Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist: Self explanatory but, to expand, a radical feminist who excludes trans women from their mission or vision.
Kind of a passive definition, isn’t it? For example, my feminism is in many ways tied to my physical being so I’ve always included trans men who were assigned female at birth (AFAB); therefore, I have an inclusive scope of feminism. Easy Peasy! I’m an intersectional feminist, period, the end.
Except, it’s not actually that easy.
I’m very easy to prey upon and sway when it comes to those who were assigned male at birth (AMAB).
I struggled for a long time with my identity. I can’t say exactly when it happened, but eventually in my early twenties I simply embraced the Me that I know. I was tired from making a statement with my appearance and I just wanted to be comfortable in my own skin.
I had earlier wrapped myself in the most butch persona possible. Short, spiky, multi-colored hair, wearing cut-off camo fatigues, combat boots, and a tank top. Or combat boots with jeans and a t-shirt and a wallet with a chain, even though carrying that wallet in my back pocket really hurt my back when I drove.
This was a defensive act on my part- I never felt comfortable in that identity. Coming out had exhausted me, though, and I was tired of people doubting that I was really a lesbian. Dressing as the stereotype gave me a thicker shell. Strangers knew at a glance that I was gay, and friends and family got pushed even harder out of their “it’s just a phase” stance.
(I even shaved my head at one point, save a row of bangs that I dyed bright pink. My sister, who was the first person I came out to and had been supportive up to that point, saw me and asked “what’s next? Why don’t you just go tattoo ‘DYKE’ on your forehead?”)
Anyway, after a couple years of this I got tired. I was just an actor, spending a ridiculous amount of energy on my appearance even though that was never anything I enjoyed doing. So I quit dyeing my hair and let it grow out and I started dressing how I always had, which was comfortably and without regard for the opinions of others.
There is a lot more I want to write about how the world viewed me and how I viewed myself in each stage of my self-acceptance and it’s actually quite pertinent to the topic, but I’m not here to write a treatise today.
The point is that my personal experiences with identity necessarily inform my views, even when those views are wrong. But because it’s personal, it’s easy for bad actors to sway me into a thought or belief I wouldn’t have really given a moment’s thought to otherwise. That’s disturbing! It straight pisses me off. It’s easy for me to immediately spot someone who’s racist or sexist and refuse to give them any of my time. It’s also easy for me to spot the same with anti-trans** people, but I haven’t yet achieved that ‘no time for you’ credo with them.
Indeed, the worst part is I’m willing to hear them out.
Here is the part where I do the cringe-inducing thing that all prejudiced people do: Some of my best friends are trans.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I have are deeply important to me and no amount of distance or time can truly separate us. And to get this out of the way right up front: I am politically solidly on the side of my trans/non-binary/genderqueer brothers and sisters and I have and always will do everything within my power to protect them from a discriminatory and abusive system.
I have seen that discrimination and abuse towards them many times in my life. It’s wrong on every level and nothing will change my mind about that.
But that’s exactly the thing that I want to address today: my brain knows this, my heart knows this, my soul knows this…. but there’s a deeply insecure piece of me that’s trapped in my lizard brain that can be easily hooked and do all it can to shout over my brain, heart, and soul.
I never had the privilege of my identity being a given, let alone slip comfortably into it. But upon achieving that comfort I was able to look back and be grateful that I was always “othered.” It taught me to be compassionate, empathetic, and mindful. It taught me that I always have to be vigilant about falling into prejudices. I am quite certain that, had I not gone through that struggle, I would be mindlessly conservative today.
Still, sometimes I see an anti-trans tweet and find myself going down the rabbit hole and it’s scary that there’s a part of me that the arguments tug at. I can find myself thinking about everything women had and have to go through daily just to be treated as legit, let alone equal. How much physical, emotional, and mental violence we have to be willing to take as a given in our society. And then a man announces he’s now a woman and I’m just supposed to accept that? After all the years of living with male privilege to get where you are, now you’re going to say that you’re just like me?**
To be clear- this is not how I normally think, AT ALL. But it is how I can start to think after just a few minutes of being exposed to anti-trans sentiment. And to reiterate, that is fucking scary.
Fortunately, I can passively think these things, but then step away and remember my beloved friends. One of them is especially dear to me- for about six months I moved to SLC for a new job and she was the only person I had while I was there. Other neighbors would join us on weekend mornings when we sat outside drinking coffee and talking about all sorts of things or nothing at all. I liked most of those people, but they weren’t my friends. But J was. A couple nights a week we’d hang out at each other’s apartments and share a six pack, but weekend mornings were the best because they turned into afternoons, then evenings, and it was only then, on those days, that I didn’t feel so utterly alone.
I never once saw her as malicious or entitled the way my lizard brain would want me to when I get hooked into hateful rhetoric. My heart broke for her because she lost her whole family when she transitioned. Her parents and siblings disowned her, her wife divorced her, and all of her children refused to speak to her. One Saturday morning when I got my first cup of coffee and headed outside I was really thrown off to find her sitting in our spot with a big, beaming smile on her face. I was kind of annoyed because we both had a “nothing until the first cup is done” rule and I could tell she was going to start in right away.
“I’M A GRANDMA!!!!” she beamed, before I could even grunt at her. She held out her phone to show me pictures of a newborn baby. “My oldest son, he’s a daddy!” She brought her phone back to her and smiled at it. “Oh, what a beautiful baby.”
I sleepily congratulated her and apologized I wasn’t ready for all that excitement yet. A few minutes went by in silence, me sipping my coffee, her smiling at and scrolling through her phone. Then the silence changed and I realized this was a bittersweet moment for her, with a lot more bitter than sweet.
She sighed. “I wish I could send him a friend request so I could see more pictures. Maybe get to know his wife. But last time I did, he just blocked me. So I can only stalk my children online.”
“I am so sorry, J. I can’t even imagine-”
“Oh honey, yes you can. You know what I mean.”
I nodded, then stood up and asked if she wanted a refill on her coffee. She said no, she didn’t think she wanted to spend the whole day drinking coffee. “I haven’t been able to just go to lunch with a friend in a long time. Let’s go eat cheeseburgers and fries and try to drink each other under the table.”
I was very “FUCK YEAH” about that idea, but truth be told, we had a few more cups of coffee, then I made a run to the liquor store but other than that we never even left the property.
So when I go down those anti-trans rabbit holes I inevitably come back to reality and remember J, who is still a great friend even if now we almost exclusively keep in contact via texts. Or the other J, who was kinda sorta my casual partner in my late teens and “passed” as a man. Who was assaulted by someone close to both of us because he “want[ed] to see your tits, dude.” Or my wife’s friend G, who was also disowned by her family and died a tragic and untimely death. Her parents cut her hair and put her in a suit for the funeral and I nearly choked on my volcanic rage upon learning that even in death she couldn’t be fucking respected.
But when I’m in the rabbit hole, it’s easy to think of it all as an abstract. That we’re only talking Caitlyn Jenner, who is reprehensible and therefore deserves it. Or making jokes about Ann Coulter and her Adam’s apple.
And then I remember the absolute cruelty that my friends have faced. They were never somehow spared from violence, cruelty, discrimination, dehumanization. It may have taken different forms than what I have experienced as a cis woman, but that doesn’t make it any less problematic or widespread.
So I check and scrutinize my biases as often as possible. We all like to believe that we’re aware and loving and accepting, but we all have biases that can be easily exploited. I do not flog myself daily for being susceptible to anti-trans sentiments. I don’t believe I’m a bad person because of it.
What I do believe is that by recognizing it I can be an even better ally. If I happen to take the bait of an anti-trans sentiment, I realize that I better educate myself more fully on the topic because I refuse to allow myself to believe in the supremacy of any one type of human (except… really, let’s just have one year of lesbians running the world and see how it goes.)
This is all a long-winded way of saying that we are mostly aware of and witness in real time the damage that propaganda can do, but I don’t think that we fully understand or accept the depth of it. There are people on this site who are otherwise very thoughtful and kind people, but will make really bigoted comments whenever something in their lizard brain is triggered.
And I know it’s easy to flag those comments, scold the commenter, and pat ourselves on the back for being so much more enlightened, but every single one of us, gay, straight, black, white, cis, trans, NB, indigenous, immigrant, whatever… We all have a part of our identity that feels threatened by another identity. That’s okay! In fact, if you’re able to recognize it as such it can be a positive. It’s when we become entrenched in that feeling and hope to justify or validate that we go into a bad place.
The catalyst for writing this has been brewing for a while due to the increase of anti-trans rhetoric I’ve seen here lately, but hit the peak yesterday when my wife and I were having a conversation about something semi-related. I ended the discussion by paraphrasing a straight cis male friend of mine from way back when… There are a lot of things I don’t understand. In the bad old days when I came out, people would go out of their way to tell me they didn’t “get” it but were totally cool with it, and then proceed to ask really offensive questions or make really stupid remarks.
I understood that they were trying so I didn’t call them out, but it did get to be really fucking old. Old enough that I wanted to go back to my protodyke phase so people just didn’t even want to fuck with me. Commiserating one night with said friend, he said “to be honest, I don’t get ‘gay’, but it has nothing to do with how I see you.” He leaned forward on the table so that we were within six inches face to face. “Did you know there are people who put a backpack on their back, climb into a plane, and then hope that backpack saves their lives when they jump out of it?”
I laughed heartily because just weeks earlier my mom and baby brother had gone skydiving. “I’m serious!” he pretosted. “People do that! Why the fuck would you do something so stupid? Do you have any idea how much you’d have to pay me to jump out of a plane? There’s no dollar amount that I will say ‘ok’ to. It’s fucking weird and crazy.”
I agreed, thinking that we’d taken one of the weird turns in our conversation that took us into a whole different topic. “It’s scary as shit seeing this little dot falling from the sky and realizing ‘OMG, that’s my mother!’” I told him. “I held my niece tight and, if I hadn’t already been holding my breath, her arms grasping me around my neck would have killed me.”
“Exactly! It’s a safe practice- it’s rare for skydivers to die. But it’s something me, you, and your niece will never do.”
“That’s right!”
“I have nothing against skydiving. I have no interest in doing it and I can’t understand why other people do. But why would I discriminate against skydivers? Because I am terrified by the idea? I can live my life completely free and safe from all the horror of skydiving. I don’t have to ‘get’ it. I just don’t have to make the case against it because I’m already sold on never jumping out of the plane.”
He didn’t remember the conversation the next day, but it didn’t matter. It was my new way of reminding myself to keep my biases in check.
I know that many users here recognize me as a trans ally, and I hope that my honesty has not ruined the trust that so many of you have given me. I hope that the above is not offensive. I hope that my intended audience reads and understands this for the clumsy attempt that it is to remind us that none of us are perfectly woke.
But most of all, I hope everyone knows that my sweet friend J and my wife’s firecracker friend G were never men. Ever. And my ex was never a woman.
They just weren’t born that way, and we don’t have to understand that to honor and respect it.
*I apologize for the crude and hateful way that I worded this. I was going to edit it but decided I can’t write this post without complete honesty, so I kept it as is.
**I also refuse to use the word “transphobic because the fear isn’t of trans people, it’s fear of their own damn selves, fear to face what might lead to questions.