I’ve noticed that a bunch of radfem types have been reblogging my posts where I call out trans women for male socialization and I can’t help but wonder if my opinion on this matter is clear. I wonder this because it has been my experience that when people read a political piece, they tend to either identify with a couple of points they agree with, after which the whole piece becomes about those points, or they find a couple points they abhor, and the piece becomes a place to focus their anger. Given that no rants followed these essays, I figure the most likely scenario is the identify with/agree with one, so allow me to clarify in full detail what my opinion is on gendered socialization.

First, I think that socialization—even gendered socialization—varies from town to town and household to household, so the most anyone can say about it is to identify trends which people follow to varying degrees. There are certain trends in male and female socialization. This is fact. People socialize their babies based on genitalia. This is also a fact. Ergo most trans women, save ones who grew up in Sandra Bem-style gender bubble experienced some amount of male socialization. I’ve described the effects of that in the post above.

That said, I don’t think that’s the end of gendered socialization story as it applies to trans women. The most obvious aspect is that once a trans woman starts passing, any continuing male socialization stops, and female socialization commences. A passing trans woman will at any given point after transition, have been subject to some male socialization and some female socialization. This is also a fact. Some trans women stumble through it, some glide into it, some just don’t care, but they all experience it, to deny that is no more rational a position than saying trans women don’t experience male socialization.

To back up my claim, I will share what my experience has been. If there were literature that was unbiased, I would have you read it, but I know of none. When I completed my transition, and was being consistently treated as a woman, I noticed quite a few things were different. For one, I noticed how much I was judged on how I dress. It took me a while to find a style that wasn’t ridiculous, and the whole time I was given a lot of sneers and snide comments. I became invisible to people in a way I hadn’t been before.

After a long, arduous time spent learning how to dress, hoping that in doing so I’d go back to being what I perceived as “normal” but was in fact male privileged, I noticed that I didn’t go back. I merely replaced one set of problems with another. In stead of being invisible, I suddenly got noticed to a degree I hadn’t felt since during the transition (a fascinating discussion for another time). But the nature of the stare wasn’t the overtly hostile one I had experienced then coming from everyone, it was intent and sexual in nature and it was coming mostly from men. It only felt mildly better in comparison to the during-transition stare. Nobody was sneering, people were smiling. But it wasn’t a genuine smile. It was a butter-you-up smile. I recognized it from my upper class socialization: the look of someone who wants something, and will be as nice as it takes to get it.

There are many more, deeper, more constricting, and aggressive examples, and if people are interested, I will write more, but I think it’s safe to say that that kind of staring and expectation-laden interest is pretty solidly in the female-socialization category. It’s part of my life, every bit as much as my male-socialized kung-fu mastery is. To deny either is to miss a fundamental part of my life—both have shaped my behavior.

I can’t write much about the other alternative: trans women who don’t pass. I can’t because I only experienced it briefly during transition, and I think due to how often I was mistaken for a woman even beforehand, and how most of the time during transition I was seen as a woman, I can’t give a full first person experience for not passing. What I can say is that from what I’ve observed, the way I’ve seen people treat visible trans women and the stories my non-passing friends have told me, there’s a special gender-socialized level of hell for trans women who don’t pass. It’s beyond homophobia or sexism, and in some ways even transphobia. I’ve seen people treat animals better than I’ve seen them treat non-passing trans women, and culturally they’re held up as the standard for failing to be physically attractive while simultaneously being disposable, and that is fucked up.

Almost all trans women have male socialization, except for a tiny edge case, but upon transition all trans women are then subject to either female or trans woman socialization depending on whether they pass. It may not be simple. It may not fit easily into radical feminist or trans* theory, but it is the truth

“Whole Women (not hole women) is a song written in part about the march in America where trans people held up banners supposed to be vaginas and were shouting we’re holes, we’re fabulous, come fuck with us. Vaginas are not holes and women aren’t merely holes to be fucked “

I was originally going to make two separate posts about this, but the more I think about it, the more complex and interrelated they are.

The first subject is a reflection on a particular story I heard that utterly disgusted me about the behavior of someone claiming to be a trans woman. Apparently this individual, despite their desperation and weekly claims of having found “the one”, each with a different person, had managed to charm a woman into bed with them. According to my friend, relating this story to me, things had gotten very intimate and all of the sudden this person got up, disengaged and said “Call me when you want to feel like a woman.” They then imed my friend to brag about this “victory”.

I refuse to call this person a woman, because I can’t imagine anyone who truly was a woman doing or saying anything like that. It’s stereotypical male behavior—it’s exactly what I think of when I hear about wbw spaces. This is the kind of behavior they’re trying to keep out, and who can blame them? This person clearly did view women as “merely a hole to be fucked” and the fact that they claimed to be a trans woman only made it that much more angering to me.

I’m sure that probably rings hollow, especially given a story like that, but I feel I must stress how I, as a trans woman, felt when I heard this story. I cringed. I shivered in disgust. I felt dirty and ashamed. I questioned what it is I’m truly fighting for. At the same time I felt comradery with my friend in being disgusted. We both were. I think any woman would be, watching one of her sisters treated like some victory, a trophy, a hole to be fucked as it were.

I am not sure how to communicate what I want to communicate, since I’m at this point not even sure what I want given this development. It’s a challenge for me to reconcile my bone deep reality of having a lot of female feelings, desires and impulses, with this asshole claiming he’s me when he clearly barely understands women, let alone is one. I feel the need to point out that these feelings, desires and impulses aren’t just shallow whims or a costume, but are reflected in my deep, sisterly relationships with my female friends, the way the patriarchy affects me, and the fact that the dissonance between my body and my mind and soul is enough to induce vomiting and make me feel pain on every level.

The fuck-hole model of surgery bothers me. It bothers me that that’s how it is, because I do view being a woman as more than that, and if science had more to offer than that, believe me I’d snatch it up in a heartbeat. I wish I could have a body I felt was mine, and that I could be happy with. But I can’t—and it hurts me every time that’s used against me. It hurts me every time someone exploits it to act out these disturbing power trips. It hurts me when people put me in that dreaded less-than almost woman category. It hurts me because all of these interpretations, all of these images, stereotypes feel so far away from truly understanding me, and on top of that become a source of such hatred and malcontent that I just want to curl up and hide everything about myself in order to at least have some semblance of care and love in my life. As many problems as I feel I have with the surgery, I can’t help but feel like of the options I have, it’s the one that allows me to live by easing my fears somewhat.

I know a fundamental part of why I feel this way is locked up in my head and that to an outsider it probably will be forever opaque, simply because it’s impossible to truly know the depths of someone’s feelings from the outside. But I do wish people would at least try to understand, and that idiots like the one I mentioned earlier weren’t the most dominant image of what it’s like to be a trans woman, because I feel like for every one “trans woman” like that, there are probably ten that are so scared to tell anyone that they feel they have to hide themselves from the world, and that is tragic.

I wish I knew where to go from here.

http://www.transactivisty.com/2012/06/queer-women-hate-body-part-2/

http://www.transactivisty.com/2012/06/invisibility-hate-body-part-3/

http://www.transactivisty.com/2012/07/hate-body-part-4/

http://www.transactivisty.com/2012/06/gatekeepers-hate-body-part-1/

“

Due to the fact, however, that I was read as “more” female — or at least because I felt different enough from typical social groups — I found myself more comfortable in gay and lesbian circles. My relative transparency as a trans woman, and the conditional cis privilege that came with it, led to me being at least nominally “welcomed” into queer women’s circles; this however lead to a remarkably disturbing insight. For the first time, I began to hear the way cis people talked about trans people — and trans women in particular.

Much to my own shame, I joined in from time to time. Yes, penises were gross. Yes, “tr—ies” were ugly. They were mockeries of women. Nothing would be more disgusting than to engage in sexual activity with one of them (trans women). Anyone who did so was, by proxy, gross. They (trans women) were “men in dresses.” They were just “really gay men.”

They … They … They.

On occasion, there was even an approval for violence toward “them” because they were “raping” women by the very virtue of their existence. The appropriation of women’s bodies, they argued, was an act of rape. And, of course, the fact that queer trans women were sexual beings, and not the non-threatening subservient eunuchs the system had instructed us to be, this changed the tone as to which trans women in these contexts were tolerantly received. Queer trans women were violent, sexually aggressive, rapists, predators, deviants, and perverts. And thus crossed the bridge from eunuch to rapist in the false choice imposed on all trans women.

But the cis women I was around weren’t talking about “them”, nor was I. We were all talking about me. I was gross and ugly, a mockery, a disgusting person with whom to be intimate. My existence was an act of rape and I was not worthy of basic human consideration. As time passed, and as I heard more and more of the things they said about trans women, my shame and disgust with myself won out.”

-MM

I’m glad someone’s writing what it’s like from the other side.

Ever hear the bizarre false dichotomy some radfems are spewing these days?  It goes as follows:

“If you pass, you are treated with normal misogyny. If you don’t pass, you are treated with homophobia.”

Lovely.

There is some similarity between how people oppress trans women and how they oppress gay people and women, mostly because people usually know jack shit about trans people so they try to superimpose whichever tired stereotype in their head seems to fit best onto the trans woman and run with it. This is how people come to objectify trans women in this obscenely negative way, declaring all of them categorically unattractive, taking pictures of them and posting them online as “traps”, and reducing their entire existence into a porn genre. You’d think lesbians would have some compassion for that. It’s also how murderers of trans women can pitch the words “gay panic” in court with a totally straight face and be let off the hook. And speaking of gay panic, and male violence against trans women, let’s take a look at another radfem absurdity:

“We don’t oppress you, men do. Men are the ones killing you, so fight them, not us!”

You don’t have to be literally wringing the life out of a trans woman with your bare hands to contribute to her murder. You can be the one laughing or video taping her murder instead of calling the cops. You can be the juror who lets her murderer go free, allowing him to kill again and sending the message to every man alive “It’s ok to kill trans women. They don’t count as people in our justice system.” You can be the ones telling trans women to STFU when they point this out. This argument is tantamount to tying someone to a set of railroad tracks, then claiming you had nothing to do with their death because you weren’t driving the train. You may not have operated the machinery, but you sure as hell put them in a position to die easy.

Here’s the difference is between homophobia/misogyny and transmisogyny: when bad shit happens to you, there is at least someone you can turn to for support. Gay men have the gay community. Women have the feminist community. When women are raped, they don’t call rape crisis hotlines only to be told that their rape doesn’t matter. When someone beats them into a seizure in front of a crowd, people don’t laugh and pull out video cameras, smirking about it. They don’t have the police shrug their shoulders and move on when they get shot. They don’t have people actively voting their murderers go free. They don’t have paramedics give up on them over their genitals. The list goes on and on.

Telling trans women to build their own community isn’t exactly fair either given this kind of environment.  There are a lot of trans women who live stealth because they know that being openly trans can get them killed, and who can blame them?  Therefore openly associating with other trans women, which is what it takes to build a community, is a risk in and of itself—a huge risk.  We could talk statistics all day, but I think it’s best to roughly relate a conversation I had with my friend, when she moved.

Me:  How’s (new location)?

Her:  Better than (old location).

Me:  Ah people accept you more there?

Her:  Not really.  People still misgender me, make fun of me, and exclude me from things.

Me:  That’s horrible!  How could that possibly be better than where you were?

Her:  I don’t get beaten up regularly anymore.

That’s a common story of what being visibly trans is often like.  The gold star of acceptance is “doesn’t get beaten up regularly.”  Is it any wonder why so many trans women go to great lengths to avoid being detected?  Is it any wonder why they’d dissociate themselves from each other for the slightest lowering of the chance they’ll be abused by strangers?  They’re not drama whores, they’re trying to survive the hell on earth that cis people have created for them, and all they’re asking you to do is stop, at the very least, and if you have any compassion at all, help them out.

Of course it’s transmisogyny. If it were boilerplate misogyny, radfems spouting this nonsense might give a shit.

Reading dialog between radical feminists and trans women on the subject of trans women in lesbian spaces a pattern emerges rather quickly of the arguments on both sides. Both sides have a very rigid and static set of language and beliefs that they shout at each other in increasing intensity until one side rolls their eyes and decides not to bother responding. If there is a function to this, it is more for passersby who happen to be reading than for the participants involved. The pattern goes like this:

The pro trans woman side: As trans women we reject the cultural definition of all trans women as automatically unattractive based solely on being trans. It negates all other aspects of our existence, it is very demeaning and unfair. We wish for you, as feminists, to question this cultural belief and examine the inherent misogyny within it. It is an extremely negative form of objectification, as a person is reduced entirely to their genitals and presentation and it is presumed that either no personality exists or such a personality is trivial and not worth any thought or consideration. It also presumes that a woman’s only value as a partner is her reproductive organs, since without them she is automatically valueless in the dating scene. We have given this concept the problematic name “cotton ceiling” because the glass ceiling refers to the unspoken lack of value for female workers reflected by a total and automatic dismissal of female workers as managers and leaders, the analogy being that the manager/leadership position is parallel to the lover position in the dating scene.

The radical feminist side: Trans women are men, and it is unfeminist for women to solve men’s problems is the central theme. From this, we as radical feminists conclude that trans women don’t belong in lesbian spaces, period. It is not our job to accommodate men, and we are appalled at the entitlement displayed by trans women who seek to gain entry in our personal space. This entitlement is a reflection of the patriarchal value that all space is men’s space and women’s role is to serve men. The term cotton ceiling is particularly offensive because the glass ceiling needs to be broken through, and the cotton ceiling is in my panties, and it’s difficult to imagine a better visual for rape than that. It is our right as women to define our sexual identities and have sexual autonomy, and the cotton ceiling concept takes that away from us.

There are two fundamental differences between these views, and they are less that the views are diametrically opposed and more that they stem from two points in which trans women’s and radical feminist view points disagree, and then a solid train of logic takes them on two diverging paths. The first key point is whether or not trans women are men or women, and the second key point is what exactly defines the cotton ceiling.

The first point is the more basic point, and in this trans women have the more consistent viewpoint. Fundamentalism is attractive because it makes everything simple. If everything is either male or female, and these categories are completely static through the course of one’s entire life, then life seems to naturally make sense in a very clean and tidy way. It’s a powerful appeal. But it’s also too good to be true. After all it used to be the prevailing fundamentalist belief that all women were genetically hard wired to be heterosexual, but lesbians refused to accept this definition imposed on them by sticking to their identity, asserting who they are at all times, creating spaces for themselves and ultimately finding a place in greater society. Trans women are very much doing the same thing, except instead of challenging the fundamentalism of sexuality, they’re challenging the fundamentalism of sex and gender itself. Radical feminists, the once revolutionary voice of individualism and autonomy now have the shoe on the other foot, and are telling trans women that their identities aren’t real because they don’t fit with the radical feminist underlying fundamentalism about sex and gender. This is what trans women mean when they say radical feminism isn’t radical and is outdated. This is what radical feminism has in common with the patriarchy.

Trans women are women. They have decided that their identities as women are more important than male privilege. They’ve decided their identities as women are more important to them than the privileges they enjoy from having their physical sex match their outward appearance. Many also have chosen their identities over having friends and families. Many have chosen their over money, or even being employed. Almost all have chosen their identities over their physical safety. Doesn’t it follow that their identities are extremely important to them? Isn’t it worth at least some consideration for why someone who is in all other respects functional and logical would do such a thing? Even if you have no interest in the answer, at least accept that they have every bit the right to self identify and have that identity accepted as lesbians have to identify as lesbians. That’s the consistent thing to do.

The cotton ceiling is more nuanced and understandable point of contention. The problem here is that both sides are thinking of two separate concepts, mostly due to the unfortunate name. I sympathize with the radical feminist stance a little bit on this one: the words “cotton ceiling” conjure up an image of rape. Period. There’s no way around it. It’s a horrible, triggering soundbyte and everyone should stop using it, because it’s a distraction from the real issue at best, and a horrible trigger at worst. If you are reading this and are triggered right now, I apologize, and please take a moment to come to whatever peace you can, and if you have it within you, please bookmark this spot and read on when you feel ready: I promise the real concept isn’t as horrible.

The real concept being discussed is that as a culture, not just in lesbian culture but in all American culture, trans women are generally considered somewhere in the area of de-sexed/pathetic to joke to freaky abomination. This perception comes from a couple places, the most dominant one being media and television, and a book could be written on all the ways this influences destructive behavior. Trans women’s point here, is that this perception influences how lesbian communities treat them. Trans women are often unanimously excluded from parties, and when they are included physically it’s expected that they won’t participate. It’s not as simple as no woman wants to play with them either—lesbians actively shame each other out of playing with trans women. This is what oppression looks like, and trans women and their admirers are well justified to be angry about it. Nobody’s taking away anyone’s right to sleep with cis women and only cis women. What trans women are objecting to is both the policing, and the thoughtless acceptance of the ugly trans woman trope. That’s all.

The rift between these communities is intense, even without touching on the history of writing, policies and practice over the years. It’s not a lost cause though. It’s worth pointing out that neither of the two points of divergence are inherently threatening to feminism. Allowing trans women to identify themselves as women doesn’t negate anything women do, nor does it hold in place anything about the patriarchy. If anything the patriarchy is terrified of allowing trans women to identify as women, because in doing so they reject the idea that masculinity and maleness is superior, for if one was granted those things, why would they throw them away? Feminism also loses nothing from critically analyzing how the ugly trans woman cultural trope plays out in our spaces, how it is based on objectification and denial of agency. It should be an excellent dialog for critical thinking, even.

If we can rise above knee-jerk reactions to all these things, and be more sensitive about our language on both sides, I think real healing can happen.