“I say a boring word like woman takes all the fun out of being a girl.” –Foxglove, “Death: The Time of Your Life”

Granted Neil Gaiman wrote that line, and he is definitely a guy, a straight white British guy for goodness’s sake, but I’ve been trying to think of where I read it for months now, every time I see these humorless ‘radical feminist’ arguments for some sort of vanilla world where there are no gender signifiers—which, by the way, are totally Western gender signifiers like lipstick and high heels that they’re always fighting, and not any sort of universal perception of women as weak and in need of protection constantly.

I mean, the idea that to “smash the gender binary” we have to all dress in some sort of clothing that provides no hint of the pleasing curves of our bodies, that doesn’t in any way decorate the bodies we were born with—some sort of religious asceticism that says we can’t mess with the bodies God (the Goddess, in those conversations, and often a specific Goddess that, well, wouldn’t even know what to do with those Western gender signifiers if she ran across them, but sure knows what to do with people who don’t take her seriously) gave us… Yeah.

That’s just the outward coating anyway. The lipstick, the clothes, the hair, it’s just the wrapping, and not the problem. The problem is that with the external perception “Woman” comes all sorts of other perceptions about what that woman is like, what she can and can’t do, and whether or not she’ll fuck you, quite often.

And those ideas come whether or not I’m wearing makeup, when I’m in a man’s top and vest or in a dress and heels, when my hair is short or long.

The idea, especially, that gender is a construct, a choice, a game (an idea I like, personally, a Game of You like Neil said, again, because I’m just on that kind of trip right now), would seem to preclude some sort of need to protect Biological Woman from invasion.

If you want to break down the idea that certain traits come with certain genders, why do you always want to embrace the male signifiers? To me, sometimes, I see the idea of not shaving, of not wearing skirts, as just an embrace of the things that have always been coded male and powerful, rather than any sort of re-empowering those things coded feminine, and so how does that help us any?

These thoughts, of course, have been prompted by another round of what Queen Emily called the Trans Wars. To me, well, it seems pretty damn obvious that when you’re terribly concerned about the biology of the people who call themselves women, you’re probably the one actually upholding, reifying, policing gender binaries.

I mean, I look at it two ways: One is that it ain’t my life, ain’t my gender, so who the hell am I to tell someone that how they feel is wrong, that who they are is wrong? Basic empathy for human beings can get you so much further sometimes than reading books.

And two is that if you’ve got to be an asshole and try to theorize about people’s lives, well, this still doesn’t make any sense. How is the idea that your gender doesn’t necessarily match your body anything but a plus for people who want to get rid of the gender binary? How is the thought that we aren’t trapped by our biology anything but a cheering one for feminism?

Is your oppression so important to you that you have to police it too? Is your feeling of victimhood such an important identity that you have to protect it from outsiders? Or is it just that if you set up impossible goals, you can safely assume we’ll never actually reach that happy vanilla genderless utopia where we all wear what, togas? and no one has kinky sex, or any sex at all really because that might imply gender roles or objectification, oh my? And that way you just get to complain away, continue feeling like a victim, and tell anyone who doesn’t feel like a victim, or who feels like the wrong kind of victim, that they’re wrong?

I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere by sitting in a corner whimpering about how beaten down we are. I feel like we get somewhere when we fight back. Or sometimes when we get together and laugh, have a drink, and realize that life can still be good. Thinking about how I’ve been fucked over never made me feel strong, but putting on sparkly makeup and dancing on a bar sure has. Yeah, poor deluded me, performing for the patriarchy, right?

See, Foxglove, who said that quote, above? She’s a lesbian. And a rock star. And yes, a character on a page and in Neil Gaiman’s head (and drawn so pretty by Chris Bachalo). Clear-eyed gaze and all. So who’s she performing for when she puts on her tight skirt?

Maybe she’s just doing what makes her happy. So was Wanda, back in A Game of You, when she left behind Alvin and moved to New York. And even though when she died her family tried to force her back into being Alvin, well, Barbie (oh, Barbie you supreme tool of oppression, blonde busty doll) scrawled her real name in hot pink lipstick on her grave.

I’m not trans. And I’m straight. I like men (quite often too much). And even my gender performance is drag. After years of jeans and T-shirts suddenly I wear red lip gloss every day and dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, and I like it that way. It’s my armor and war paint and the noise that high heels make is much more satisfying to my ears these days.

And I was treated like a stupid little girl and had more assumptions made about my competence, skill, and sexual availability when I wore jeans and no makeup and worked on bicycles all day.

Policing our presentation doesn’t help. You really want to smash the binary? Fight the idea that how we look has anything at all to do with how smart we are, how competent we are, how strong we are. Fight the idea that women can only get anywhere by being just like men.

I’ve got another quote for you, this one snagged off the Twitter of a friend of mine.

“Sexiness and professionalism are both drag. The problems arise when people confuse them for honest attributes.” –Molly Crabapple

Oh, and Lisa, as usual, has much, much more.

Posted: August 17th, 2008 under Bullshit, Feminism, comics.
Comments: 4

It’s been a bit since I’ve done this, since I’ve been unholy busy, but here it is.

1. La Lubu has a comment on Octo’s Feministe post that says a lot of what I was trying to say below far better than I did. Octo also linked to this post at La Lubu’s blog that, well, yeah. Because without the basics, we can’t do any of it.

2. And Octo yet again has a thought-provoking post, this time on individualism. She’s seriously on a roll over there, and instead of freaking out because she’s violating lefty dogma, take a minute to think about it. Then think about what La Lubu said. Then…synthesize?

3. Hilzoy on why John McCain gets scarier every day.

4. A post at Racialicious about the true purpose of satire.

5. Emily about the latest round of trans wars (do we really still have to have this discussion, people?) but more importantly, again: A woman is dead, and her killer got off.

6. Debi has a round-up of things you can DO. She has lots of other goodness, too, including a big kiss-my-ass to everyone who’s treating her like a wayward child. Rock on, Debi. And thanks for the Arcade Fire.

7. The Jaded Hippy actually went to see Tropic Thunder to tell us all about it. Frankly, no matter how much Robert Downey, Jr.  was involved, I wouldn’t have been interested in that movie before I heard anything about protests about its racism and ableism. And she’s aware that she’s white and able-bodied. Something to think about, especially in terms of the successful-satire post above.

8. Finally, I’m stealing this quote from Pop Feminist.

“We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining their limits. Under the crossfire of gynecological surgery rooms and television screens, we have buried love within shame for the benefit of pleasure, desire, if not revolution, evolution, planning, management–hence for the benefit of Politics. Until we discover under the rubble of those ideological structures — which are nevertheless ambitious, often exorbitant, sometimes altruistic–that they were extravagant or shy attempts intended to quench a thirst for love. To recognize this does not amount to a modest withdrawal, it is perhaps to confess to a grandiose pretension. Love is the time and space in which ‘I’ assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity.”

- Julia Kristeva (1987)

Posted: August 16th, 2008 under Feminism, Love, Movies, Politics.
Comments: 3

1. “It.”

As Cassuto noted, when people objectify others, they find it much easier both to possess and to kill them. What he meant by objectification was not sexual, but literally treating a person as an object. Cassuto also pointed out that humans are never fully able to conceive of another person as a thing, and so they enter that space in between thing and human–they become monsters.

In most of these cases (Angie Zapata’s and others), the transgender woman is doubly objectified–first as a woman that the person feels entitled to, sexually (the usual feminist definition of objectification) and then when they find out that she isn’t exactly what they were expecting, she becomes a thing, and thus something that can be killed–”it.”

It’s that very monstrosity-through-objectification that is threatening, though, because if she were simply a thing, she would no longer be frightening and need to be killed. It’s the fact that she’s still at once the woman he was attracted to and yet not what he’s ’supposed’ to be attracted to that makes her monstrous, that requires her death, that creates this ‘panic’ that to some people actually justifies killing another person.

2. The media.

In the news, the trans woman is both acceptable victim because she is a woman, and deserving victim because she does not fit the box that we’ve put ‘women’ into. She’s another step removed from the Natalee Holloways and Laci Petersons of this world–particularly from Peterson, who was so defined by her biology, her pregnancy, her fetus, always so obsessively named in the media.

It is appropriate for a woman to be a victim of violence, and even more appropriate for a woman of color to be a victim of violence–it’s expected. News coverage of violence against women goes in a hierarchy, but trans women are at the very bottom of it, (well, trans women of color sex workers would be the very bottom) and that’s just wrong. It’s “not a typical hate crime”? Then what else is it?

Back to the monster theory for a second–do you think that people who commit hate crimes against those of a different race than them don’t have a similar process in their brains that tells them people of this other race are less human than they are, different, Other, monsters, and thus killable? Is the so-called “irrational” reaction that made this man kill a woman less a product of his hate and fear than a Klansman’s hatred for black people or a Nazi’s hatred for Jews?

3. Sexual assault.

As I mentioned above, Angie Zapata was doubly objectified–first as a woman. The man who killed her stated for the record(!) that he found out she had a penis by grabbing her genital area. As if it’s some male right to check for himself, right? To test out the goods?

Wrong.

So this guy not only killed a woman, he sexually assaulted her first, and then stole her car, and we’re supposed to believe that somehow he’s the victim in this case? I mean, if I grab some guy’s cock, find out he’s not circumcised, am I allowed to bash his head in and then drive off with his car because it offends me as a Jewish woman?

I doubt it.

Lisa has more.

Posted: August 5th, 2008 under Bullshit, Feminism.
Comments: 2

Because I should write about it but I just can’t today. I have too much to do. So please read these. And think about what happens when we make a person “it.”

At La Chola.

At TransGriot.

At Questioning Transphobia.

At Shakesville.

At Feministe.

(Violence against women and its portrayal in the media is one of my major topics of study, and I’ll be all over this soon, I promise. Because violence against trans women is both violence against women and boundary policing, both abusing a victim that is easy to pick on, that society won’t blame you for, and the media portrays it consistently like the trans person in question was asking for it. And fuck them.)

Posted: August 2nd, 2008 under Feminism, Media.
Comments: 4

(yes, I used the word ‘periodic.’ deal.)

The neverending discussions go on. I had drinks last night with a friend who wondered what feminism was doing for her, a black woman.

As it always upsets me to see people who are otherwise feminist turned away from feminism, I had to think about this yet again.

My feminism was there long before I used the term. I wrote zines, protested at frat parties and refused to give blowjobs to high school boyfriends just because they wanted them.

My feminism was always somewhat caught up with sexual behavior. Up until I was in college I never felt like I was denied anything because I was female. The smartest people in my classes were always girls. I never felt bad speaking up and telling guys they were wrong. But the double standard in sexual relationships pissed me off.

So even now, it may be a somewhat bourgeois thing to fixate on, but I think about feminism and sexuality a lot. It’s a prime interest for me. I’ve never liked the rules of relationships, so I’ve always been trying to renegotiate them for myself.

My feminism wants equal rights, not special protections. I wrote an angry Op-Ed in college in response to a girl who wrote a column about being a “lady.” I ain’t no lady, I said, but that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve human respect. I believe of course that there are certain things that affect women more strongly than men–the threat of rape, even though men are definitely raped too (and don’t get me started on the normalization of prison rape), is something that women live with, the aforementioned sexual double standards, pregnancy. But I am not your victim and I don’t need to be protected.

Nor do I believe that women are somehow better fundamentally than men, that putting women into the positions of power that are fucked to begin with is going to make them all better because those women are kinder and gentler.

My feminism is critical of power relations based on a linear hierarchy. (This translates into me feeling guilty being ‘the boss’ at work). Some of this comes from a general punk-rock tendency to say fuck authority, but it’s since gotten much more theoretical. This means that while I am a (white) woman and therefore most sensitive to issues that affect me as a woman, I consider it my job to critique all power structures. This is because I am a feminist.

(more below. this is a long one.) Read more »

Posted: June 22nd, 2008 under Feminism.
Comments: 4

So I finally got around to listening to part 2 of NPR’s series on transgendered kids today. And this one definitely made me cry.

See, Violet was born Armand.

Armand found a Minnie Mouse costume one day and fell in love with it. It had belonged to his older sister, Melina, but Armand wouldn’t take it off.

Armand’s parents didn’t want to accept it. They tried to make him live as a boy. Their house was full of explosive, uncontrolled fights. Psychiatrists threw out alphabet-soup diagnoses. Then Armand threatened suicide, pointed a knife at himself, scared the hell out of his older sister.

It wasn’t ADD or OCD or anything else that shrinks have easy drugs to fix. Depression meds didn’t cure it. (And I don’t want anyone to think I’m deriding them for taking those drugs, but I am damn sure that shrinks who met a transgendered kid and started throwing psych meds at her should be slapped.)

When Armand’s parents finally found a psychiatrist who diagnosed their child with Gender Identity Disorder (a term I dislike, but one that helped them deal with it, at least), they described it as a feeling of relief, that someone finally understood. They immediately stopped trying to force Armand to live as a boy.

Her mother said, “We could see the desperation in her face…it was like she was screaming out ‘Listen to me, this is who I am!’”

“When we found out she was transgender, it was like ‘What do you need?’” As soon as they let her, age 10, be who she felt she was, she was the happiest kid in the world. It was like a different child. “She looked freer,” her parents said.

Then the family found out about a treatment that postpones puberty. Hormone blockers are given once a month, and they stop the development of sex hormones. This prevents physical differences between genders from developing–no facial hair, no Adam’s apple, no voice deepening. It makes later-life transgenderism easier, since the distinguishing characteristics are not there. The child can take hormones of the sex they feel that they are and be virtually indistinguishable from others.

The downside to this therapy is that if a child later takes hormones, they can become sterile. And of course there are those who say, as we discussed in the last post, that a child that young can’t know whether he or she is actually transgender. But Armand’s wonderful, loving, accepting father says he tells people, “What people fail to realize is that they made that decision long before [age 10].” He asks them how old they were when they knew they were a boy, or a girl.

And the therapy is designed to delay puberty, not to prevent it. It is designed to prevent the horrifying experience that Melina, Armand’s sister, voiced so well:

Melina, who is 14, says she sometimes thinks about what it would be like if she woke up every day to a body that was slowing turning male. If she were growing in ways that felt alien and frightening.

“To go through the process of the gender that you’re really not … that must be the most scariest most disgusting thing … I can’t even imagine what that’s like,” she says.

Imagine, indeed.

NPR also spoke to Polly Carmichael, a British psychologist who works at the Portman Clinic in London and practices techniques apparently similar to Zucker’s in that they require children to live as the gender they were born as. They claim that 80% of the children they work with grow up and remain their biological gender.

However, the Amsterdam clinic where the hormone blocker therapy was instituted says that 100% of their patients grow up and live as transgender.

I understand being leery of hormone therapies. I could tell you all about how Depo-Provera screwed my life right up for a couple of years. I don’t know how I’d feel about my child undergoing hormone therapy. But I do know that I can vividly picture the feeling of my body turning into something alien, different, and that it would feel monstrous. (Oh, the monsters-post I’m going to write soon…)

The fears of all those people who say that a child’s gender identity is fluid (which should be more proof that gender is not biologically predetermined, shouldn’t it?) and thus the child might want to “change back” would have more weight if these parents were actually putting their kids through sex reassignment surgery, which is not the same thing as being transgender or taking hormones. But otherwise, why not? Who cares if Armand only wants to be Violet for a few years and then decides that Armand was a better fit, after all?

Robert, Violet’s father, said that telling his family was the hardest part. After all, Violet was ten. He told the story of a family gathering where all of his aunts were sitting together, and one of them, the matriarch of the family, asked him “Robert, didn’t you have a boy?”

And he steeled himself, and he explained that Armand was now Violet, that she was transgender, and he brought her over to say hello to her great-aunts.

And when she happily skipped away, he waited for the aunts’ response.

“I’m proud of you,” his aunt said. “It must have been hard.”

(Rewriting this again made me well up with tears again.)

(Cross-posted at Alterdestiny)

Posted: May 10th, 2008 under Feminism, Hope.
Comments: 1

NPR, amazingly, did a story–actually part one of a two-part series–on young children with gender identity issues. Two six-year-olds, born boys, who at a very young age identified as female.

Of course, I have a wee bit of a problem with the discussion at this point, when it starts to sound like these kids are just playing with dolls and their parents are freaking out, but it turns out that’s not the case. Both sets of parents, from the beginning, bought their kids whatever toys they wanted, “girl” toys notwithstanding.

One set of parents, though, decided it was a problem when their ’son’ didn’t just want to play with dolls, she wanted to be referred to as a girl, and she wanted dresses. So they bought her dresses, but they decided to see a professional, just in case. Thankfully, this family lived in California and found an awesome therapist, Diane Ehrensaft, who encouraged them to let their child live as she wanted to, to refer to her as a her, and to refer to her as transgender, not as “gender identity disordered.”

The other family let it go until their child came home one day with a gash on his head from being assaulted on the playground for playing with Barbie. They ended up going to this guy. (Coincidentally, Belledame had this post up just today.) He, of course, convinced them that they should ‘train’ their son to be a ‘boy.’ And of course being a boy means not wearing pink, not playing with dolls, playing only with other boys. And it makes the poor kid miserable.

It nearly moved me to tears when the mother described asking her child, who doesn’t want to play with the “boy toys” they bought, to draw a boy instead of the girls and rainbows that he draws. He says, “I don’t know how to draw a boy,” and I nearly started to cry at the dog park.

Gender patterning has infuriated me for a while. I ran my family’s bicycle business for three years before heading back to school, and most of our business came from rentals. You can’t get a gender-neutral little kids’ bike–they’re either pink or blue, either girly as hell or super-boyish. But our adult bikes (and even our larger kids’ bikes) were all black, yet grown men would still freak out about them being “girls’ bikes” because they had the sloping top tube rather than the straight bar. And just imagine what happens when the only kids’ bike we had left was the wrong color…oh, no, we can’t have that!

So it should go without saying that I was annoyed first by the definition of “girl” and “boy” being limited to pink and blue, and then by this shrink who thinks he can train this child out of thinks he enjoys doing and turn him into a “proper boy” who plays with trucks–and probably becomes exactly the kind of boy who cracks other boys on the head for playing with dolls.

This guy’s excuse is that you can’t be transgender at that age, that kids’ gender identities are fluid, and that therefore the kid can’t possibly know his own mind.

Yeah, but what the hell is wrong with the kid being happy? They’re not signing him up for sex reassignment surgery just yet, they’re just letting him play with the toys he wants and wear the clothes he wants.

The child whose parents let her live as she wants to is happy, well-adjusted, and the most popular kid in school.

The child whose parents force him to be a boy (and have now convinced him that he wants to be a boy, hence my use of the male pronoun) is not happy. He has “a few male friends” but his mother admits that she thinks he’s living a split identity.

How the hell is that good for your kid?

Sure, kids can be cruel and they like things defined rigidly and tend to mistreat kids that don’t fit their assigned roles. I could tell you tons of stories of things I dealt with when the rumor went around my elementary school that my friend and I were lesbians.

But if your child is happy, as Ehrensaft said, why put her in therapy? When she’s depressed and confused, then maybe the time for therapy has come, but if she knows what she wants and is happy with it, why is it so damn important that your kid be forced to play with gendered toys and dress in gendered clothes?

Maybe this kid will grow out of this. Maybe she will live the rest of her life as a girl and never have surgery. Maybe she’ll surgically transition. But of all the horrible things that could happen to a child out there, this is hardly one of them.

I was impressed with NPR’s coverage, though, except for the reporter’s tendency to refer to the child living as female, whose parents use “her” and “she,” as “him.” On the whole, I thought it was an evenhanded, thoughtful story and they were quite forthright with saying that the child living as female was clearly happier.

Tomorrow is going to be the second part of this series. I’ll have to download it.

(Cross-posted at Alterdestiny)

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under Feminism, Media.
Comments: 1

Feminist theory holds, in part, that women are reduced to their bodies in myriad ways by patriarchal society. Women are defined by their appearance, their sexuality, their ability to give birth, in ways that men simply aren’t. The male body is the normal body, while the female body is alien, Other, and thus an integral part of the woman. Man can transcend his body, but woman cannot.

Earlier this year, I presented a paper at a departmental gathering. The best talk I heard there was on “Embodied Cyberfeminism,” by a Mass Media & Communications doctoral student. She wrote about Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” theory, and discussed gender play online as a way to separate women from their bodies and allow them to be defined as they wish.

In the blogosphere, as plenty of us have noted, we sit behind a screen. I don’t have to identify as Jewish or even as female here. The fact that many of us do speaks to that tendency of our bodies to define us. And once we identify as such out in the blogosphere, certain people seem to get the attention, even though the body is hidden and the writing is the only thing we can see.

I took a course on writing and feminist theory that studied the works of Nancy Mairs, a feminist writer with MS. Mairs wrote about her body in eloquent, beautiful terms, and noted that there is no way for her to separate herself from that body even when it fails her, but that her writing can help her to feel comfortable in that body.

In any case, women of color are doubly defined by their bodies. Nonwhite people are defined by the difference of their body from white people’s. With this definition comes a litany of stereotypes, but the starting place is the appearance of the body. The skin color, the shape of one’s eyes or nose (as I note when I am called out in public as a Jew despite no outward symbols of Judaism on me), as a woman, one’s breasts or ass. The shape and shade of our bodies creates an image of how our minds, our whole persons, must be.

Transgendered people define their own bodies–and despite some “feminists” thinking this is somehow wrong, it is beautiful. But as the title of this film (found through Problem Chylde) says, a black person who is transgendered is still black. (And as Holly points out so well here, just because you’re trans doesn’t mean you are trying to uphold some rigid gender roles.)

A white man may escape being defined by his body because his is the normative body in society. A woman may not, whatever the color of her skin. And people of color may not. And this makes it an issue for all of us. It is an issue when Sean Bell is killed and his killers go free (despite them being police officers), because he is being defined by his body as dangerous and as not valuable enough to care when he is killed.

It is an issue when Rev. Wright is seen as somehow more dangerous, scary, and transgressive than John Hagee, because of the color of his skin.

It is an issue when women are treated poorly because they are larger than what is considered desirable (by who, anyway). Fat phobia is often discussed on feminist blogs.

It is just as much of an issue when these things happen as it is when Hillary Clinton is characterized as a “witch” or when anti-Clinton groups name themselves Citizens United Not Timid, because she is female.

We feminists should not wait, as I said below, until an honest-to-god (and maybe cisgendered, if certain feminsts have their way) woman is hurt by something to speak out, because all of these issues are issues of bias against someone because of their body.

Because of the color of their skin.

The shape of their hips.

The curve of their breasts.

Their bodies.

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Feminism.
Comments: 1