on being gwyneth

“You’re interfering with my fabulosity and specialness, you poser.”

Sorry. You don’t own genderfucking, nor “breaking the binary,” nor even the identity. Read up on some anthropology, if not recent queer history.

“You’re not genderqueer, so you’ve got no right to speak.”

Oh? And just how would you know, little Miss Thing?

i’ve come to the conclusion that the only valid disqualifier for transition is the persistent desire to be not-trans, or the belief that if you transition successfully, you will no longer be trans in any meaningful way.

“i didn’t transition to be trans” is the stupidest cry in our playbook, and setting aside its glaring epistemological absurdity, it reeks of transphobia.

so how’s that going for you? are you not trans yet?

as callan says, we are normal – we may be statistically rare, but as i’ve said over and over again, deviation is not deviance – so “i just want to be a normal girl” really just means “i don’t want to be a trans girl.” and that’s just not going to happen.

everyone thinks that somehow they can get past it. but they never can. no matter how complete their passing, the consciousness remains, and they always come back. even the “successful” ones. they always do. eventually, the tension becomes too much…

everyone needs to be known.

and no one transitions in a vacuum anymore. the initial impulse may be “i want to be a woman”, but everyone now knows that transpeople exist, and we increasingly are our own models. it would be nice to be able to claim some kind of purity of purpose, but the fact is that that excuse hasn’t existed since christine jorgensen. yes, at some point we have the initial “houston we have a problem moment,” but, for instance, i will freely admit that one of the experiences that made it possible for me to transition was actually meeting a transperson. in the sense that i looked at her and realized that this could be real, that i could do this too, i transitioned to be trans.

most offensive are those that parade their complete assimilation in the non-trans world, while retaining an entire cheering squadron in the background… a kind of shadow sisterhood, whose accolades they need, but whom they effectively ghettoize.

if you can’t stand being trans… then don’t transition.

an acquaintance recently posed the rhetorical question of whether we can’t just drop the older/younger trans war. it’s something that i’ve come across more and more these days, even as removed as i am from so much of its context. the bitterness has tainted my outlook permanently, i think. here are the two comments i made:
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generally attractive MTF: just a woman who happens also to be trans.

not-so-generally attractive MTF: freak.

contemplate the fullness of this couplet, and you will have grasped the greater part of the trans wars.

while doing my rounds of progressive political blogsurfing, i was directed to this excellent item on how a segment of the current “new generation” of democratic/left-leaning -ists seems to have embraced an antagonism to actual progressive principles, and rationalized that antagonism as being about “generations, not ideology”:

if you’re at all an observer of trans politics, read this comment on a selected quote:

“Old school” pretty much says it all, I think. It certainly reveals the fundamental dishonesty of the “we’re not fighting, we’re just different!” gambit. Is not a certain fetish for the new, the young, and the revolutionary a core element of the cultural ethos of American progressivism?

it strikes me as directly relevant to the generational conflict that seems to pervade the community… and particularly the flavor of that conflict, created by a younger generation that often seeks to discard and even revile the elder on the grounds that they are somehow inherently different.

the original title of this piece was going to be “wbt smackdown.” its opening was to be something like this:

for the most part, i actually accept that a person’s identity is exactly what they say it is. so i’m inclined to view the personal claims of those who adopt the term “woman born transsexual” as both legitimate and authentic. but i also believe that the “wbt” political doctrine and the social boundary conditions it seeks to enforce are a regressive, vicious fraud.
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i will, for now, keep this brief.

all of this nonsense about different “kinds” of transsexuals? these ersatz typologies and false dichotomies and theoretical taxonomies and bitter divisions over stealth and out, passing and not, young and old, medical and psychological models, AGP and inherent gender and on and on and on…?

it’s all bullshit. it’s all a stand-in for class struggle. it has nothing whatever to do with identity. it’s power politics, pure and simple.

as a palliative to the toxicity of the prior entry, i offer this essay of reason and compassion by Christine Burns of PFC-UK (who prefaced and forwarded the McHugh article). i have taken the liberty to emphasize in bold text those passages i find particularly relevant to my own concerns.

the sheer *sanity* of UK-PFC’s approach to trans-rights continues to astound me, in comparison to the flailing cacophony from this side of the pond.
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i suddenly realize that something has slipped. i entered into this because i had a clear vision of myself as a woman. as i went forward, i came into contact with a subculture with which i found some shared experience, and re-identified myself as one of them. the things that make me one of them are all true, but they do not make up my vision of myself. TSism must be for me an incomplete identity, however much of a relief it may have been to find it. i have to stop the slippage, regain that vision, return to my path. i need to get on with the business of becoming a woman.

i was a man. i am now in transition. when it is done, i will be a woman. the condition that underlies this, that makes it possible, is transexualism. it is a substrate, and is in a sense the only common factor. i cannot be rid of it, but neither is it the definitve characteristic. it’s simply a part of me, as i go through my changes.

this awareness rests on an archetypal idea of gender. to me, the ideas of “male” and “female” do exist, and while they may in some ways be mixed – though not as freely as some might wish, or even i – they remain themselves, like kahlil gibran’s lovers, sharing tea but not the cup. yin and yang do not make grey. if this were not so, then “transition” would be meaningless, gender would have no relevance. but of course it does. it is a flux, between mind and body, self and other, individual and society. it is itself a medium and it is its own message.

as i settle into myself, i re-examine my relation to the subculture to which i have been drawn, almost without thinking. and i don’t like what i see. i sit in the middle of raging debates, watching each side tear their own throats out in a raging effort to define some kind of normative value, some definition… and, god help us, some rules.

i detest rules. i reject norms. find me a middle ground and i will show you how to ride a knife.

by long habit of devil’s advocacy i absorb and learn from these endless arguments, find myself agreeing with everything, contradicting everything too, tearing it all into the shapeless confetti it really is and wash it down with bile. it makes me sick. i have actually found myself almost physically ill, shaking from the buffeting of my conscience.

one thing i know… when both sides of a question are this matched, this equally right and wrong, then the question itself is at fault. it needs to be unasked. the only answer i can give to the gender wars as they are posed is “mu.” no-thing. the point, as the saying goes, is moot.

hatred, fear, oppression… these are evils, and are miserable motivations for anything.

finally, i claim my unassimilated queerness. the same resistance to normative pressures that makes my head swim when i try to engage those debates, makes that same head shake when i look at was has been offered me in the way of community. so demure. so earnest. so terribly afraid that to be a woman and a fairy, to be a *real* woman and still trans- for who are you to tell me what a real woman is anyway, really? – is inherently contradictory. so… limited. limiting.

but not of me.

to paraphrase mercutio, a curse on both their houses. no-one owns or defines me, nor has any right to say what i am and what i am not. my battles, such as they may be, are with arbitrary authority, ad hoc classsification, the state and the unelected power of the medical community.

in short, fuck this shit. i have a woman to be.

you probably know by now that i acknowledge and employ the term/idea “transgendered.” i also think it’s not the same as transexual, not really. and i’m finding that i am a little bit more radicalized than i used to be (or maybe just more hardass) about it.

look… i *like* the idea of transgendered culture. i think identity *should* be fluid. i also, when confronted by someone who wants to wear gender like clothing – to assert maleness one day because that day they feel butch and femaleness the next because that day they feel femme, to cast off nothing and try to have everything – find myself growling a bit deep down in my throat.

my reaction to such an identity statement? go get an ID. or a job. or healthcare. (or a spouse!) or any component of a “normal” life that is defined and framed by the dominant culture. it is of course perfectly possible to live “in between,” in a kind of protected zone of sexual minority subculture. and to some degree, that’s even where i am now… all my friends are either trans or queer, and i think i’m going to keep it that way for a long time to come. but ultimately i am transitioning to *be in the world* and to *be what i am*.

you know i’m not talking about surgical privilege, or passing, or anything like that. i’m talking about a state of mind, a decision that most of us have to make at one point or another regarding the identity we are willing to *actually* assert.