Trans Dark Matter
Warning! This post might be controversial. Sorry about that. It’s about me! So I can’t help it!
The fact that I lack any safe space is a source of disillusionment for me. I do not expect people to be false and to go against their own opinions to provide it. It’s important to say that. That would be unfair to them and false safety for me. What exercises me is the fact that I don’t feel I have any unequivocal support for my identity and my lived experience against all comers. I feel I have no community to fight my corner with me when I fire a flare into the darkness for aid. And here I mean wade in and stick up for me, ask questions later, support. In a world where every trans person I know (and the only other person I know personally who might possibly relate to this post and finds themself in a similar position would definitely like me to point out that she’s genderqueer), has found this, it’s hard to express quite how othered and alone that can feel.
What’s the reason for this you might ask? Go on, I’ll imagine someone asking if it helps. I’ll tell you, I don’t want srs. Call me crazy, call me inconceivable but that’s how I wish to live my life and gender. This is my life, my body and my gender identity. There is no one size fits all way of doing it, although anyone who wants to dispute the need and right of trans people who do desire physical transition can totally rely on my fighting on their side!
You know, I have found a few trans women who are in the same place. They are like me, their outlet is blogging. Reading some one else’s blog is something yes, it makes me feel like I’m not a one off for a start! But it isn’t the same as a community or personal friends. It is oft repeated and sometimes accepted that 90% of trans women never have srs for all sorts of reasons*. I can find no source for this by the way, but I’ve read it in print and online several times, it took me ages to find the first time round when I just needed to know I wasn’t the only woman who thought this way. In fact, it’s such a shady figure that even when I did find it the comments have always been that all that 90% wanted srs but couldn’t. OK, well, I put my hand up. I probably could have it, but I don’t want it. So, is that 89.99 recuring percent now? With me all in my own category? Or since I exist… you never know so might others! How shocking! Surely you’re out there? But where!?
We’re the dark matter of trans. Invisible and disputed, a theory for some people to speculate on and project their own ideas and pet conceits on to. We have to fight even harder and on even more fronts to have our identities accepted, not just as women, but as transsexuals in the first place, to have the very fact we too have gender dysphoria and are valid women accepted. I think we must be giving up on communities as even amongst trans women our existence, motivations and even identities can be subject to question and suspicion. I know this, I’ve looked all over for you others! Did we just miss each other in those forums? Were you just around the corner when I wandered into virtual world trans spaces? We should make an appointment next time!
We are othered by the othered and cast adrift to fend for ourselves, probably because we make it even messier and more confusing and therefore even harder for the cis majority to accept everyone else. Gender fuck? I sex fuck, sexuality fuck and then get dirty with notions of genderqueer and binary too for afters and I’m still a binary lesbian woman. For my next trick I’ll time travel, or perhaps just be really awkward, I can manage that one sleeping ! My life, body and gender are a grey area for everyone to try and map and claim for their side. Or one of the other sides, depending whether they want me in their team or not .
Wait a moment though, I’m not a team capture the flag game! So, I find the only sensible response is to plant a fuck off huge sign “Here be a dragon, and she’s fucking pissed off about it :V”
Thank you for listening .
With love.
*EDIT This includes people who can’t for health reasons, for financial reasons, limits to do with their lives as well as those of us who are able to find a way to balance our dysphoria without. Thought this was important to make really, really clear!
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:31 am
Mattie,
I had a trans friend in grad school who didn’t want the surgery either, and she often got the same response. I believe she’s off doing NGO work in Africa, miles from an internet connection, so alas, there is at least one of your kind whom you’re not destined to meet. Not right now anyway.
A bunch of us got drunk and angry and philosophical together one night and she told me that the you-must-be-dying-to-have-the-surgery assumption was worse than the but-what’s-your-REAL-name question. That kind of surprised me, because that question seems like the worst to me, but I can see how the surgery assumption would be infuriating too.
And the 90% figure is surprising as well.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:25 am
It is infuriating. It’s all about a stereotype and it’s a reduction of my life to a medical process.
I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to but, “one of my kind” is making me feel really uncomfy. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about, I am not my genitals! They do not, should not, define me. Whatever I do, or do not, do with them, they are irrelevant. Except in the bedroom. Clearly there they are relevant. But that’s not here, or anywhere else this happens.
Sorry Rachel, but “one of my kind” is really othering. You’re one of my kind, fellow human, woman and feminist. So as a way to avoid saying one of you
freaks,special snowflakes,types oftranswomen it didn’t work. I would have been much, much happier if you could have just said “someone who has made a similar choice to you” as that still leaves us the dignity of being humans and women. Do you see what I mean?June 23rd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Oooh. Sorry about that. I didn’t even think about the implications, but I should have. My bad.
Replace that with “at least one other person in a similar position to yours.”
I kind of also get the impression that some people view a desire for surgery as a sign of authenticity or something. Like if you’re willing to go under the knife for it, then you must really mean it, or be committed to it, or something like that. At least, that’s the gist of some of the comments my cousin got post-op from other members of our (very big, rather conservative) family. Like they didn’t take her seriously until then, or something. But I also think it’s reflective of our binary body-parts-must-match-gender-identity indoctrination from birth.
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Thank you for your apology.
People do see the desire for srs as a sign of authenticity. Most cis people do and not a few trans women too. I’m less sure about other trans people as I haven’t really been in a position to find out. I know the dynamic around srs is different for trans men, from conversations I’ve had. I agree it’s all to do with the body parts = gender view and certainly the way the stereotypes have been created and perpetuated by doctors has greatly contributed to this. Usually expressing the feeling that you don’t want srs is enough to see that you are denied hormones and a “diagnosis” as having gender dysphoria. Little wonder that the need for medical assistance and the long history of coercion of trans people to fit the medical models in order to get it has created social pressure to conform amongst us. If you step outside that you pose a threat to the existing model that does allow some access and for those who need that this is no small concern, an understandable one.
Equally amongst cis people I get a mixture of reactions. For some, it makes me more comprehensible, since they cannot conceive of needing srs at all. I can, I completely understand and relate to it. But I don’t personally need it. For these cis people by failing to fit the “crazy transsexual” stereotype I become more acceptable. This is still transphobic though, it’s based on ideas about us and on the positioning me as different, ’saner” than other trans women. For others, my failure to fit it makes me less authentic. They totally want me to pick a “side” and can’t imagine that I can pick be a gender without picking a sexed body that matches their ideas of what that means. My assertion that I experience my body as a female one is utterly baffling for them.
But gender identity is not physical sex. Gender is not body. Dysphoria is not “gender confusion”, it’s the result of gender and physical body being at odds and how that feels and acts on me, gender is not confused here, it’s clear and fixed. For me, personally, that makes a difference in how I approach mine, in how I live it. I don’t believe that this should invalidate my gender identity, nor should it be used to invalidate the lives and needs of trans people who choose other paths.
What happens, to solve the problem my lived experience poses is that I am further othered, based on what’s in my knickers! What confuses me most is when feminists do this to me. Use my body to third gender me, or other me. Surely, as feminists we agree that a certain body does not equal who you are, equal woman? Hasn’t that been a key plank of feminism since forever now? The fact that through my choice I am very sharply objectivised by pornography, that this is totally based on the wider objectification of women as sex objects and on sexist and heterosexist notions of female sexuality, should strike a strong chord and some retrospection. A trans feminist learning moment! Well I think so anyway.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Surely, as feminists we agree that a certain body does not equal who you are, equal woman? Hasn’t that been a key plank of feminism since forever now?
Exactly. I’ve been in a few fiery internet convos with the radical (trans-hating) sort, and non-rads who just seem to be clueless, and I confess I’m not the great in these contexts because I find their position mind-boggling. Even if you didn’t view feminism as a movement based on social justice and compassion, it would be pragmatic (although maybe a bit cynical) to take the oppression of all marginalized bodies as a cause for action for the sake of solidarity and consensus-building, if nothing else. In all these similar causes, if we wish to bring about political and social change, we have to build a consensus that extends beyond just our group, so limiting ourselves to preaching to the choir (although good for venting and finding a supportive network) seems counterproductive. That being said, I really think that if you’re invested in social justice and a minimally empathetic person, you can’t help but take the treatment of others seriously, and that can be the guide for your feminism and activism.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I would tend to agree with most of what you say here. With the addition that part of the issue facing trans people (and other marginalised groups) is being allowed into the choir without question and on our terms, not on the terms of other people’s comceptions of us. Building consensus ought never be about erasing, othering and discriminated against and if a consensus built around broadly agreed standards does that, it is using a position of privilege to do so. Before a movement can “take the oppression of all marginalized bodies as a cause for action for the sake of solidarity and consensus-building” it has to recognise that marginalisation and what role it plays in creating that marginalisation fully into account. It has to make sure that what it says about that marginalisation grows from the experiences of the people suffering it, rather than from ideas and concepts of them imposed from without. Otherwise instead of incorporating and supporting it will only be using and forming new discrimination, imposing the choir arrangement in place of forging one from everyone’s voices equally heard in harmony.
This is difficult work for all concerned, wherever there is a marginalised group of any kind within a larger movement. It takes awareness of privilege, sometimes of privilege that is not consensually accepted by the larger group(s). The dominant group(s) have to learn to see and counter their own privilege. It takes the marginalised struggling for that to happen and that is a hard fight.
“I really think that if you’re invested in social justice and a minimally empathetic person, you can’t help but take the treatment of others seriously, and that can be the guide for your feminism and activism.
I think this sentiment really ought to be taken to heart by every one of us and truely acted upon!