Category: trans

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Time to #BoycottTexas: SB6 Approved

I watched some of the five hour hearing.

Toward the end, a Republican woman named Lois Kolkhorst came on and made something she thought was a feminist argument for passing this law.

And if I never hear another woman argue this transphobic bullshit on some kind of fake feminist grounds I will be surprised.

It embarrasses me that somehow, women actually believe all the bigoted, transphobic legislators who are now somehow magically concerned about violence against women. And this woman, who apparently spoke to an undisclosed university professor, said she herself must be a radical feminist — because their views are the same.

It’s a sad day for Texas and a sad say for this country.

(& Every time someone mentions the men and women in the Bible, all I can think is: what about all the eunuchs? Do you guys actually read the actual Bible or what?!)

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Male Privilege & Trans Women

I’ve said in the past that I’ve made all the mistakes and asked all the dumb questions as a feminist who is trans-allied, and I have. I’ve put a lot of it in print.

The reality is that many of us still talk about gender as if it isn’t intersectional. So we ask: do trans women have male privilege before they transition? But that is both too big and too small a question; too big because it implies that trans women are monolithic, and too small because it implies men are as well.

So instead perhaps questions like: is a woman who is suppressing her gender and suffering from gender dysphoria actually experiencing the world as a man? Also, if we know that a gay man doesn’t experience male privilege in the same way a straight man does, and we know black men don’t experience it the same way white men do, then isn’t it possible that trans women, before they transition, also don’t experience it the way cis men do?

While there are women like Laverne Cox and Jazz Jennings, who expressed their femininity from a young age, who never experienced male privilege at all, there are a lot of trans women who hid their femininity. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there or that they didn’t suffer with it. It means they were being raised like sheep in wolves’ clothing: visible only to themselves, and exposed to some of the very misogynistic, sexist attitudes men share when they think they are around other men only.

I remember my wife coming home after being on an elevator with a bunch of guys from the College of Insurance and being horrified by the way they spoke about women. I said: I know. And she said: no you don’t. And I believed her.

Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity is useful here. She outlines some kinds of masculinity, like subordinated masculinity (like gay men) and complicit masculinity (the guy who isn’t hegemonic but who still benefits from patriarchy). So male privilege might be thought of on a similar scale, that it’s not YES or NO but rather: what are the other intersections of identity that might modify the experience? If being black or gay disappears some of male privilege, at least in the world at large, then it’s easy enough to say that trans would as well. Add more intersections of marginalized identity, such as being feminine, gay, and trans, and male privilege has all but disappeared.

Sometimes when we talk about gender we want a hammer to solve all the arguments when what we need is a scalpel, a microscope.

None of this is simple.

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#IBelieveinTransWomen

Look, my fellow big brained cis feminists who don’t understand trans people but who feel the need to question and evaluate trans feminism and the entire concept of gender because you’ve just learned this is something you should know about:

THIS HAS ALL BEEN DONE, HASHED OUT, CONCLUDED, long before you arrived on the scene.

I asked all the dumb questions. I posited all the tenets of feminist theory. I examined the role of socialization, looked at intersectionality, read books about intersex, argued with radfems, got cold shouldered by them, targeted by them, all of it.

Please please please just stop and take a minute to realize that this is not a new topic, that your feminist brain is not going to find some crumb of logic that mine didn’t, and that right now, all you’re doing is hurting women who are already marginalized in ways that are brutal. Especially right now.

Here. Read this.

I believe trans women, and I believe in trans women.

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Dandara dos Santos, Or, Why I Don’t Quit

A former student expressed some fatigue and frustration on FB today while they were once again explaining how binary gender is a social construction. I said: try doing it for another 25 years.

It’s two decades nearly doing trans work for me, but almost 30 as a feminist.

Around the same time, a video of a trans woman (TW, please don’t watch it but do read the story) being savagely beaten while her attackers laughed was also making the rounds.

“Dandara dos Santos was dragged from her home and dumped in a wheelbarrow before being rolled to a back alley and beaten to death amid cheers and laughter.”

And that’s why. I don’t know how anyone can read that sentence and ever, ever stop trying to educate people. It’s the least I can do.

Rest in peace, Dandara dos Santos. May your attackers rot in jail, may your family find peace, and may whatever divinity you believed in welcome you home.

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WI State Detransitioning Trans Employees

Imagine, married folks, how it would feel if you got a cheery email from your university or from the state you live in telling you that due to some clerical reorganization, you and your spouse, and all married people in the state, had been re-set in their files to SINGLE and that, in order to be reclassified again as married, you had to provide documentation of your marriage as well as scientific evidence, say DNA, to prove you aren’t related.

IMAGINE.

That’s exactly what the state of Wisconsin is currently doing to trans state employees: reverting their gender markers to the gender they were assigned at birth and asking for “additional documentation” to change the gender marker back.

Cary Gabriel Costello, who works at UW Milwaukee, just got that email. You can read Costello’s description of this event on his blog TransFusion.

This is happening to people who have ALREADY transitioned, who have legally been their gender for years, and who had been entirely accepted as that gender legally, professionally, and medically. ETF is requiring them to do three things:

1 – The employee must notify ETF (Employee Trust Fund, the state’s administrative board) directly, providing their old and new names, old and new gender markers, ETF ID number, and a declaration that they are gender transitioning. (Previously, employees notified HR at their place of employment, and employer HR staff changed the gender marker directly in the benefits system. But now ETF will centralize control over implementing transitions, and maintain a database of gender transitioners. In essence, we are being required to register with the state.)

2 – Trans people are required to provide “proof of identity,” such as a driver’s license or military ID showing the new name and gender marker. (This is the easiest one for people who have already transitioned.)

3 – Trans people must produce “proof of gender.” These options include (a) a correctly gendered passport, (b) a court order – often requiring proof of genital surgery, such as in WI, or (c) a birth certificate which is correctly gendered.

THIS IS NUTS, folks. It’s creepy, it’s the worst governmental intrusion, and it’s turning the clock back on trans rights and identity a decade.

Please stay informed. As I know more, you will too.