I can always tell when I am dealing with a member of the Transgender Borg Collective by the difficulty they have in dealing with my rejecting of their philosophy and social construction of transgender.
Take the tizzy I set off with Bushfire.
Bushfire has a hard time understanding how someone who went through the sex reassignment process can have a completely different analysis of the process and meaning. That is the problem with buying into a cult structured analysis. One who believes the analysis to be absolutely true can not understand how someone with a different philosophy and analysis can say that analysis is bullshit.
The ideology of transgender is basically similar to religion in that there is no hard data to back up assertions, only bluster, accusations and victimology based guilt trips. I almost forgot, the assertion of infallibility.
For example Bushfire asserts I must be “gender transgressive” because the Transgender Borg Collective has read the book of the great prophet, Judith Butler… Perhaps they were even able to understand what they were reading, although claiming to understand the jargon that wasn’t meant to be understood but rather to further the admiration of academic wankers is something I consider a dubious accomplishment.
The biggest problem I have is that so much of its ideology is based on misogynistic bullshit posited by white heterosexual transvestites, a variant on the Men’s Rights Advocate theme.
I’m currently reading Stephanie Coontz’ book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. She is writing about Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique and its impact on women at the dawn of the 1960s.
All the emphasis on gender and gender determining who is really a man and who is really a woman seems like a throw back to the days of limited sex roles. Transgender requires a rigid gender binary upon which to base the idea that adherence to a gender role makes on a man or a woman.
Bushfire was unable to grasp that I don’t transgress gender. I simply do not recognize gender as having any real meaning. I’m not a woman because of the clothes I wear or the make-up I don’t wear. I love my Birkenstocks more than any heels I’ve ever owned and I’ve never figured out where the penis goes when it comes to building a computer or doing household repairs.
When Bushfire tells me, “Others see you as gender transgressive.” I think, “Yeah but they are generally Christo-Fascists and or misogynists and therefore their opinions don’t mean shit.
Or they are academics dependent on selling their bullshit so they don’t have to become experts in the field of rapid nutritional deployment. Baristas with Ph.Ds.
I look upon psychiatry as more religion than science and all religion as a fraud..
But back to the framing the Transgender Borg have chosen to use.
When they are pissed off with me I have a hard time telling them from the Religious Reich or certain radical feminists.
But let’s look at one element of their framing. If you were ever associated with a trans-prefixed word you are tainted with that word forever. That sounds like the old Jim Crow one drop rule i.e. one drop of African American Blood makes you Black.
But it doesn’t stop there. One of the proposals being put forth for the new DSM would refiy a suggestion I made. It would keep GID for those seeking SRS and would consider SRS as curing GID.
So much of the Transgender Borg rhetoric is just generally oppressive.
I always wonder how I can be called a separatist when I never considered myself transgender.
I came up with post-transsexual because, quite honestly I had sex change surgery so long ago that it is like when I had my tonsils out.
I’m tired of post-transsexual people being denied our own language and the right to describe our own lives without some colonial master telling us we are wrong.
When those in the Borg call me names for speaking out against the colonialization I feel like I am in a relationship with an abusive man, who claims to know better than me because , well because he is a man.
When I am dealing with the Transgender Borg I feel a lot of male energy directed towards me.
And as a feminist I fight back.
06/28/2011 at 8:11 am
At a concert where there was a fair contingent of transsexual women, my partner remarked that several of them looked through her in an entirely male way that women really never do. No amount of clothes, accessories, makeup, or even multiple surgeries will transmogrify you into being a woman, if you are a man inside — this is just as true for bio females as for bio males. I wish we could all just agree to be human and leave it at that.
06/28/2011 at 11:04 am
Using the standard TG Borg reply, “How did she know they were transsexual women and not transgender?”
But you are right in a sense transition means shedding male socialization and becoming re-socialized as female. The if you are a man inside crack sound pretty gender essentialist, something a lot of post-transsexual frequently get accused of.
06/28/2011 at 11:14 am
You are correct, my phraseology was incorrect. She remarked that those women were looking at her in ways women do not. We did not discuss whether they were transsexual or transgender. My apologies.
06/28/2011 at 11:51 am
That same comment is also often made about lesbians with the implication that lesbians are not “real women.”
06/28/2011 at 1:21 pm
I have always had a deep suspicion of anyone who said that someone’s beliefs, sexual orientation or gender identification made them thereby unreal. I am consistently amazed to find “real man”, “real woman”,”Mr. Right”, and similar in current use in the 21st century. See: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151426
06/28/2011 at 4:37 pm
Ah yes — real woman, real man — as someone who has been accused, at different times of being neither, I wonder what it all means.
What does it mean?
And, why would I give a damn?
Well, when I was supposed to be a “man” there were times (more than one) when my exceptional performance at work (different jobs) was always modified by, “imagine what a ‘real man’ could do in this job” (as if managing a group of people required a penis). They were ALWAYS surprised when my successor did not do as well as I did. The old, “we didn’t know how good you were until you were gone” syndrome.
As a “woman”, there were other women who just did not trust me, because, in their eyes, I had been a man. In fact, a few had actually been attracted to me as a “sensitive guy” – so, my transition affected their self image as purely heterosexual women. Of course this was my “fault”.
Some lesbians who self described as “radical-lesbian-feminists” seemed most upset by the fact my vaginal tissue was formed from a “repurposed penis” — how TOTALLY icky. eeeewww!!!
Before that, most of my FRIENDS had been WOMEN – most men did not trust me either.
Gee, any wonder so many transsexuals tend to be bookish loners?
After a lifetime of looking for a place to “fit in”, after being rejected, or looked at with suspicion, there finally comes a time when just being yourself, and trusting to luck seems the best way to go. At least I can be comfortable with myself, even if the partners of total strangers are not.
As far as various “T-types” looking at other women. Could they have been admiring? Could they have been looking for “clues” on how to act? Could it just have been insecurity on the part of the various “T’s”? Or, was it the old “male gaze” rearing its ugly head? Or, could they have been trying to “read” the person they were looking at?
I well remember an old girl friend always accusing me of “looking at” various women – often when I had not even noticed said women. About a year later, after SHE had come out as lesbian, it became totally clear — She ALWAYS noticed women more than I did.
Very strange, don’t you think?
06/29/2011 at 10:12 am
No, just sounds human to me.
06/30/2011 at 11:30 am
Hi Suzan,
You write:
“. . . the Transgender Borg Collective has read the book of the great prophet, Judith Butler… Perhaps they were even able to understand what they were reading, although claiming to understand the jargon that wasn’t meant to be understood but rather to further the admiration of academic wankers is something I consider a dubious accomplishment.”
I have to admire your analysis of Butler’s pretentious and meaningless academic prose. I’ve read some Butler, and her writing does not “speak to me.” I much prefer Julia Serano’s explanation of things.
On the other hand, I don’t believe “The Transgender Borg Collective” is hiding under anyone’s bed. There are huge differences between those who are gender-queer and those whose identities fall within the binary, though the umbrella concept provides shade to both. In my weltenschaung, I see those who identfy as “genderfluid” or “genderqueer,” as well as the more traditionally “bi-gendered” folks who do an alternative presentation on a part time basis as falling within a broad “Bigender” classification within the umbrella. This allows for subsets of Trans* and bi* with those whose identity is fluid or mixed in one subgroup, while those whose identity is “that usually associated with the sex not assigned at birth” in the other. (There is a problem with this kind of division – there is the temptation to deny a reality to those who sort out into the other subset. But I’m familiar with that, when I deal with post-op separatists who somehow see me as less real because I have medical issues that keep me from having my own GRS, who try to deny my reality. So long as we’e talking classification rather than identity, it’s a guide to understanding similarities and differences. Once we start with identifying, and segregatig, things go downhill in a hurry.)
I see a utility to the umbrella in certain circumstances, and don’t see it as erasure of my identity. This “borg” concept, to me, relates more to the kind of thing that the late Virginia Prince was doing when she started on a path of transgenderist separatism. Technically a creature of the prevailing and erroneous notions of the 1950′s and 60′s on the subject, Prince’s attitude toward those who obtain GRS echoed the findings of the blue ribbon medical commission report to the City of New York in 1965. Prince held to that position until her death.
There is a difference between transgenderist separatists and transgender inclusionists. The latter get a bum rap, though – tere is not a “we are all the same” mantra among inclusionists, but there is a “we are diverse though we shae a single common thread.”
I recently stumbled over a different sort of separatist blog that appears to exist to make fun of all of us – regardless of our surgical status, identity, or anything else. It specializes in quoting men, and anyone who is trans-anything (I’m quoted at least a couple of times, as is Lisa Thompson from TS-Si, and Zoe Brain, and other people I know from parts of the trans world.). To the person or people who run that blog, we’re all the same – we’re all “men,” regardless of anything. The blog appears to have been started up in April of this year.
Take a look: http://mansplaintransplain.wordpress.com/
All I can do is shrug at them. While their palpable ignorance isn’t really funny at all, that blog is not the result of there being a “transgender umbrella” – it’s the result of certain kinds of cis-separatists who actually do believe that we wh might beclassified as trans-anything are “all the same.”
06/30/2011 at 12:06 pm
I don’t think we share a common thread. For example there is a transgender activist here in Dallas, super hard working, great politics etc. I really like her and love bumping into her at demos. But when I was pre-op, even though I was part of Weather Nation, sheltering a deserter boyfriend and working at the Counseling Center I wasn’t spending my energy raising money to go to Moscow Pride.
I wasn’t marching in Pride Day because I didn’t see being transsexual as being related to gay or lesbian. I also was focused on accumulating the money for surgery at a time when women made 57 cent for every dollar men made and when the going wage for women of my class was two dollars per hour.
It wasn’t all self-sacrifice, Jerry and I had some rockin’ good times with the Berkeley Jazz and Berkeley Folk Festivals, the Freight and Salvage Coffee House etc but I wasn’t traveling to some distant event at great cost.
But on top of all that I’m a feminist. I’ve seen all this gender bullshit repackaged and rebranded twice in my lifetime. The first during the 1950s, then Betty Friedan exposed it in 1963 and we had Second Wave Feminism. Then it came roaring back as “gender” during the reactionary 1980s. But the bullshit stinks just as bad.
May I suggest a really neat book that I am currently reading. “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” by Stephanie Coontz.
Knowing stuff like this makes it impossible for me to look at the ideology of the Transgender Borg Collective with an unjaundiced eye.
As for the bigots calling themselves “radical feminists” while hiding behind aliases. I think most of them are Catholics like Raymond or other Taliban Christers and not real feminists.