Haus - it's fairly well-established strand, unfortunately. I don't know how much influence it has, or how well it sells. As mentioned, Janice Raymond's The Transexual Empire, but also more recently:
Sheila Jeffrey's Unpacking Queer Politics in 2002 - general argument was that transmen are opting out of lesbian culture to 'trade up', thus bad, and transwomen are parodic, stereotypical women, and thus bad.
Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture 2006 - has a chapter on 'boi' identified lesbians and transmen in the US, and how they're all about the sex and the misogyny.
I've read a couple of articles/papers by Tamsin Wilton (can find refs) that implied that transwomen have a distorted sense of female identity. Wilton and Jeffrey are much-published theorists, Levy's a less academic newcomer.
I think a common rhetorical problem is that commentators collapse the cultural issues around transgender down onto the person of transpeople themselves. Thus Raymond (I think, from memory) makes some cogent points about the systems of diagnosis and the medical gatekeeping for transwomen, and how they favour stereotypical gender expression - but then she decides that means the transwomen themselves must be stereotypical infiltrators into womanhood. Similarly, Wilton protests she's making a distinction between the people and the cultural mechanisms that surround them, but when discussing the mechanisms always seems to come back to querying transpeople's right to identify. These explanations seem to see transpeople as always not only in accord with the sexisms of the systems, but also causing them. Which seems very cart-before-horse - blaming a tiny and fairly disempowered bunch of people for culture-wide misogyny.
alas - spot on, I think, but just to clarify, 'Camp Trans' is a protest camp, and not part of the festival. It runs workshops and creative events and hands out literature, I think.
When I'm talking to people about transgender stuff, I rely on a few routes round the 'real'ness question. My usual response is to throw the gender of either the person whose asking the question, or my gender, into question (not in a hostile way, I hope - more a reflective way).
One I used last week, on the identity question:
'But my transgender mate [some of my best friends - I know...] has lived as a woman for thirty years, and I've only done it for ten years - doesn't that mean she's got more experience of being a woman than I have?'
And last month, on transwomen with girlfriends ('Why would they bother?')
'But you're a woman - you know it's not all about fancying blokes, is it? Also, I fancy ladies - does that change my gender?'
And last year (on genital surgery and making a big pre-op, post-op distinction):
'But you have no idea what my genitals look like - does that change how you see my gender?'
And when it gets to the bottom of the barrel, I usually end up saying:
'But there are thousands and thousands of nontranssexual women whose gender expression, and the way they relate to being women, really annoys me. But I still see them as women. Given the numbers, shouldn't I go and poke them first?'
I hope this expresses that I support the gender identities of transpeople, without me having to say 'NO! They are Real WomenTM! Trapped in The Wrong Body !' (which I find a perfectly plausible as an expression of the somatic feelings some transsexual people have, but ineffectual as a universal explanation).
Not identifying as - well, anything, actually, but a woman primarily - I try not to rely on arguments where I have to say 'I AM WOMAN! I welcome transwomen as WOMEN!' Although that's probably assumed by most people I'm discussing it with. Also tricky because I don't want to sound as though I'm Officially Recognising transwomen, from my position of authority of having-a-lady-part (thus, my right to self-determine is never in question, and I get to ratify other people's genders).
The only time I baulked was when I had to explain the existence of transmen to my father, who said they couldn't exist as you can 'take something away but not stick something on'. I chickened out and didn't say 'But you're a man - isn't there more to it than having a cock?' because he is my father. I instead suggested that as very few people ever see one's genitals, they aren't the be-all and end-all of living in a gender.
On the good-tranny, bad-tranny thing - I was teaching Trumpet by Jackie Kaye this month. It's a novel about a musician who is found to be female-bodied after his death. While I still think it's an amazing book, one of my students pointed out that it valorises, maybe even glamourises and mystifies 'passing'. I think it's a strategy that's essential for what the book is trying to do - completely naturalise the identity of the deceased hero, and I really appreciate the effort. But it does it by having this Real Man - handsome, masculine, very heterosexual, tailored chap who nobody 'clocks', not for a moment. Which is tricky - what about people who can't pass, or whose gender expression is more ambiguous? |
