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.

Boyhood/Girlhood

Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood sounds fantastic, and yet I've been consciously avoiding going to see it. Two years into social transition, one and a half into medical transition, I still feel that little fishhook of pain in my chest when I contemplate boyhood and my lack thereof.

To comply with the popular trans discourse, I suppose I would have to claim that I “always was” a boy, even when I didn't know it. To be sure, there can be both rhetorical and emotional value in the “always was” narrative, but for me that is a conscious rewriting of my history, which doesn't sit quite right with me.

Not that it's not to some degree true. There is a truth in the suggestion that I always was a boy; there is a truth in the admission that I never had a boyhood. These truths are not contradictory so much as complementary. Each alone only tells a fragment of the story.

For me, the value of the “always was” narrative is very limited. I see its use for trans people who were conscious of their gender from an early age; but what does it really mean for me? For a female-assigned child with two cis brothers, who deeply internalized the “(birth) genitals=gender” message of a cissexist society, who could plainly see that I was not a boy in the precise way that my brothers were boys, who did not know that there was any other way to be a boy and who therefore assumed that my desire to be a boy belonged to the same imaginary realm as my desire to go to wizard school? (And later, on discovering feminism, decided my desire to be a boy must be rooted in internalized misogyny?)

I find more use in a negative framing and a paradox: it's not that I “always was” a boy, but that I never was a girl, and that I was not a girl even as I was a girl.

The logic of Jewish philosopher and theologian Peter Ochs is helpful here. For Ochs, the dyadic logic of binarism – the notion that not-X is the opposite of X – is properly applicable only to situations of suffering. To the sufferer, actions either help alleviate the suffering (X) or they do not help (not-X), and as such the world can be divided into the binary categories of X and not-X. In all other situations, however, binarism is misapplied, and it is an oversimplification and a logical misstep to assume that not-X is necessarily the opposite or absence of X.

This, I think, is the logic of transition, and it helps to explain why trans people, particularly in the earlier stages of transition, can be so sensitive to seemingly small aspects of the gendered world, such as being called “sir” or “ma'am” at the grocery store. A transitioning person experiences gender from a place of suffering, and as such divides the world into two categories: my-gender and not-my-gender. Anything that reinforces my-gender helps to alleviate the suffering; anything that reinforces not-my-gender does not help.

(Clearly, I am referring to a binary-identified trans person. I have not yet thought through the implications of this logic – or even, if I'm to be perfectly honest, the limited temporality inherent to the concept of “transition” – with respect to non-binary genders.)

However, the binary logic of my-gender and not-my-gender only applies once I am consciously aware of my gender. Accordingly, it would be inaccurate to retroject this binarism onto my childhood. My childhood as I lived it at the time was, as far as I knew, a girlhood. My childhood as I view it from my current perspective as a male adult is not-a-girlhood. Both perspectives are true.

Much as I long for boyhood, driven by losstalgia for a past that was never mine, and much as I could psychoanalyze my childhood gender identity, seeking evidence for the sublimation of my own felt maleness into an abundance of carefully nurtured fictional personae – even so, I have had experiences that turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Anglo-American culture categorizes under the heading of “girlhood.” I was given dolls and dresses alongside legos and pants. I was permitted, even encouraged, to embrace masculinity as male-assigned children still tend not, even in liberal households, to be encouraged to embrace femininity. I first embraced feminism as an insider, and I know firsthand fears such as that of walking alone among men as a (perceived) woman at night (though I think I am a better feminist now that I am no longer at war with the feminine in me).

My girlhood, as I understand it now, is not a matter of having “been” a girl, but of having experienced much of what is culturally considered to be part of girlhood. It is not an ontological but an epistemological girlhood. Even as I ache for the boyhood I should have had, I recognize that I have learned a great deal from girlhood and that it has been a major contributor to the man I am becoming.

I don't know if I will ever learn to love my girlhood. But I hope to someday be at peace with it.

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.