13

The T from the LGB

Faced with a blurring, shifting, evolving landscape of what gender and identity can mean, many people would like to try to make things appear simpler. For some cis LGB people, and some straight trans people, this means marking a neat line dividing issues around gender identity from issues around sexual orientation. Gender is who you are, and sexuality is who you want; sexual orientation is who you go to bed with and gender identity is who you go to bed as. To avoid confusion, to avoid misgendering, it would be easier to part ways; get rid of the alphabet soup of LGBT(+Q)(+I)(+A) and focus solely on trans issues, or solely on LGB issues.

Some of the reasons for this desire are valid if not, perhaps, readily discernible to an outsider. After all, one of the reasons why we’re so often seen as the same group is one of the reasons why some of us want to go our separate ways. In the public imagination, and in the particular reasoning of people who either don’t know or don’t like trans people, being trans is what happens when you take being gay too far. This line of argument has two strands. The first, popular with those who mock gay and trans people alike, is that gay men are girly and gay women are butch: what is a trans woman but a really girly man, a trans man but a super-butch woman? The second explanation is more often trotted out by cis gay men and lesbians who disapprove of trans people. They believe that every trans person is actually a gay person so scared of being gay that they would physically alter their bodies so as to make their desires seem more normal. It is unsurprising that many trans people, sick of being called fantasists or cowards, would prefer to strike out on their own. It’s also unsurprising that cis gay people, sick of being told that they “want to be a man” or “want to be a woman,” actually want to make it clear that being gender non-conforming and queer is not the same thing, or not always the same thing, as being trans.

There’s also the issue of transphobia in LGBT spaces. For all the joint statements from campaigning groups and advocates, and the ways in which we are lumped together by outsiders, there’s a sizable chunk of the LGB population that hates trans people just as much as straight people do. We feel it in the ways we are groped on the dance floor of a gay club by someone who wants to “check,” and in the refusal to allow queer trans people access to queer spaces, because we’re not seen as legitimate. It’s in the treatment of our trans bodies in these spaces and communities, the ways in which they are described as disgusting, freakish, threatening, and just plain wrong. The cis gay men who claim that vaginas are gross, little thinking that there are gay men with vaginas. Cis lesbians who describe their lesbianism not as a love of women, but as a rejection of penis, and woe betide the lesbian who might have one, or might have had one once. It was, until recently, the way that mainstream LGBT organizations were happy to tack a “T” on the end, but not to fight for trans rights, inclusion, justice. There is so much bad blood, and so much still to fix.

My stake in all of this is personal. As a queer trans person, it has to be. But beyond my own needs there are wider, far more compelling reasons, why trying to pull the T from out of the LGB hurts more than it heals. In our interlockings, our intersections, there is power, hope, a path to something better. But the divisions that would drag us back have existed for a long time, and cannot be wished away. We have to go deeper if we wish to go forward.

IN THE PUBLIC imagination, most trans people are assumed to be straight. After all, this is one of the main props of the standard trans story: “I knew I was a woman, because I needed to be with a man as a woman,” and vice versa. It may be surprising, then, to learn that trans people are far more likely to be bisexual, gay or lesbian than cis people are.

Anecdotally, we know this and have known this for a long time. In my own UK trans community the number of straight trans people I know is overwhelmed by the bi, queer, pansexual, omnisexual, lesbian, and gay trans people of all genders and descriptors. Some of these trans people are heavily invested in the mainstream gay scene, and many have made alternative, trans-friendly spaces where they can express honestly, and without fear of reprisal, both their desires and their selfhoods. Our trans community is also comprised of people with no sexual desire toward others, who may or may not be in romantic relationships that are gay or queer. Some of us are in open relationships, some of us are in polyamorous triads, some are happy to be single, some are monogamously coupled. We are into kink, into vanilla sex, into no sex at all, and some trans people combine these categories in ways we have not been taught to recognize or respect. It is not that straight trans people don’t exist, because of course they do. But I don’t know where, in this proposed splitting of LGB from T, we would fit the majority of trans people who are both.

Research data backs up the evidence of our lives. There are patterns and changes that shift depending on culture, location, subsets of identity, but the broad findings leave little doubt as to the importance of LGBQ desires in many trans people’s lives. A 2013 Canadian study found that an estimated 63.3 percent of trans men were bisexual, gay, queer, or otherwise found themselves attracted to other men. The authors of this work referred back to similar studies from other researchers, in 2001 and 2011, which found that between one quarter and one half of trans men describe themselves as gay or bisexual, with even more preferring the broader term “queer.” Likewise, there have been numerous reports that have demonstrated the fact that around the same numbers of trans women would also describe themselves as lesbian, bisexual, and/or queer. Scottish Transgender Alliance’s enormously important 2012 report on trans mental health found that the majority of trans people surveyed described themselves as bisexual (27 percent) or queer (24 percent). Many respondents used multiple terms to convey the nuances of their sexual orientation.

There are trans people whose orientations remain fixed throughout transition, and there are also people who find that their sexuality can shift and change throughout life. Some attribute this to hormonal changes, others to the ways in which being trans forced them to question many of the received truths they’d previously accepted, making them more open to possibilities previously seen as impossible. I know of many trans masculine people who were not attracted to men pre-transition, but who found themselves identifying as bisexual or gay post-transition. Many said that they couldn’t imagine relating to a man in a perceived heterosexual relationship, but that being with a man as a visible man made sense.

For myself, being genderqueer and being queer are intimately linked, calling back to the same need to resist limits on who I might be and who I might desire. I don’t want to second-guess the direction of my life from past experiences, while still needing words to describe the particularities of those experiences to others. I know many trans people who feel the same way about their sexualities, whatever those sexualities might be: that there is no point where you could extract one from the other, could draw a clean line through the totality of a person. I get very tired of the idea that LGB rights means only LGB cis rights. I can’t countenance the exclusion of trans queer people with the idea that trans here is a noun, something separate, rather than an adjective that points to a broad range of experiences, placing us in community with queer people of all genders.

THESE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN gender and sexuality are not simply products of our modern lives, but vital components of the groups and movements that have made our lives possible. Not that we could guess that from the majority of gay and lesbian histories—Surpassing the Love of Men, Gay Life and Culture: A World History, Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History—but the actual record of same-sex desire in human cultures is threaded through with evidence of gender non-conforming lives. Previous, cis, historians have tried to gloss that variance as “gay.” More recent researchers have stressed the importance of taking everyone—even those in the past—on their own terms. And those terms are often more mixed and complicated than our modern categories of “cis” and “trans,” “gay” and “straight.”

The very word “homosexual,” used so exclusively now, initially had a double meaning, being both the desire for the same sex, and possessing a mind, a brain, belonging to the “opposite sex.” “Homosexual” was neither trans nor gay, but a root from which both of these modern ideas grew. Karl Ulrichs, one of the early founders of what would become the later LGBT movement, defined homosexuality as a third sex; the people so often described as gay men in modern tellings of this story were described by Ulrichs as having, as he did, “a woman’s soul trapped in the wrong body.” There is a tendency now, stemming from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, to call those explanations excuses, a way of trying to garner sympathy, or explain the unexplainable. In societies that punished same-sex behavior, surely it made sense to claim a kind of heterosexuality? But the fact is, when we delve deeply, we find all kinds of genders, gendered explanations, in these early movements and communities, and many people who experienced same-sex desires without any hint of gender variance.

A clear comparison can be found in the early-twentieth-century examples of Radclyffe/John Hall and Natalie Barney. Both are most commonly described as lesbians: they lived at the same time, had many friends in common, moved in similar queer circles. And yet their approaches to gender and desire were totally different. Hall is most famous for her/his groundbreaking 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, which was banned in Britain under obscenity laws. The tragic story of congenital invert Stephen Gordon, The Well is known both as the quintessential early lesbian text and also as one of the most depressing and, to many lesbian readers, unconvincing stories of same-sex desire in the canon. Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf all found it wanting. Hall’s depiction of physically, mentally masculine inverts, doomed by their treacherous bodies to an outcast life could not be more removed from the kind of lesbianism celebrated by Natalie Barney, depicted in The Well as Stephen’s friend Valérie Seymour. Barney, an American heiress and founder of one of the most famous salons in Paris, believed in the innate superiority of women in all things, and in the passionate, erotic celebration of femininity. She was unabashedly open about her love for other women, believing lesbianism to be a more moral, and certainly more rewarding, choice than heterosexuality. When it comes to Hall, I don’t even know which name or pronoun to use. Hall was John and he to those who knew him well and respected his inner life, and Radclyffe and she to the rest of the world. None of us could know whether, if he/she lived now, they would be a trans man, a butch lesbian, or something else entirely. What we do know is that our shared past often defies current categories in favor of something more murky and complex. We can see a recognition of that complexity in the ways in which some early homosexual campaigners tried to reject it: something must exist in order for it to be suppressed. The “movement for masculine culture” was set up in opposition to the more popular theories of inversion and gender/sexual variance, positioning homosexuality as something manly, virile, and utterly unconnected to the cross-dressing and cross-gendered behaviors of the abnormal. Biologist Benedict Friedländer, a misogynist, anti-Semitic Jewish man, was one of the leaders of this movement, in which nationalism, machismo, sexism, and racism combined with notions of a biological drive toward homosexuality to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the white, same-sex-oriented man.

As we have already seen, sodomy laws were enforced with greater regularity, and with greater cruelty, upon the people who broke the gendered rules of their societies. Early Modern European culture is so rich with depictions of same-sex sex and desire, but it is in the records of arrests, torture, and executions that we find much of our evidence of gender non-conforming behaviors. The ways in which we have interpreted this evidence change, of course, with the meaning we wish to find. The figure of the passing woman appears over and over again in lesbian history and historical fiction as an example of the lengths women will go to when denied the chance to love other women openly. Increasingly, I’m finding the same stories passed around trans circles as evidence that trans people have always existed. We all of us want to feel validated, to feel the legitimizing force of history—but do we ever have the right to claim strangers as being one of our own?

We certainly feel the draw. Louis Sullivan, himself a pioneer in the record of trans history, wrote a biography of Californian man Jack Garland, who died in 1936. Jack could be seen as a typical example of the passing woman: assigned female at birth, an adventurer in men’s clothes, “the mysterious girl-boy, man-woman, or what-is-it” in the newspaper parlance of the day. He was a soldier, a nurse, and, eventually, just another man like any other, until the shock of his autopsy. But then there is the fact that Jack acknowledged his need to be with men as a man, that he made many coded references to life on the street with hobos and “willy boys.” His closest friend had no doubt that he was a man through and through, despite his birth. Others, after his death, have crafted stories of him as a woman pushed to imitation by the constraints of misogyny. Louis Sullivan described him, without a doubt, as a trans man. How could any of us place him, in a way that does him justice, when we can never ask and know for sure?

Even when divisions between categories of gender and sexuality came into force, shared oppressions meant a shared battle. The American protests and riots of the early 1960s—Dewey’s, Compton’s—were melting pots of different identities. Even the most famous riot of them all, the one that many people cite as the birthplace of the modern LGBT movement, was not a single-community affair. Contrary to the story presented in Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall, the Stonewall riots were the bubbling up of all the injustices borne by gender non-conforming people—trans women of color, butch black lesbians, transvestites, femmes, sex workers, queens—the queer people who suffered the most from police violence and societal rejection. Stormé DeLarverie, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera: we owe so much to them, and the countless others who were brave enough to say “enough is enough.” Without their actions at Stonewall, the modern gay movement, the rights enjoyed by gay people, would be unthinkable. And yet, even then, there were cis gay people, white people, trying to exclude the trans and/or gender non-conforming activists from the movement that they themselves had made. The Gay Liberation Front, cofounded by trans people, moved to exclude their own founders. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson started STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—a group that helped trans street kids survive, gave them shelter, food, education, hope. They did it without the help of the new gay groups. After their exclusion from the GLF, some trans, gender non-conforming people started the QLF—the Queens’ Liberation Front—only to find themselves banned from the first ever march to commemorate Stonewall. There are harsh truths for cis gay people to be found in the TransLiberation Newsletter of 1971:

The oppression against transvestites and transsexuals of either sex arises from sexist values and this oppression is manifested by homosexuals and heterosexuals alike in the form of exploitation, ridicule, harassment, beating, rapes, murders and the use of us as shock troops and sacrificial victims.

Trans lesbians led the way in many second-wave feminist groups, only to find themselves excluded from lesbian feminist spaces. Clubs, communities, activist organizations where trans queer people created and defined what it meant to be LGBT, fought for justice, did the constant, dulling, dangerous work of being out and demanding more: those same organizations turned their backs on their trans members once it was safe to do so. Some of our modern history is extraordinary in what it shows us of cooperation and compassion, and some of it is a master class in excluding the most marginalized “for the greater good” of the most privileged.

I don’t think this mixed bag of our history is a sign that we should try to part ways; that tactic, too, is scattered throughout the historical record, and it hasn’t worked yet. Instead, as ever, we have a chance to learn from the mistakes of the past, to examine those exclusions, these moments of cowardice and hubris, and to apply what we have learned to our current movements and communities. We could take the best—the empathy and solidarity—and try to add to it, to pass that legacy down to the people who come after us. Not just as activists, but as individuals, we can do better in community than in division.

MANY PEOPLE, CONFRONTED with a picture of transgender pioneer Leslie Feinberg, on being told that she was transgender (without the use of that pronoun), would assume that that meant that Feinberg was a trans man. They would think that his sexuality would be based on a foundation of maleness: gay to mean attracted to men, straight to mean attracted to women. Those assumptions would be wrong. Feinberg, whose fiction and nonfiction books changed the lives of so many trans people, myself included, was a transgender, butch lesbian. She used different pronouns in different spaces, insisted on the importance of solidarity, and linked her trans activism to her communism, her anti-racist work, her support for trade unions, and her feminism. In a 2006 interview, she explained the importance of having the right word in the right context when it came to expressing the self:

For me, pronouns are always placed within context. I am female-bodied, I am a butch lesbian, a transgender lesbian—referring to me as “she/her” is appropriate, particularly in a non-trans setting in which referring to me as “he” would appear to resolve the social contradiction between my birth sex and gender expression and render my transgender expression invisible. I like the gender neutral pronoun “ze/hir” because it makes it impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you’re about to meet or you’ve just met. And in an all trans setting, referring to me as “he/him” honors my gender expression in the same way that referring to my sister drag queens as “she/her” does.

Constantly, in Feinberg’s work, there is the referring back to multiples: multiple communities, multiple experiences, multiple ways of naming and being named. She died in 2014 at the age of sixty-five. She was survived by her partner of many years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, another writer whose works reverberate with the knowledge of what it is to trouble the boundaries of how we are supposed to express our genders and desires. Pratt writes of being femme, of locating femme in the radical repositioning of the world’s gendered power norms, provoking investigation into what is learned, what is “natural,” and what feels right. Her words challenge the reader to reevaluate what it is that they know about bodies, categories, and love, and dares them to see something more than they previously thought possible. Her description of making love with a partner, presumably Feinberg, who has strapped on a phallus, in her 1995 collection s/he, asks us how we can define the limits of other people’s lives:

You are a woman who has been accused of betraying womanhood. In my groans of pleasure from your cock, perhaps some would say I have betrayed womanhood with you, that we are traitors to our sex. You refusing to allow the gestures of what is called masculinity to be preempted by men. Me refusing to relinquish the ecstasies of surrender to women who can only call it subservience. Traitors to our sex, or spies and explorers across the boundaries of what is man, what is woman?

How can you pull apart a life like Feinberg’s, like Pratt’s? Why would anyone want to do so?

Part of being trans, of being queer—not all of it, not for all people, but part—is in the reimagining of what it is to be human. These are categories forged from the failure or refusal to acquiesce to majority rule. That majority rule requires nice, clear lines and limits, and so often we, who are fighting for acceptance, will try to stick to the same in imitation. Too often, all we do in doing so is hurt our own. I’m not prepared to accept any definition of trans, any definition of LGB, that would leave out those like Feinberg and Pratt. I think we would all be the sorrier for it.

IF WE HAVE any hope of trying to end the ignorance, discrimination, and violence that blight our lives, we cannot afford to be seduced by the sophistry of single-issue movements. As Audre Lorde so rightly said, we do not live single-issue lives. The idea of single-issue movements, of whatever kind, so often has the idea of “neutrality” at its heart; an LGB cause where LGB means cis and white, a trans movement where trans means straight and white. But none of us is “neutral”; some of us just have less pressure, less hatred to contend with than others. Focusing on the needs of those with a lighter burden to bear is not “objective” or “pragmatic,” but it is a confirmation of historic societal prejudices that say that some lives matter more than others, some lives are too “complicated” to be worth caring for, some oppressions are just too entrenched to change.

We talk of an LGBT umbrella, but not of those LGBT people who cannot seek shelter beneath because we have narrowed our protections down to the point that only the few are covered. We have been taught to weigh up lives and accord them value, and we turn that tactic on each other. When we feel anger, we direct it toward the most vulnerable members of our communities for their failure to be “respectable” enough to toe the party line, to make themselves acceptable to those who hate us.

I want, and I need, an LGBT umbrella, but what I need beyond that is a solution to the injustice raining down on us—and my needs are less pressing, less desperate, than many others’.

So I am wary of any call to split the T from the LGB, rather than to focus on specific needs within the broader community with shared resources, shared strength. It feels too close to washing our hands of those who stand in the way of assimilation, who would demand justice instead of tolerance—who cannot cut themselves into pieces to fit a truncated agenda.