tell you. It felt not unlike a panic attack: waves of nausea would crash over me, so intense I could barely stand upright, and then recede just enough to make me think I could cope before hitting me again in full force.

I am not very good at confronting issues head-on, and anyway I didn't want to ruin anyone else's fun, so I did not say anything. And it's not that I expect my friends to read my mind or anything – I haven't spoken about it openly with many of them and I don't expect them all to be totally sensitive about it – but they see the gender-neutral pronoun buttons I wear; they know gender is kind of a difficult subject for me; they know I prefer gender-neutral language wherever possible.

They should've fucking known this would upset me.

Like, I don't know, maybe gender dysphoria is trivial or a joke to them; but it's really, really painful for me. Every time someone uses female pronouns for me, it stings a little; every time someone calls attention to my assumed femaleness in a major way, it's like a punch in the gut. It really does feel like a physical injury.

The other day one of my friends referred to me as a “girl”. I didn't say anything, but afterward I cried about it in the shower.

All my life, I've been suppressing this. At a very, very early age I intuited the need to suppress it. I assumed every girl wanted to be a boy, but nobody talked about it because (a) it would upset their mother and (b) there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I channeled all of these feelings into fiction: I desperately sought out novels written by female authors from the perspective of a male character as legitimation that it was okay to do this, and I wrote all my own stories from the perspective of boys or gender-non-conforming girls. I guess the gender policing I encountered as a very small child made it clear to me that “not being a girl” would have to sit alongside “walking with dinosaurs” and “solving mysteries” as belonging to the realm of pure imagination.

Well, guess what? I give up. I give up trying to be who everyone wants me to be. I don't have a clue who I am, but I know who I'm not. The bowling incident has made that crystal clear: if I were a woman, it would not have upset me so much to be called one.

I packed up my not-girl-ness in a box marked PURE FANTASY at a very early age. Inside the box, it festered and grew; now it's a big ugly mess that has burst free of the childhood fetters, and what it will look like once I've given it two decades' worth of care and attention is anybody's guess.

Coming Out To Myself

Some people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends. Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.

I am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes), but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in queer-friendly communities.

I am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process was myself.

The hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.

That's why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.

What was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.

By “internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a lot of straight people don't ever think about it.

Take my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic. “We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,” “one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for “one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told, “If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were gay, we would be totally fine with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that happens to other people.

I honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I couldn't be gay. Gay was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the apparent criteria for being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I couldn't be gay. There must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some qualification you had to earn, some card you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a power ring makes you a Green Lantern.

It took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such; but there is no difference between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The only thing telling me there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay people, watching TV shows with gay characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism. Hello, self-actualization.

It was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.