I won a few friends, but just as many enemies. Before I attended in 1997 I wanted to make sure that I could be a fully participating member of the community rather than the outsider I had felt myself to be the year before. Plus I had a transwoman friend, a woman earning her PhD at another university in Arkansas, who also wanted to be accepted as a member of the Arkansas women's community. I did the only thing I know how to do. I taught.
I volunteered to do a workshop at the Project's Little Rock headquarters for the community. It seemed the logical step. It also seemed hard.
I prepared the following words, to be presented at a monthly potluck. They were chosen very carefully to reflect how I felt at the time, so I will not change them. But please know that time has passed. The women's community has changed. I have changed. And to a certain extent the place of transwomen in the world at large has changed, even if it feels like I am watching moss grow. But they were the words I said then and they described my feelings.
One note: I spoke primarily the case for transwomen. I felt I had no standing to do otherwise.
A Need for Dialogue
For far too long, there has been a cleft between the women's community and gender-variant people. Since Janice Raymond wrote her book, The Transsexual Empire and Gloria Steinem wrote her essay entitled, If the Shoe Doesn't Fit, Change the Foot, many feminists have condemned transsexual women as the embodiment of the evil that gender stereotypes can cause. A relatively new book by Bernice Hausman goes so far as to accuse transsexual women of actually creating the modern concept of gender, apparently for our own nefarious purposes. Ms. Hausman, like her philosophical foremothers, calls for the deconstruction of gender. Her method for doing so involves the destruction of transsexual folk.
We, transsexual women and other gender variant folk, have been as much to blame as anyone. Some of us, in order to appease a homophobic treatment community, have adopted stereotypical behaviors in order to get the treatment we desire. Some of us, in an attempt to evade "guilt by association," have exhibited the very homphobia that we would wish to avoid. Many of us, in a vain attempt to gain acceptance by society at large, have learned to mouth the stereotypically transgendered phrases without understanding the petard we have been building upon which to hoist ourselves. And most of us, in order to find a niche for ourselves in this binary-gendered culture, have invented false histories in an attempt to "pass" in a "target gender" rather than to learn how to just be ourselves, and in so doing we strengthen the very binariness of the gender system that oppresses us. We are, at times, our own worst enemies.
We have heard the words:
Transsexual women are consummate liars.
Transsexual women are men pretending to be a man's idea of what a woman is.
Transsexual women invade women's space in order to subvert feminism.
Transsexual women are so used to "male privilege" that they will never be real women.
Transsexual women are sexual predators who fool their partners in order to get them into bed.
Transsexual women, in the act of changing their bodies to be plastic imitations of women, commit the grossest act of rape on the community of women.
There have been far too many specific examples where there is a some truth in some of those statements. But the brush paints too wide a stripe.
Many of us,perhaps as many as half of us, are lesbians after transition. Another estimation is that 1/3 of us are lesbian, 1/3 of us are straight and 1/3 of us are bi. We do not, in general, change sex in order to have sex with men. So if we divorce ourselves from the gay community during transition, it is not because we are necessarily homophobic, but because we do not wish to be identified as "gay men who've gone over the edge."
If we learn to lie, it is because when we first begin our journeys we most often have no other language to discuss who we are than what the treatment community allows us. That must change, and it is my hope that in being open about who I am and what my experiences have been that I can help put an end to that behavior. And I am not alone in this quest.
If "male privilege" is the most damning claim of those who would exclude us, then let it be said that there is nothing lower on the totem pole of that privilege than a sissy. Those of us who may have exercised that privilege at some time in our previous existences have surely given it up in our act of betrayal to the great Penis God. Many of us have heard the question, "What man in his right mind would voluntarily have his penis removed?" Our answer is, "A man would not. That is our point."
That many of us, if not most of us, fail to identify our true pasts, is regrettable. I hope, given the pressure this culture exerts to be either a woman or a man in order to be accepted as a human worthy of respect, that it is at least understandable. It is time, however, for us to work along with feminists, not to destroy the concept of gender, as Raymond and other feminist writers would have us do, but to work to demolish the gender roles that our society enforces on its people.
Would a world in which there was no such thing as gender be a world in which we really wanted to live? To me and to others in the gender community, it is rather the variation in gender that makes the world an exciting place to be. To us, oneness in gender is just another form of oppression. In a multi-gendered society, where all are free to claim a gender appropriate to our individual selves, the very concept of heterosexualism becomes nonsensical, for there is then no such thing as "the opposite sex." And if heterosexism falls, so does homophobia.
I seek not to infiltrate, invade nor infect the "woman" part of the two-gender system, but rather I seek the ability to be my own gender, whatever that may eventually mean.
I call myself a transsexual woman, not in an attempt to debase the concept of "woman," but because I communicate in a language which fails to acknowledge my existence and because I live in a society which forces me, on occasion, to choose one of the two options.
Yes, I wish inclusion in the women's community, for I am looking for allies in making this world a better place to live for me and others like me. And as far as I can see, it is women who have been the victims of binary gender. Men are not going to give up their position of supremacy without a fight. That also is what makes me a feminist.
We are fighting the same battle. Our goals are the same: we seek to put an end to patriarchy. The difference is that we in the gender community think we're on the same side on this issue, but some women in the feminist community think we are the enemy, and that our demise will be a victory for you.
We need to talk. That is why I am here tonight.