maysie.web.net

I have to blog about this.

In a certain leftist website, on a certain discussion board, there have been two recent threads on trans issues.

The first, started by a trans ally in the feminist forum, was about the exclusion of trans women from the new Vancouver Women's Health Clinic.

 http://www.rabble.ca/babble/feminism/new-womens-pharmacy-vancouverexcludes-trans-women

The level of discourse on the thread, on which nobody self-identified as trans, went from arguments such as "what's to stop any man from claiming he's a woman to access services?" to "women are defined by our woman bits". Basically, between and amongst the few allies and supporters and anti-oppression people, a bunch of transphobic, trans-ignorant and downright hurtful assholes. 

Some of my thoughts from that thread:

" I have no idea what the process was behind opening this clinic, but I'm currently doing work with a client that provides community health care services to very specific communities and they are embarking on an expansion of their clinic into a specific area of health care needs. They've mandated the consultants to gather information in the community, including medical professionals, community workers, and the potential clients/patients themselves. We call it a needs assessment and any/all future funding will demand that there is a need for this service, via a thorough and well-done needs assessment process.

So. Assuming that this happened and the need for a separate service for women was established to a critical enough point to satisfy criteria of the Ministry of Health in BC, which is a safe assumption, I wlll now assume that neither questions were asked about including trans clients, nor were trans women or trans men asked about the creation of this clinic, and were thus excluded.

Such an exclusion is about transphobia.

If there was a deliberate non-inclusion of trans clients, for any number of reasons, this too is transphobia, and a pretty vile kind might I add.

[A note about terminology transphobia and homophobia. I hate these terms, as they are inaccurate and indicate a psychological state/evaluation when really these terms are used as the equivalents to "sexism" or "classism" or "ableism". Using them as in "You're being transphobic" is not to say "You are experiencing an irrational fear of transpeople" but rather "You're being offensive and exclusionary and hateful towards transpeople."]

Vancouver feminist organizations sadly do not have tons of credibility when it comes to trans issues. I understand that the situation of Kimberly Nixon v.VRR as far more complex than I once thought it to be, but nonetheless, assumptions were made about trans women, assumptions that remain intact. The most pervasive is the lie that there is this entity called "A Real Woman" and that trans women are not, and will never be, and can never be, "A Real Woman."

I've had my own struggles, personally and politically, with issues of transphobia and trans inclusion. It's a very challenging politic to understand on an intellectual level. So I do have compassion and understanding for those who see that it's just fine to include only "women-born women". I first heard that phrasing from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and there was a fierce debate at that time about their trans-exclusionary policies. I think this was back in the early 1990s? But I moved past it, and since trans folks' lives and health hang in the balance, it's a pretty vital piece that feminists, and others, need to get a handle on, PDQ. 

...

I am cis-gendered.

Cis-gendered means someone who has a connection between the gender/sex they were born with and their present gender identity. It was coined so that there wasn't a dichotomy between "trans gendered people" and "normally gendered people." We are all either cis-gendered or trans-gendered. 

Being cis-gendered means that even though I may not fit everything that we're told "a woman" must be/act/say,  I identify as a woman. It's a part of my social, personal, sexual, emotional and I guess, psychological identity. Our society was built upon people having cis-gendered identities. Even if we fit into such genders "badly" such as very effeminate men, or very masculine women, we are still cis-gendered if we identify with the gender/sex we were born with.

So that said, I can barely understand what it's like to grow up and not fit the gender that a person was born into and socialized into. Little boys and girls are socialized very early, and very severely, into gender roles. Not just toys and books that are "okay" to play with/read depending on one's gender, but behaviour and actions, certain subjects in school. Some of these behaviours/actions are rewarded, some aren't. The world is very cruel to anyone who doesn't fit, or try to fit, or who doesn't stifle their real selves to fit a gender model. (Does it go without saying that how one is seen in terms of gender is also related to one's class, ability, race and sexual orientation? Well, I've said it nevertheless.)

I've never had a struggle with gender identity. I've presented as "more masculine" and "more feminine" throughout my life (sometimes related to my sexual orientation, sometimes not). But my identity as "woman" hasn't changed. So again, I can barely understand what that's like. Not until I heard a transwoman describe her life that I realized my transphobic assumptions (for example, that she had experienced male privilege before she transitioned) were ignorant, misinformed and downright hurtful. " 

Then, I stupidly decided to continue the thread, at this link: http://www.rabble.ca/babble/feminism/trans-inclusion-and-feminism

 " I disagree with the biological arguments.

Women don't share a common experience "as women". What can be argued is we share a common experience due to sexism and misogyny. Cis-women who don't conform to rigid gender roles,  are punished in smaller and larger ways (depending on the extent of the lack of conformity) by society, our families, our co-workers, etc.

The same goes for men, by the way.

I actually don't believe there are "common experiences" of sexism and misogyny except in very broad ways, since all of our identities as women are also grounded in our race locations, our class locations, our ability, sexual orientation, education, and other factors. The notion that "we are all women and suffer from sexism" is so wide to be effectively meaningless. And I say this to an audience that has a clue about feminism, not a mainstream one.

Some women don't acknowledge that sexism exists, or that they've ever experienced sexism. Such women don't speak for me. Some women are "protected" from more severe forms of sexism through class privilege and other privileges.

"Women-only" space was created during a certain moment in North American history (not that it didn't happen elsewhere, I'm only familiar with the NA context). Women's centres, women's bookstores, women's shelters, rape crisis centres and other spaces were created by women, in defense against a hostile world that erased women's experiences.

Sadly, the world hasn't changed that much in the 30 or so years since the idea of separate women's spaces arose.

But, feminist ideas of oppression, intersectionality and multiple subject locations have changed.

This is due, I think, to the few mini-revolutions within the feminist movement, mostly around inclusion issues. Lesbians and other queer-identified women fought to be included, and in fact fought to be counted as "real women". Poor women, women of colour, immigrant women, all have had struggles (some of them ongoing to the present) around inclusion. Many from all those groups gave up on fighting for inclusion and have created their own spaces. One could call this fractioning, but if there are service needs which aren't being provided, this takes precedence, imv, to some notion of standing together when that's not feasible or likely. 

An interesting point for me is that this discussion, as most discussions around trans issues, centers on transwomen. The bodies of transwomen are variously sexualized, exoticized and problematized. It's something worth thinking about which I'll continue to do.

Some random tales from my life and people I've known.

I worked in a women's space with a trans man, who I knew as a slightly butchy genderqueer non-gendered person with a female name. We worked together for a number of years, and he began taking hormones, eventually had breast surgery, and he changed a great deal. Physically. He was, and is, the same person, but this was his journey. He's a white man now, something that he really needed to come to terms with such as when he passes, how he's treated and what he responds to. He was queer-bashed about a year ago.

A few years ago I dated a transman for a brief period of time. He was taking hormones but had not had surgery and wasn't planning to. He was a man of colour, and when I first met him year before, had identified as a butch lesbian. Transitioning and becoming a Black man had very different implications for him, compared with my white co-worker.

I participated in the "Trans Inclusion 101" workshop that was offered to women's service organizations by the Trans programming at the 519 Community Centre. The program is no longer listed on their website, which is a shame. A transman and a transwoman did the training, and encouraged us to ask all our questions, that I would frame respectfully as dumb-ass, fairly non-informed and stunned. Including my questions. This was fine for the facilitators. It was 101 and it needed to get at all the basic issues, many of which have been touched on in the last thread, and every time we have a thread on this topic on babble. I learned tons. The biggest thing I learned is how little I know, and today, 4 years after that workshop I still have so much to learn.

Like most people, my struggles too have been with transwomen, and the idea that they had male privilege and didn't get what being a woman means, in all its sexist bullshit that we have to put up with everyday.

Gender is fluid, for some people. Gender itself oppresses some people. This is separate from sexism and misogyny, which is oppression because of membership in an identified gender, not oppression because of lack of conformity to one of two narrowly defined genders.

For those of us who gender doesn't oppress, it's something we really need to think about, and open our minds to. I continue to struggle to do this, and use dumb-ass essentialist language all the time, which I try to notice more, and try to change. It's not that we have to be "perfect" or anything, but we have to see where we've been, quite literally, brainwashed, about gender.

Final story. Gender matters. I do an exercise with myself sometimes, just walk down the street and look at people, and notice how much gender matters when I'm just looking at someone for 5 seconds. If I can't figure out the gender of the person immediately, I look some more, for cues, etc. It matters to me. It's completely fucked up that it matters to me, yet it does.  "

The discussion then continued, with both sides throwing quotes, articles and stories at each other. A reminder that no identified transpeople were present during any of this.

Then I closed the thread, with this post:

"  As an anti-oppression educator I feel very strongly that talking, communicating and furthering dialogue is better than shutting discussions down.

Nobody has full and complete understandings, empathies for and levels of "getting it" for every type of oppression. My view, and my personal perspective, is that this is political work I personally agree to do, for the rest of my life, as part of my commitment to social justice and anti-oppression.

That's why I started this new thread when I closed the old one. 

Agreement is clearly not possible. And I don't even mean agreement on the issues, terminology, etc, but we can't even agree that oppression is going on, that oppression of trans people exists. 

I have no idea what the purpose of keeping this thread open would be, and am closing it. Why? Because as an anti-oppression educator and a moderator on babble, this discourse is beneath a progressive discussion board.  "

Gender, while it is a social construction, acts on our bodies in a few ways.

First, there's gender identity. It works like the joke: There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't. In North America/Canada, gender is socialized, rather brutally, casing most of us to fall into line, on one side or the other, female or male. Some people do not fall into line, and they are described as having "issues" with gender. (Isn't it more accurate to say that gender has issues with everyone, and it's only some who directly challenge gender?).

Then there's sexism, misogyny, woman-hatred. This is systemic, embedded, institutionalized, and also lives in each of us, regardless of our gender identity. They overlap, but they aren't the same thing.

Read Kate Bornstein for the question "how many genders are there?" and many more fun, informative and mind-opening questions and exercises.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=NjH32xMTu7kC&dq=kate+bornstein+my+gender...