14

Trans Feminisms

Despite my fear of cameras, I’m slowly getting used to being filmed, under certain circumstances: live performances, music videos, documentaries, and educational projects. I’m still a novice when it comes to television. Earlier this year I was asked to appear on a flagship UK news program, a live broadcast, to discuss proposed changes to the way the law recognizes and treats trans people. In that total slowing down of time that happens during a performance, it was impossible not to read the host’s teleprompter just before she introduced me and her other guest; I was labeled there as a “trans activist,” and the writer picked for her opposing views was “a feminist.” It was so hard not to interrupt, mostly to laugh, and ask why it was that she was a feminist and I was not? My doctoral research is in feminist musicology; I specifically applied to my university because of its groundbreaking work in music and gender. A feminist attitude underscores all of my musical performances and event organizing, my teaching, and my charity work. I made my first feminist speech when I was ten years old, and I began writing for online and offline feminist publications in my mid-teens. It would have been just as easy to say “trans feminist” as “trans activist”—and yet that word, that label that makes sense of my life, was not given me.

I need feminism. I need it not because I am a woman but because, no matter what lens the world uses to view me through, I am subject to gender-based abuses, founded on the idea that there is one, hierarchical, coercive gender system. When I am seen as a gender non-conforming woman, a failed woman, a dyke, and a bitch, I need feminism. When I am seen as a gender non-conforming man, a pretty boy, a poof, a faggot, I need feminism. Most of all, when I am seen as the flipped version of what I am—a gender failure and a gendered freak—then I need a way of fighting back, of changing the world that treats me this way. Feminism is my method of resistance, my road map to change.

This enforcing of gendered systems, of gendered expectations—the poor treatment that comes from being seen as “not right” and “not important” in the scheme of gender—can come from all places and all people. The first man who groped me in broad daylight as a young teenager, a straight man, and the man in a packed nightclub who forced his face between my legs, who kept coming back to grab my genitals, because “It’s okay, I’m gay.” The woman who took advantage of my age and my vulnerability, and seeing me naked and alone after a shower in a public changing room, put her arm around me and ask me to take my towel off and get dressed in front of her, and the drunk woman after Pride who asked me if I was a man or a woman, then answered her own question with a blow to my crotch. I have been extremely lucky, compared with many women, compared with many people outside the binary, compared, in fact, to many men who have also suffered from the effects of misogyny. But I don’t believe that any of these experiences are acceptable. It’s not that I want a weapon with which to attack the individuals behind these instances, but that I need a total game plan that ensures that these instances, any instance of gendered violence, any system of gendered oppression, becomes a thing of the past.

It’s hardly as though I’m alone here: all of my friends, and the majority of my trans community, are feminists. They are engaged with feminist communities that reflect the kind of belief expressed by South African activist and artist Gabrielle Le Roux, describing here her awakening to the importance of trans people in feminist practice:

Through a couple of close personal friendships, I began to deeply engage with transgender issues as gender issues and realised that this is all our issue… This means that a struggle for gender equality founded on the idea that we are struggling for equity between men and women is also profoundly flawed. Having worked as a feminist activist for two decades with so many issues and such diverse women, for us not to have engaged with transgender issues as gender issues made me feel cheated. Gender is the connection between transgender and feminism—I feel strongly that until we engage with transgender and inter-sex inclusively as gender issues, our feminisms are stuck.

And yet, we have headlines like these:

“Call Yourself a Woman? Feminists Take on Transgender Community in Bitter Debate”

“What Is a Woman? The Dispute Between Radical Feminism and Transgenderism”

“The Conflict Between Feminism and the Transgender Movement”

“Transgender Rights Versus Feminism: What Makes a Woman?”

They crop up in right- and left-wing publications alike; it’s the standard set-up for news discussion shows. Many trans people I know have given up on mainstream media engagement, the kind of talking-head appearances from experts, because of the inevitability of being pitted against a transphobic feminist, and of being encouraged to fight.

This framing refuses to jibe with what I know to be true about the multiplicity of feminisms in general, and the history and import of trans feminism in particular.

Trans women have been part of feminist movements for a long time. When we look at the magazines of the queer, radical German subcultures of the 1920s and 1930s, we see trans and lesbian writers and communities sharing spaces, publications, clubs, and activist groups. Many trans men, like influential philanthropist Reed Erickson, had been feminists (and sometimes lesbians) before transitioning, and retained strong ties to feminist movements. Pioneers of all genders from the older, working-class bar and drag scenes—black, Latin, and white—were fighting for gendered freedom and justice long before the theoretical developments of 1960s and 1970s second-wave feminism. And yet it was a minority of these second-wavers that created and legitimized the idea that “real” feminism could not include or even support trans people—and which singled out trans women for a vicious campaign of abuse.

There are three arguments lobbied again and again at trans people, supposedly from a feminist perspective, supposedly from a neutral, unbiased position. From a distance, without repetition and investigation, these arguments can look reasonable. But the uncritical assumption that these arguments are correct may well, in the long run, be causing more harm to trans people than the more open abuse of a furious minority.

The first is that trans people, by existing, by transitioning, prop up a sexist gender binary. This argument relies, as a point of principle, on the erasure of trans people like me, who do not fit into a gender binary and have no wish to do so. Further “evidence” is provided by images of some trans men and women in the mainstream media: glamorous, feminine women and hyper-masculine men. What is missing here, apart from an awareness of the diversity of gender expressions and identities to be found across trans communities, is knowledge of the ways in which medical treatment for trans people has been granted or denied based on the expectations of cis, mainly male, clinicians. Pioneering sexologist Harry Benjamin was famous for his criteria of what made a “true transsexual,” but sexual stereotyping in the provision of trans-related care is still with us. Trans people have been denied hormones and surgery for being gay, for being bisexual, for being too tall or too short, too fat or too thin, for not molding themselves into white Western presentations of gender, for daring to be butch trans women, or femme trans men, for being disabled, for giving the “wrong” answers to intrusive questions about sex and masturbation, for not being in full-time employment, for being married, for refusing to change their names, and for being intersex. Those examples come from the lives of trans people I have met, have known, in real life, and I suspect that there are many more. Some trans people have to play the long game: give cis clinicians what they’re looking for so as to be able to transition, and then have the space, the freedom, to present as is right. If the feminists who used this argument truly cared about coercive gender standards they would be standing with trans people and demanding an end to medical gatekeeping—and, yet, here we are. The behavior of those with power over us is used as a stick with which to beat us. It solves nothing.

The second common feminist argument made against trans people is that gender may be diverse, but sex is binary, unchanging, and oppositional. We have already seen some of the ways in which sex and gender are more complicated and varied than that, but it is worth considering the additions that some feminists have made to this template. In this reading, it is not only that female and male are biologically opposed, but that their differences contain spiritual and moral elements. Much is made of the ideas of male and female “energies,” of the (unproven) assertion of a male biological drive toward violence, the (equally unproven) assertion of a female biological drive toward compassion, and of the power that lies in the actual or symbolic womb. For all that this comes under a feminist banner, these arguments are strikingly close to Freud’s belief that “biology is destiny,” and find their foundations in much of the early white suffrage and temperance movements: the claims that women deserved the vote because they were purer and better than men, that women were not tempted by alcohol because of their innate moral superiority.

The final and, seemingly, most convincing argument is that of socialization. Trans women, these feminists claim, can never really be women, as the very fact that they needed to transition proves that they were socialized as men. At a cursory glance, it makes some sense: who we are is, indeed, predicated to a large degree on what we have been taught to be. Where the anti-trans socialization argument falls down, though, is in its assumptions about how socialization works: that it is enacted along some kind of universal binary gendered line, that it is a one-way process, and that it stops after a certain time.

This is to me, as a feminist, abhorrent. It strikes me as wrong not only in its inaccuracy, but in the ways in which it ignores other axes of power and privilege, other ways in which we suffer at each other’s hands—the myriad ways in which we benefit from others’ suffering, whether we like it or not. I look at my own early years, and see an incredible mix of differing messages, predicated on my family’s unique experiences of gender, of nationality, of race, and of money and of class, and on my broader cultural positioning within those categories. Many supposed universals of “female socialization” were unknown to me, as were those of a supposedly typical male experience. I find commonalities of experience with friends from similar backgrounds, who inhabit similar categories, and I find commonalities with people who, at first glance, would appear to be totally different. There can be—there are—similarities and overlaps of gendered experience, just as there are similarities and overlaps between any cultural groups—but a universal either/or socialization does not do justice to the multiple nature of inequality and injustice, nor does it help solve these problems. How could I, on the basis of the sex I was assigned at birth, claim to have had the same socialization as a child born into poverty who has never known what it was like to go to bed well-nourished and safe? The same socialization as a child denied an education because of warfare, cultural upheaval, or a specific localized form of misogyny? To claim that all the privileges of my whiteness matter less than the sex I was assigned at birth, so that my socialization was that of a child raised with the total violence of embedded racism curtailing their possibilities at every turn? To me, it feels like an insult, an appropriation, to take the experiences of others who have struggled far harder than I ever have had to and say “this struggle is mine, because of the one way, out of many, we were categorized at birth.”

Neither is socialization a one-way experience; the human mind is so much more than a blank slate waiting for an outside hand. How someone will hear, interpret, and internalize the multiple messages they receive, and how they will respond in turn will vary from person to person. To return again to my childhood: a crucial part of my gendered socialization was that I reacted to others’ messages as someone who did not feel male or female. Trans people’s experiences of how they knew themselves before they had the language to know themselves as trans are hugely diverse, but it would be wrong to assume that we reacted to the gendered messages we received as the sexes we were assigned at birth, or uncomplicatedly so. Trans women who are tarred with the label “socialized as men” often report childhood experiences of knowing themselves to be girls, of being punished for being feminine, and of being abused for not meeting masculine stereotypes. I don’t understand how those experiences, both self-reflexive and at the hands of others, constitutes a “male” socialization.

Finally, we have the idea that it is only socialization in childhood that matters: that it takes a certain length of time before a person can claim to be a woman or a man, and that if a critical window of opportunity is missed, a person cannot ever “change gender.” Leaving aside the fact that those putting forth this argument ignore both the existence of young transitioners, and the common occurrence of inner knowledge that predates social transition, this interpretation of how the self is constructed dismisses what we are coming to know of brain plasticity and the evolving field of theory of mind. I know I am not alone in having experienced significant shifts in personality following major life changes in adulthood. My brother’s final illness and death altered so much of what I feel to be “me”: my gut reaction to bad news, the length of time it takes me to process difficult emotions, my sleep patterns, the temptation to turn to alcohol in times of pain, the figures that haunt the visions that accompany sleep paralysis, the way that my depressive lows now melt into grieving. My doctor told me that both my immune system and my metabolism were adversely affected by the extreme and ongoing stress. Who I am now is not identical to who I was ten years ago—that’s hardly a controversial statement.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminism (as opposed to trans-inclusionary radical feminism) is one strand of feminist practice, but one strand only. Other types of feminism include, but are not limited to analytic feminism, liberal feminism, postcolonial feminism, black feminism, postmodern feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, anarcho-feminism, Marxist feminism, ecofeminism, intersectional feminism, and libertarian feminism. All of these categories contain multiple viewpoints and messages, and many overlap in significant ways. Some are fundamentally opposed to each other, and some share many of the same goals and practices. Feminisms are ever changing, living philosophies and movements.

To be honest, I think the answer to the supposed conflict lies in the broader cultural popularity of infotainment and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. As with any other story, drama and conflict sells.

What are we to do, those of us who want to educate, to learn, and to reach out across this divide, but don’t want to feed the beast of outrage and ratings and perpetual argument?

I would suggest that we remember that feminisms are more varied, and more valuable, than this one harmful subset. We don’t have to play a losing game, or sink to our opponents’ levels. Feminism can be for everyone.

AMERICAN LEGAL SCHOLAR and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw put a name to a different way of doing feminism in her writings of the late 1980s and early 1990s: intersectionality. The first part of the definition given in her 1991 essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” is one of the most quoted, most easy to understand definitions of this approach available:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

But this definition also comes with a warning, an explanation of what can happen when we deny the ways in which we can be caught at the intersections of our lives:

providing legal relief only when black women show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident. Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in the cars and zoom away.

The objections made to the process of intersectional activism—even to the word itself—run from facile to false. Professional feminist shock jock Julie Burchill likened the word to a bowel complaint, and claimed it was similarly full of shit. A popular media tactic is to claim that intersectionality is a “made-up” approach, a trend coined by the twitterverse, heavy on pile-ons and the misuse of difficult language, light on actual feminist practice. According to some, the word itself is too long, the idea that some people have more prejudice to contend with than others is too divisive, and the thought of trying to combat multiple, stacking oppressions at the same time is more than our job’s worth. In this reading, “intersectionality” is just a way of trying to make white cis women feel guilty, and naming the whiteness, the cisness of intersectionality’s main opponents is identity politics gone mad. “Intersectional” feminism is what happens on university campuses, where the young and idealistic play oppression Olympics, while the real feminists, the old guard, do the actual work. Supposedly.

I’m not so sure. Not sure how a thirty-year-old word to describe a centuries-old process can be described as new or divisive, certainly—but doubly unsure as to why this kind of feminist process is still being fought over by some when it is an everyday practice for many.

A little while ago I participated in a panel discussion on intersectional feminism in the East End of London. The event had been organized by members of the local council, and both audience and speakers were more varied in their backgrounds, their experiences, than can often be the case at feminist events. For an hour and a half my fellow panelists—activists and academics—fielded audience questions, joined in discussion, and actively listened to each other. Our differences did not stifle us, but united us in a shared need for learning, communication, and support. I learned a great deal about the ongoing impacts of British colonialism on experiences of gendered oppression and expression. Several older men opened up about what it was like to be forced into a certain type of masculinity; one young woman asked how she could best support trans people while remaining respectful of her Christian background and love of God. It was not hard, or threatening, to learn from one another’s experiences: it was a gift. In considering how we had each benefited from an unfair society, and how we had suffered at its hands, we were not competing to try to find out “who had it worst”—we were sharing how best to make things fairer for all of us. I don’t understand what it controversial, or difficult, about that.

BUT I DO understand what it is to be turned away by the labeling of things when that labeling is unexplained and its processes are unclear. When that label is used to mean a mocking reference to Tumblr teenagers and trigger warnings with everything, with activists who’ll delight in tearing down the uninitiated, beginning to understand or practice an intersectional approach might seem intimidating, or pointless.

It is also true that so many guides to intersectional feminism available online point more to the end product than the process. They talk about which words to use, and which points to make, without addressing the fact that words change and goalposts shift. “Ten Ways to Make Your Feminism More Intersectional,” “Five Feminist Arguments You Didn’t Realize Are Cissexist,” quick little lists to read on your phone that can certainly help but rarely delve deeper than “do this, but not that.” We love to focus on symptoms, but too often leave structures and systems unexamined. Working out how we can do our best by each other is not so simple as just using the most up-to-date terms and, without examining the deepest levels of our thoughts and actions, it can be easy to fall into thinking that intersectionality just means adding a surface layer of “diversity.” That all you have to do to make your feminism intersectional is to add one photo of a woman in a wheelchair, add one token piece by a trans woman, share an article from a black feminist, and call it a day.

I worry about my own tendency toward this. I see the way that others fail me, and know I must, despite my best intentions, be failing others. I need more than just an outcome created by others to be copied: I need an underlying philosophy of my own that can hold me to account, and also inspire me to think more, think harder, and act with greater compassion. I need to think of ways in which, by following this philosophy, I can make it easier for others to develop their own.

I was lucky, then, that the simultaneous publication of two books, and my back-to-back reading of them, helped to clarify these murky and conflicting feelings. The contrast between them, in foundation, in process, in outcome, and my reflection on those contrasts, put into words what it is I want to do with my feminism.

Sheila Jeffreys’s Gender Hurts and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: two books from two anglophone feminist writers, each from an influential mainstream publisher, each one from an academic author—Roxane Gay is a Professor of English at Purdue University, while Jeffreys was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Both books told from a queer perspective: Gay is bisexual, Jeffreys a political lesbian. Two different generations: Jeffreys the older and Gay the younger; and two different experiences of racism and racial privilege: Gay is black, Jeffreys is white. Gay’s work is a collection of essays, spanning a huge number of topics, while Jeffreys’s work is focused on the sole issue of the supposed threat trans people pose to the world in general, and feminism in particular.

Reading Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism was not a pleasant experience for me—nothing like the evening spent inhaling Bad Feminist—but I’m glad that I read both, and in the same day. At each point where Jeffreys’s arguments left me feeling excluded, misinterpreted, or blamed, Gay’s book offered a deeper, more inclusive alternative. The experience left me with four main tenets—ways of questioning my actions and intentions—guides for what my intersectional feminism can be.

Plurality is necessary because there is no neutral.

The introduction alone to Bad Feminism struck me by its breadth: “Feminism (n): Plural.” An explicit description of what that means: “We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry along with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us.”

Any of us claiming that our feminism is neutral or total is either ignorant or a liar. Even if we do it from the best of intentions—“this is the real feminism, other people claiming to be feminists are cruel and hateful”—it does damage.

So my feminism must remain mine, and I must take responsibility for it, in all the ways in which my insights are valuable and all the ways in which they are limited. In doing so, I can hope to join my voice to others without drowning them out.

Failure is necessary in order to learn.

Many of us carry around an image of the “perfect feminist”: someone who never makes the “wrong” choices, always knows what to say, wins every argument, embodies every virtue. Some feminists will take that image so much to heart that they cannot stand to think of the ways in which their real selves fail to measure up.

Gay’s solution, in the face of the image of feminist perfection, is to be a “bad” feminist, because perfection doesn’t exist, but trying for something is so much better than nothing. In her essays, she gives herself space to fail and its crucial corollary, space to succeed. The interrogating self is interrogated—both the writer and the reader—but with kindness as well as stringent honesty.

The most important thing I’ve ever learned as a musician, both as a student and as a teacher, is that progress is impossible without failure. The trick is to own your mistakes, to own your responsibility for fixing them—and to never stop learning from the example of others.

It might well be the most important part of my feminist learning as well.

We must bring our whole, examined selves to the table.

Gay’s book certainly has a structural advantage here: personal essays are traditionally more discursive than a quasi-academic text. In combining theory with the little details and human foibles of her daily life, she shows us a realistic version of what it is to be a feminist. Not someone whose every action, every thought, fits a preapproved template of political righteousness, but a feminist who can tackle the worst problems of our world and still indulge in trashy novels, dubious pop music, drinking too much, and worrying about getting it wrong.

There is not one aspect of life where gendered oppression does not reach, and which cannot benefit from feminist inclusion. If we start preemptively cutting out parts of who we are because they’re “not feminist enough,” then we’ve failed before we’ve begun.

We cannot afford to leave anyone behind.

At no point while reading Sheila Jeffreys’s work did I have the sensation of being recognized as an equal participant in the feminist movement. Jeffreys talks about the “politics of transgenderism” rather than trans lives and trans communities. She asserts that people like me are “created by forces of male power” through “mutilation”—a reading which is totally at odds with all I know of the trans experience—and seems uninterested in hearing our side of the story. Throughout Gender Hurts, I had the sensation of being seen as a problem to be solved, and as a roadblock in the way of true feminist justice.

I was thankful, then, to come to Gay’s words:

Women of color, queer women, and transgender women need to be better included in the feminist project. Women from these groups have been shamefully abandoned by Capital-F Feminism, time and again. This is a hard, painful truth.… For years, I decided feminism was not for me as a black woman, as a woman who has been queer identified at varying points in her life, because feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others.

And after that reminder, instead of doing down the existence of others in order to prop up her own experiences, Gay writes from the center out, enriching the understanding of others through the specifics of her own life. Her teaching, her fiction, her experiences of love and hatred, desire, boredom, fear, hope: her narrative is messier and more complicated than Jeffreys’s, forcing the reader to acknowledge her full humanity—and, from that, the full humanity of others.

Life is seldom perfect, and everyone knows the sometime necessity of a compromise. But if we accept the necessity—the desirability—of offering up the lives of others to improve our own, then we have already lost.

MY FEMINISM MUST be intersectional if it is to contain the realities of my trans life, and the lives of all other trans people—trans people whose experiences are often radically different from mine. But it is not only a need for inclusion, and for protection, but a question of feminism’s need for all that can be learned of gender oppression, and of gender itself, in all of its many forms.

Would you like to know the subtle differences between being seen as an effeminate white man and an androgynous white woman? Would you like to know what those differences can do to a person, to their safety, to their comfort, to their ability to move through the world? Ask me—because the world has shown me. Is it only men who enforce gendered norms and enact gendered violence? In my experience it is not, and that experience can be a valuable tool, if we want it to be. If feminism is to help everyone, it has to learn from everyone. The more we learn about the intricacies, overlaps, and contrasts of our experiences, the more we can dismantle the totality of gendered oppression.

These extraordinary elements of trans people’s collective knowledge—what it is to be the same person perceived in different gendered ways, what it costs to challenge the idea that sex and gender are fixed at birth by outsiders, what it is to exist outside the gendered system we were taught was universal—how can feminism continue without them? Without the insights of trans women who experience that particular form of oppression, transmisogyny, where they are punished for their womanhood, and punished again for the fact that it is devalued and disbelieved? Without the insights of trans men who, depending on country, race, class, bodies, perceptions, lose and gain any combination of benefits upon transition? Without the accumulated knowledge of those, like me, living outside a gender binary: in the streets, in our homes, in employment, in the social system, in our own minds?

All of this experience, this work, enriches not only our understanding, but gives us all a better skillset with which to fight against the systems that keep us down.

This is the point where, in my experience, some people will say, “Why feminism at all?” “Doesn’t feminism mean female?” “If you’re going to broaden the category, why not call yourself a humanist instead?” For me, that response is yet another of the many reasons why feminism needs trans people. Gendered oppression is so much more than a dualistic fight between women and men, and its cruelties extend beyond one form of discrimination against one group of people. This labeling of the world into things for men, and things for women—good things, bad things—twists what is designated “womanly,” “feminine,” and uses it to punish nearly all of us. Some are hurt far worse than others—but very few make it out unscathed.

We cannot untangle this Gordian knot by pulling on one thread only. We have to stop pretending that, despite acting together, our resources are scarce and our empathy and talents limited. We do not need to pursue only one goal at a time, help only one type of person. The sheer fact of our diversity means we can be diverse in what it is that we need, and what we can do.

Instead of narrowing down our feminist needs and our desires, we could open them up to everyone who has ever had a need to be free of gendered oppression, gender coercion, gendered limitations.

To do this, I need to ask more, expect more, demand more and better. And I need to show myself willing to hear and act on the same demands in turn.