Farewell, for now!

I will be on indefinite leave from the blog while I work on the comedy act and also complete my next book. Thank you to all of you who followed or posted! — Riki

A Comedy No One Laughs At

I’ve been working on my comedy routine lately. You know, transgender comedy sometimes seems to me like an oxymoron. When I was going through the transition and everything – this was the 1980s! – it was all very serious and grim. Even the doctors were grim. The only kind of humor I had with the 2 other trannies I knew in Cleveland was strictly gallows humor. Everything was going so badly – lovers, family, job, hassles on the street, push-back from the medical establishment – that was the only kind of humor we knew.

How times have changed. And the trans-community is so much larger, the issue so much more visible. For years now, I feel like we’ve been so heads-down in activism and advocacy. And it’s difficult not to take it all seriously when kids are still dying simply because they are gender-different. This is serious stuff. And I’ve been very, very angry about gender discrimination for a long time.

Bodies That Matter, Part II — Detransitioning

In the last post I argued that we are naturally occurring variations in the system. And that we should own that, rather than embark on the path of trying to be exactly what the system already mostly offers – that is, gender normative men and women.

For myself, this would be an inversion of much of the work I’ve tried to do when interacting with the gender normative world. Especially in my early years, when it seemed the two things I cared most about were a) being really accepted as a woman and b) passing.

I think in my mind I felt that accomplishing those two things, or at least one of them, would somehow authorize me to feel the (fem) feelings I was having.

Bodies That Matter: On Trans Legitimacy

As David Buller says in a recent Newsweek article on the limits of evolutionary psychology, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system.

Most arguments about transgender — as opposed to bio-genders — are based on the issue of legitimacy. Bio-bodies have it; trans-bodies don’t. They are “real” man and “real” women, we want to be them. And if not to approximate them as closely as possible.

Postmodernists are quick to point out that arguments about legitimacy tend to be diversionary. They are not actually about what is “real” but rather a political tactic. Some bodies are empowered and others are disempowered and marginalized.

(Yet) Another Trans Mockery

Not to be outdone, the very next day, the De Gustibus column in the Wall Street Journal made fun of transpeople. More sophisticated than Olbermann (what wouldn’t be?), the author reached for an example of how absurd, how totally ridiculous a liberal college education has become. Stephen Moore blames those liberals for all the “transgender studies and Che Geuvara classes.”  Don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen either one in a college syllabus.

No matter, point made — anything to do with transgender must be loony, nonsensical and ludicrous.  This is not the first, and I would bet not the last time, the Journal uses transpeople as the butt of the joke. We are one of the right’s favorite whipping boys right now. Here’s the letter I wrote in response:

Olbermann’s Trans Mockery

The first thing that happens when some new minority becomes visible is that people often start making jokes about it. This is a natural impulse in dealing with novelty and discomfort. On the left this impulse is usually reigned in by a certain degree of political awareness — or at least political correctness. On the right, there is no such restraint, and so the jokes usually tend towards mockery.

In the last few days, however, both sides have been ridiculing transpeople. First, Keith Olbermann introduced a segment about a particularly unpleasant government employee by showing her as a man in a dress. Needless to say, it had to be a man with heavy, dark, beard growth in an ill-fitting blouse and cheap, long blond wig. This combination is the one I see most often used to illustrate the complete absurdity of a man in a dress.

That’s so gay.

There was an interesting article in Judith Warner’s NYT blog a few weeks back that has had me thinking. It’s about teasing among teens with “that’s so gay.”  There are two interesting things about this kind of social bullying.

First, it is not about who someone is attracted to and it’s not mainly a gay slur. It’s not even totally a slur. Maybe it’s cold comfort, but sometimes those kinds of little shifts are what progress look like.

So what is “that’s so gay” really about it?

To me, it’s about reinforcing gender stereotypes. It’s about stigmatizing anything which is not stereotypically male, meaning anything that does not demonstrate the kind of sweaty strength, aggression, and toughness Real Man (or in this case Real Boys) are supposed to exude, or at least aspire to.

“Gender is a copy for which there is no original.”

This was Butler’s point in Bodies that Matter. It was deployed in service of defending and valorizing that which is genderqueer, which is delegitimized because it is an imitation of the Real Thing.

For Butler, there is no Real Thing in evidence. No one springs into life knowing how to do gender. We learn how to do a gender by watching and mastering the symbolic language of those around us.

There is, for instance, nothing natural about holding objects with one’s pinky finger extended, standing hands-on-hips with the finger pointed backwards, or pointing with the wrist bent at a 90-degree angle.

Delegitimizing Trans Part 2: Limb Amputation

…and I confess that I was so offended by the idea that someone would want to have a healthy limb amputated that my reaction was, “well these people are crazy. And the only reason to bring them up is to leverage that craziness with the superficial resemblance to SRS to delegitimize us.”

In other words, it wasn’t a very pretty reaction. But it does show how much these arguments about SRS are basically political forays, intended to undermine rather than illuminate or (heaven forbid!) ameliorate transgender issues.

There is now a growing body of research, not to mention a lovely article in (where else?) the New York Times, explaining a sound neurological basis for BIID.

Delegitimizing Trans Part 1: Limb Amputation

For some time now, since the rise in medical recognition of Bodily Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), it has been fashionable in some quarters to compare it to transsexuality. BIID patients, you see, want to have perfectly healthy limbs surgically removed. While transsexuals want to have perfectly healthy… well, you get the drift.

This is not, as such arguments are, advanced in any way to help transgender people. Its sole purpose is to delegitimate – and discourage – Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). This is motivated by the antique and charmingly naïve conviction that SRS is not already sufficiently discouraged, at a time when firing transpeople upon transition is not only common but perfectly legal in almost every state, and when more than 70 transgender young people 30 and under have been murdered in just the last dozen years or so.