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.

The Trouble With Trans Discourse

My God, I am sick of trans discourse.

I am sick of the toxicity of each subculture of trans ideology toward those who do not share its particular rigid orthodoxy (none of which are adequate anyway). I am sick of the bitter infighting, and I am sick of the calls for unity. I am sick of the holier-than-thou posturing of the language police, and I am sick of the pretensions to bold truth-telling in the face of censorship. I am sick of hearing what's a slur and who needs to lighten up. I am sick of hearing who's a true transsexual, who's a newly-minted queer, who's a gendertrender, who's a quisling shill for the cissupremacy/patriarchy, who deserves necessary medical treatment or basic fucking human respect based on whether or not they agree with your definitions. I am sick of everybody wanting to eradicate everybody else.

I'm sick of radfem ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of claiming that, because the social construction of the gender binary as we know it is harmful, gender as such needs to be eradicated. I'm sick of the reduction of sexism to the nakedly biological, as if sexual dimorphism were the entirety of biological sex/gender diversity, as if patriarchy could be exhaustively described by “people who can't get pregnant oppressing people who can get pregnant,” as if its complex matrix of the material and the discursive could be adequately described in terms of uteri alone, as if the Foucauldian soul had never been posited.

I'm sick of truscum ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of asserting that being trans is always and necessarily reducible to a medical condition. I'm sick of the implied reification of medical conditions, as if they were eternal, subsistent, and external to the culture that diagnoses them. I'm sick of the binarism, the refusal to treat nonbinary genders as legitimate. I'm sick of the biological reductionism that dovetails exactly with the TERF understanding of sex and gender, differing only in the degree to which they believe trans people should have access to medical care.

I'm sick of genderspecial ideology. I'm sick of the reduction of gender to a feeling, to something that has no overlap with the flesh in which it is manifest, to a garment that can be donned or sloughed with the day's outfit. I'm sick of the holding sacrosanct of potato genders and nounself pronouns, placing them above critique just because someone nebulously “identifies as” them. I'm sick of the disembodiment of gender just as much as I'm sick of the biological reductionism thereof.

I'm sick of appeals to chromosomes or gonads, of claims of “deception” or the knowability of “true sex,” of the kind of biological reductionism that binds me to my birth assignment. I'm sick of born-this-way-ism, of brain sex and prenatal hormone exposure, of the kind of biological reductionism that is nothing but trans apologetics. I'm sick of airy-fairy gendering that erases the body so utterly as to make people believe that medical care is not a necessity for those who require it.

For most of my master's degree, I avoided writing about gender. I was undertaking the coming-out process, and I felt that, in a life where gender (what it is, how you know, what mine is) consumed my every waking thought, my academic work constituted a single blessed corner of relief. I would talk about Derrida and Johannine Christology and new media theory, and I could immerse myself in deep topics where for once, for once in my life, I didn't have to think about gender.

Now, in my doctoral work, engaging with gender seems unavoidable. It's still not my primary interest – I'm more interested in disability and crip theory, Eucharistic theology, and phenomenology – but I can't seem to talk about anything else without also talking about gender.

I fantasize about quitting Tumblr, about shutting down this zombie blog, about leaving trans discourse altogether. I believe in listening more than I talk, and most of the time I suspect that what I have to say is neither interesting nor valuable.

But, my God, anyone should talk who can add a little nuance to the trans wars 2k14 and their relentless, horrifying oversimplifications.

Is Masculinity Inherently Toxic?

A while ago, Red Durkin posted something on Facebook celebrating Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, expressing her delight at having two such fantastic people as the highest-profile trans women in the US at the moment.

One trans man's response was a jocular wish that the guys had anyone half as good to represent us. As he pointed out, who do we have? Chaz Bono? Buck Angel?

What I want to know is: why? 

Why are the high-profile trans women amazing people who speak out with incredible nuance and sophistication about intersectionality, while the high-profile trans men are just swimming in unchecked male privilege and douchebaggery?

Is it because they're men? Is masculinity inherently toxic?

The answer is, I think, more complicated than a simple "yes" or "no." It's a bit of both.

Obviously not all men -- not all trans men, not all cis men, not all non-binary-but-masculine-leaning people -- are privilege-denying (trans-)misogynists. I'm not literally saying that all men are terrible and all masculinity is toxic. But I do think that, as long as we are uncritically beholden to western late capitalism's current construction of maleness and masculinity, we can't help but be misogynistic, for one simple reason:

Masculinity as we know it is primarily about rejecting femininity.

Western late-capitalist masculinity is basically this, with fewer newspaper hats and more violence.

Around eighteen months ago, I was getting really sick of being taken for female. Being pre-T and in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was consistently seen as a butch dyke. In frustration, I took to Facebook to ask my friends for tips to appear more masculine. Every response -- every single one -- was about being a douchebag. I was told to take up more space, to be loud and annoying, to be rude and obnoxious. Farting and misogyny: is that what masculinity is?

I don't think it has to be, but I think we have to try extra hard if we want it not to be. I wish I could say that trans masculinity is a different creature than cis masculinity, but you don't have to spend time in the cesspool that is the FTM Facebook group to know that trans guys are exactly as insecure, juvenile, and misogynistic as cis guys. Just because your gender identity is different from your birth-assigned sex does not mean you have spent a lot of time pondering the nature of gender and trying to challenge cultural sexism (and, of course, vice versa).

One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my gender was when a friend said I reminded her of her son, because we both manifest a kind of masculinity that is not about constant oneupmanship. Of course, then the danger is that I find myself Doing It For The Cookies, and my God that's a strong temptation. I want to be a good man, a man committed to dismantling the patriarchy, but I want to be doing this for the women and the non-binary people and the gender-non-conforming guys, not for the accolades.

COOKIES FOR ME BECAUSE I AM ONE OF THE GOOD ONES!!!!!

This post has been on the back burner for a while, not least because I was afraid it would turn out as narcissistic cookie-hunting, but in the wake of Elliot Rodger it seemed important to finish it. There's a direct line between a masculinity predicated on rejecting femininity and violence against women (and men judged insufficiently masculine -- the gender-policing of men and boys in our society is appalling). As long as masculinity manifests as misogyny -- objectifying women, a sense of entitlement to women's bodies, controlling and policing gender expression, self-defining in opposition to femininity -- it's going to be toxic. "Misogylinity," as Jenn at Reappropriate calls it, is inextricable from white supremacy. And cis supremacy, and all the other supremacies that constitute the shit stew we call kyriarchy.

I don't really know what non-toxic masculinity is. Maybe we'll only find out once we've dismantled the toxic kind. Maybe non-toxic masculinity is the dismantling of toxic masculinity. I know it's my duty as a man.

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.

Last-Minute Fringe Review: S/He Is Nancy Joe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is by its nature a very mixed bag. There are so many shows – over two and a half thousand last year – that you can't possibly stay on top of everything. All you can do is to keep your eyes peeled, read reviews, listen to friends' recommendations, and hope for the best. Sometimes you will see huge shows by established entertainment giants. Sometimes you will be one of three cringing attendees of an excruciatingly poor production. And sometimes you'll see a performer you know nothing about, based solely on an intriguing title and theme, and it'll be one of the most phenomenal shows you've ever seen in your life.

Walking past the Zoo Southside, I was arrested by the title S/He Is Nancy Joe. The strapline “I was born a girl but I know it’s a mistake” had me buying tickets. It was a really good decision.

Performer Miřenka Čechová of Tantehorse delivers an intense, harrowing, gorgeous hour of deeply felt dance and multimedia performance that explores zir gender journey with heartbreaking beauty. (**Although I have seen reviews and descriptions that gender Čechová female, seeing the show makes me extremely hesitant to do so, and so I use the pronoun zie/zir.**)

The choice of medium is inspired. The process of transition is, for me at least, a process of coming to terms with one's embodiment and learning to relate as an embodied being to the world around you. Dance is appropriate to portray this process since it is an immensely embodied art form, while the incorporation of props, sound, words, and animated images provides a sandbox for exploring the relational aspects of gender. Aesthetically, this is a beautiful show that makes powerful use of the different media involved.

Čechová is a mesmerizing performer. Zir body moves with, against, in, or out of the projected animations as needed to effectively portray the highs and lows of coming to a gendered self-understanding. At times zie is jerked around like a puppet on strings, buffeted helplessly by societal forces far beyond zir control. At times zir agony is a palpable presence on the stage; at other moments, zir sense of freedom and self is expressed through joyously harmonious dancing with zir animated silhouette.

Several standout images remain printed indelibly in my mind. First, Čechová reeling between doubled-over pain and a pose of crucifixion while red bubbles out behind zir to overtake the white projection screen, a menstrual symbol of enforced womanhood and the torment of dysphoria. Second, the tragicomic scene when zie attempts to reject being transgender and dons the hose and polka-dotted skirt of girlhood, only to find zirself so restricted in movement that zie can barely even let zirself be led in demure waltzing steps by invisible partners. Third, the accusatory spotlights that accompany a coldly transphobic voiceover, and the subsequent curled-up agony in the projected glare of television tuned to a dead channel.

S/He Is Nancy Joe packs an awful lot of thought-provoking material into its 55 minutes. Childhood gender stereotypes, dysphoria, denial, self-discovery, transphobia, and anxiety over medical transition are all explored with sensitivity and nuance. At the end of the performance, Čechová told the audience that it was an extremely personal show, and that much had been quite clear in every motion of zir body.

This is an astounding show, both artistically and as an exploration of gender. My only regret is that I didn't see it until the penultimate day of its run, so I can't make everyone I know in Edinburgh go see it. Tomorrow, Sunday the 18^th, is the date of the final show, at Zoo Southside at 1:30pm. Drop everything else and see it. I can't recommend it highly enough.

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.

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.

The Upside

It occurs to me that I complain a lot about gender- and transition-related stuff. This is because it, frankly, sucks. Getting misgendered sucks. Having to correct people on pronouns sucks. Trying so damn hard to look masculine and then being called "ma'am" at the grocery store sucks. Dysphoria sucks. Processing the changes in your relationship with your parents sucks. Being legally identified as the wrong name and gender sucks (and the process to change that double-sucks).

It sucks, it sucks, it sucks.

But hearing someone call me "he," "sir," "young man"? Makes me feel like a lottery winner, like a fairytale prince whose dreams have all come true, like the king of the fuckin' world.

Pictured: me.

On Being An Ex-Lesbian

The frequency of the identity trajectory

lesbian --> trans guy

 is well remarked upon, but that doesn't make it any less weird to experience.

I was never that big into lesbian culture. I mean, I like Tegan and Sara and alternative lifestyle haircuts, but that whole Dinah Shore, L Word, second-date u-haul, group-of-lesbian-friends-who-have-all-slept-with-each-other scene always kind of mystified me.

(Not, of course, to suggest that that scene is either prescriptive for all lesbians or somehow worthy of condemnation. I just mean that it's a big part of lesbian subculture, and that it was not for me.)

So I don't feel as though I'm leaving behind a whole community, which it seems like some people do. You know, the kind of guys who keep going to womyn's music festivals and stuff. I was never comfortable in women's spaces – being around an all-female group is easier for me now that I'm not expected to be one of them, but the majority of my friends are and always have been people who are not women – and the only thing I really miss about femaleness is clean public restrooms.

The fact is, though, there are things you do and say as a lesbian that have a very different resonance if you do and say them as a guy.

For example, my ships. Yelling, "Make out already!" at a movie screen when two female characters are talking seems like a pretty okay (if potentially obnoxious) thing for a lesbian to do. Insisting on some offscreen headcanon Hermione/Ginny experimentation might not make any damn sense (on Hermione's part anyway), but it's understandable in a lady-loving lady. Obsessively scrutinizing every minute aspect of your favorite lesbian relationship on TV is, contra Ryan Murphy, fair play in a community that gets so little pop-culture representation.

In a guy, though? Those behaviors are kind of creepy.

If you're a guy who spent a few years being part of that community, it's a little more complicated than that, but it's still something to be cautious about. My sexuality, which for years I've been used to considering inherently transgressive, now risks reinscribing the male gaze.

(Not that I consider myself straight now. If there's one thing I've learned about sexuality from this whole transition business, it's that "gay" and "straight" are untenable identities. Also the last person I made out with was a gay cis man, so whatever.)

It's very weird, though. I'll hear mention of something very lesbian, and instinctively think, "That's me!" – and then, almost as instinctively, "No it's not."

In the end, I guess I think of being a lesbian in the same way I might think of a place I used to live: with fondness, recognition, and a degree of nostalgia, and also with the understanding that it's in my past, that I am no longer the person I was back then. I don't live in Lesbitopia anymore.

Liminality

Right now, I look androgynous.

People don't know what to do with me. When I go to a grocery store or a restaurant, I sometimes get called "sir" and sometimes "ma'am." If I'm with a male friend, I tend to get read as male, whereas I seem more likely to get gendered female when I'm with women.

Often, I just confuse people. I notice it when the waiter takes our order, addressing each of my friends as "sir" or "ma'am," then getting to me and saying, "And for you...?"

Or there was the time when the Banana Republic fitting room attendant was telling each person in line, "Sir/Ma'am, your room is ready." On seeing me, he asked me my name - which obviously helped none, because he ended up just saying, "Max, your room is ready."

Or the time at Eucharist, when the presider had been saying to each communicant, "My sister, the body of Christ! My brother, the body of Christ!" When it came to me, there was a very long pause; and then, "Max, the body of Christ!"

At first it was fun, destabilizing people's neat little gender categories like that. I hadn't been so ambiguous since I was sixteen and beholden to a ghastly and neutralizing school uniform. I felt like a gender warrior, smashing the crap out of the stupid gender binary simply by existing.

I'm getting a little tired of it, though.

I don't want to spend my whole life thinking about gender every damn minute of every damn day. I don't want going out in public to be this big exhausting palaver of will-I-get-misgendered-today. If I could be certain that I would only ever get seen as male or neutral, I would be okay with it; but, in a world of binaries, visible androgyny carries the risk of being read as female.

(I've had more than enough of that for one lifetime.)

In a world where the vast majority of people didn't feel the need to instantaneously classify everyone they see as either M or F, perhaps I could be happily androgynous forever. But we do not live in that world, and I don't want to spend my life in the in-between space.

I'm a guy. I just want people to see me that way.

Transgender Jesus

“Jesus exists precisely to be a blank sheet onto which we can write, project and reinscribe our longings and fears. The narrative locations in which Christ comes to find himself are multiple. This does not undermine but rather expands his historic specificity. The ultimate palimpsest, Jesus gives up and gives over the authorship of his signification into the hands of others. A queer understanding of Jesus makes clear that colonial authority is to be resisted, since the latter elides multiplicities of stories. Rather, difference and diversity are written and overwritten here, the parchment becoming denser and darker as spiralling narratives feed off and subvert one another.”

Susannah Cornwall, Controversies in Queer Theology

I read this paragraph for class weeks ago, and I keep coming back to it. It gets me very stoked about the constructive theological possibilities of rewriting Jesus; but it also troubles me enormously.

I do believe very strongly in constantly refiguring Christ to reflect the face of the outcast, whoever that may be. This is basically the core of my theological praxis: to reinscribe the Christs who look like me, and to encounter others' reinscriptions of the Christs who look like them.

The part that bothers me is the “blank sheet.”

Is that all Jesus is? Is he nothing but a mirror, an empty page, the reflection of our own deepest needs and longings? Does he have no substance in himself?

I do not like what this implies about my God.

In researching a paper this past couple weeks, I have been surprised at the apparent lack of a sustained theological treatment of a transgender post-resurrection Christ. People have likened the hypostatic union of the incarnate Christ (fully God and fully human) to being transgender; it's been suggested that, if God encompasses all genders, then becoming incarnate as a male was for Jesus a kind of gender transition; Virginia Ramey Mollenkott most famously combined parthenogenesis with an intersex condition to propose a chromosomally-female, phenotypically-male Jesus, suggesting that intersex people and trans guys most closely resemble the historical Jesus – but nobody has done much work on this with the resurrected Jesus.

I'm thinking of something like Nancy Eiesland's Disabled God, where she explicitly claims the post-resurrection body of Christ as a disabled body and draws out some theological implications for the reconciliation of PwD with their own disabled bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

Without wanting to appropriate the Disabled God or imply a conflation of transness with disability, I don't see why we can't borrow this method for imaging a Trans Christ. If we can claim the post-resurrection body of Christ as a trans body, maybe we can draw out some theological implications for the reconciliation of trans people with our own trans bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

I think this has some enormously liberating possibilities. My own relationship with my body is so hopelessly conflicted and tangled up that I don't know where to start seeking reconciliation with it. I do know that there is more hope for that now than I ever had before.

I've only been living as a guy for a few months, and already I look back on my time as female like a kind of imprisonment. I do feel liberated, and I haven't even started making the big physical changes. I want there to be a theology of this. Justin Tanis' Trans-Gendered is the best I've found, but I'm trying to do more.

I'm trying to remake Jesus in my own image. Should I be?