Sex In The Public Square - transgender - Comments

Thanks and Apologies

Lou FCD — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:36:17 -0700

As Michael has said, thank you for correcting me. It was a stupid mistake, and one which I will endeavor to not repeat.

And thank you Michael, for addressing it in my absence.

Apology

Michael — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:09:11 -0700

Thank you Emily, for pointing that out. Please accept our apologies for the oversight. We have now corrected the original text.

Hi. Thanks for posting

queen emily — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:03:55 -0700

Hi. Thanks for posting about this. As you rightly point out, much of the violence against trans women is against trans sex workers, overwhelmingly trans women of colour.

Oh, and just a small note about trans names and pronouns. It's not generally appropriate to refer to the pre-transition name. So, just Ebony Whitaker when referring to her. And though, her sister did use the pronoun "he" in her quote, in your commentary immediately after, "she" would have been better. The media does it all the time, but it contravenes APA reporting rules as well as common courtesy.

Cheers.

The XY Games

Lou FCD — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:10:34 -0700

Jennifer Finney Boylan, who wrote a NYT OpEd this morning called The XY Games , was interviewed this afternoon on NPR's Talk of the Nation. The interview was brief, but covered some of the same ground and issues brought up here. Audio is due up sometime after 6PM Eastern.

From the OpEd:

"So what makes someone female then? If it's not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?

The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person's life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person's gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person's gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

How do we test for the gender of the heart, then? How do we avoid out-and-out frauds, like Hermann Ratjen, who said he was forced by the Nazis to compete as "Dora" in the 1936 high jump? (He lost, finishing fourth.)

A quick look at the reality of an athlete's life ought to settle the question. Ratjen was male not because of what was in his genes, but because of who he was. He returned to his life as Hermann after the Berlin Games. "For three years I lived the life of a girl," he said in 1957. "It was most dull."

Harrison Burgeron

Elizabeth — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:51:50 -0700

Michael, thank you so much for your comment. And of course if you can comment further on the medicine and ethics behind the story that would be most welcome.

Your comment puts me in mind of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Burgeron" where people of unequal abilities are forced to be equal by means of technology. It is a perversion of the idea of equal opportunity (an ideal consistent with the Olympic games), confusing it with equal outcomes (an ideal absolutely inconsistent with any competitive enterprise).

For what it's worth, until just now I was only familiar with the short story version of Harrison Burgeron, written by Vonnegut. I just now looked found info on the film version (mid 90s as opposed to early 60s). It contains this adaptation of the "typical" sex-work scenario:

In his last day with a fully functioning brain, he goes to a head house - a house where illegal device-free women are paid to play chess and conduct intelligent conversations with the clients. Unfortunately, there is a police bust while a "mind whore", Phillipa, and himself are having his first intelligent conversation ever. While being captive in the police station, he is approached by a special agent who offers him an alternative to the lobotomy - to join what turns out to be the secret elite that runs the government.

Discrimination and ethics

Michael — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:30:11 -0700

There are some profoundly disturbing messages in all this, which seem totally out of keeping with the Olympic spirit. The most egregious is that it is not only applied to women alone, but that some people should be excluded from sport because they are 'different'. What sort of message does this send to young women other than that if you are any good you will be investigated as some sort of freak due to an assumption that women are inherently inferior to men, and that only masculine characteristics allow for achievment. Presumably grit, determination, courage, skill and hard work count for very little in modern olympics.

The science is flawed in that is assumed that any 'abnormality' creates some sort of unfair advantage. And what exactly is an 'unfair advantage'? Presumably athletes that are taller than average should also be excluded. It is difficult not to see that this is fundamentally gendered discrimination.

Bad science is also bad ethics. Not just the exclusion of certain people based on physical charateristics, but the likely impact failing such a test is likely to have on an athlete. Nor is it just the humilation and shunning (Soundarajan eventually attempted suicide) as an athlete, but the public labelling in terms of one's medical history. A history which is quite likely to have been unknown to the athlete in question. The likely effect on a woman of having her gender publicly questioned cannot be overestimated.

While it is understandable that concerns about fraud fuelled the original introduction of such tests, in fact such fraud is almost unheard of, and as a result women were subjected to the humiliation of having to parade naked in front of officials, to be inspected. The current sex tests have absolutely nothing to do with fraud and much to do with preconceived ideas of gender and femininity. These attitudes are vestiges of the terrible discrimination that women faced in sport and particularly the Olympics, for so long. Many might argue that women are still not treated as equals in competitive sport, or their sports taken seriously.

Sport and the Olympics should be about inclusivity, not exclusion based on prejudice.

the red-haired stepchild

Deliciously Naughty — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:38:29 -0700

As a woman who identifies as bi, I particularly agree with your comment that not all the letters in LGBT are equal. For many years I identified as straight, but with the qualifier of having fooled around in college. I did this mostly out of a desire to not offend anyone since my long term relationships have always been with men.

I get annoyed when people dismiss bisexuals as slutty fence-sitters, as if we're omnisexual beasts, preying on the choicest cuts of meat in the room without regard for the feelings of the straights or gays.

In reality, it is sometimes extremely hard to be bi. I have married a man, but that doesn't stop my craving for women. When I've been with women, I miss the feeling of a man's cock (as opposed to a toy) deep inside me. It is often confusing because you feel like you're always missing out on something. You then beat yourself up for not being able to pick a side, a person, a sex to be with.

Binaries are never good, and trying to straddle the line is often painful, like doing splits on the edge of a knife.

Ironically, as the community has gained acceptence, we have stopped being so accepting. As with feminism, if we spend all our time going after each other, we'll never achieve our goals, and like the ERA, equal protection for gays of all flavors might be lost to our own in-fighting. If we could learn a lesson from the Second Wave of Feminism, I would hope that the lesson might be to stop trying to create a smaller and smaller definition of what it means to be "gay" (or a "feminist") and excluding those who want/need to help you the most.

In feminism, the white upper class women cut dykes, poor women, and women of color out of the movement. Let's try not to do the same thing to Transgendereds, Bi's, Drag Queens, and the (as you put it) more queer among us in the Gay community.

Without the BT...

Elizabeth — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:13:34 -0700

"without the perverts, without the drag queens, without the leather daddies and dykes, without the transsexuals of every variety, without the dirty, disreputable people, there would be a lot of gay folk politely huddling in their closets. The LG is nothing without the BT."

Amen. It is so important to keep the contributions of the queer, the kinky and the generally nonconforming visible. Amazing how often and how easily they get rendered invisible by those who would be happier if the gay/straight difference were about nothing other than the gender of the person with whom you make your middle-class-monogamous home.

It's worth pointing out that the Feinberg/Rivera interview that you posted was published in Workers' World, hardly a middle class oriented publication. And it makes me think about organizations like Queers for Economic Justice that work hard on the intersections of economic oppression and queer issues.

Social justice is not about the right to assimilate into the dominant culture. It is about the right for all people to have decent housing, living wages, health, education.

Thank you for this article.

Jamie — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:58:33 -0700

Thank you for this article. I'm a transwoman, and this was very heartening to read.

Correcting my overly optimistic critique

Elizabeth — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:37:24 -0700

I realized that I was way overly optimistic about where exactly the ENDA bill was in process. I referred to it as being in conference committee when it hasn't even been voted on by the House yet. Apologies! To be clear, HR 3685 is only moving out of the Judiciary Committee and toward the full House for a vote there. Click here to track the bill.

Trans-less ENDA

Elizabeth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:15:40 -0700

JoeMyGod has this piece about the move forward today of the ENDA-sans-transgender bill. What a disappointment. As he points out, this is despite a massive outcry on the part of LGBTQ (note the T) folks ... and it represents a split between HRC and organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce which stood by transgender folks and demanded an inclusive bill.

So, what do we make of HRC's strategic position? And given that the bill is going to be vetoed anyway (would you gamble otherwise?) does HRCs strategic position make sense? I read this, attributed to Barney Frank, in the NYT the other day:

“On the other hand,” he continued, “an announcement that this new Democratic Congress led by a woman who has been as committed to full rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in every aspect of her career, that she had to kill a gay rights bill and couldn’t do anything at all would, I think, be the most negative message we could send.”

Clearly getting the bill out of the conference committee was the most important thing on their minds. Getting a fair bill out of the committee was not. Given that getting a bill out that would be signed by the president was impossible, what should the committee have done? I certainly would not have sold out an important part of the community for a symbolic gesture.

Barney Frank and ENDA

Elizabeth — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:41:52 -0700

The NYT ran an article yesterday with the headline "Liberal base proves trying to Democrats," in which they discussed Barney Frank's support for the "compromise" that leaves the transgendered out of ENDA. It's an interesting article because it talks about the difference between political expediency (which is something that leaders in congress are often concerned with) and the achieving of ideal goals, which is of course what we activists are most concerned with. But then there was this:

"Sometimes, though, the in-fighting can seem unreal, as with the recent fury directed by gay groups at Mr. Frank.

“Barney Frank is not gay enough?” asked Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, one of the most conservative members of the House.

Even Mr. Frank acknowledged the weirdness. “The likelihood that somebody is going to run against me in my district on the grounds that I have been insufficiently pro-gay is not very high on my list of concerns,” he said.

Does anybody think this is about whether the fury of gay rights and trans rights groups is over whether Barney Frank is gay enough? Or even whether he is sufficiently pro "gay rights"? No, the question is whether he is as pro-rights for all sexual minorities as he is for the mainstream gays.

Heterosexism isn't just about preventing gays from achieving equal rights, it's about privileging one very narrow sexual orientation (monogamous heterosexual marriage without too many toys or porn or kinky stuff) over all others.

I've come to believe that the gay rights movement and the sexual freedom movement are two separate, if intersecting, things.

Thanks!

Mojave66 — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:57:52 -0700

Thanks for the welcome, Elizabeth! I know Chris from another forum, he introduced me to SitPS and I'm loving it so much. GREAT work, you guys. >Why else would the word 'gay' when used as a weapon aimed at boys or young men attack not only their sexuality but also their basic masculinity. This. Precisely.

Gender nonconformity

Elizabeth — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:02:32 -0700

Mojave66, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I'd say that what ticks people off about gay people is precisely the fact that they are not conforming to the expected gender norms, which are in themselves heterosexist. In that sense, it's all about gender nonconformity. Why else would the word 'gay' when used as a weapon aimed at boys or young men attack not only their sexuality but also their basic masculinity.

Welcome to Sex in the Public Square. I hope we'll see you around frequently!

Another assumption

Mojave66 — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:22:19 -0700

Chris-- this piece is so wonderful. Thank you for writing it. There's another aspect of the whole anti-trans bullshit that annoys me, and it is this idea that there is a clear-cut demarcation between transgender people and homosexuals. As a rather butch lesbian I can say that noooo, it's very much a gray area, and it's the gender non-conformity that ticks people off more than the sexual orientation in most cases.