The June 2005 topic was “How did we get here?” Again this month, we had more of a philosophical discussion rather than linear storytelling.
Description:
How did we get here? How did we figure out that we were trans*?
How did we figure out that we were trans*? How did we discover we wanted to partner with a trans person? How did we come to accept our trans family member? The process of self-discovery can gradually emerge or rapidly surface. For some of us it is a questioning of who we are, on our own terms, at our own pace. For others, someone else's revelation may cause us to examine our relationship to them, as well as to ourselves and our beliefs. The unearthing and road to understanding is clear and obvious for some, while for others it is muddled with questions and uncertainty. We all reach different places and are all constantly evolving and continually becoming the people we are. Where are you today? How did you get here?
Gender Performance/ “doing gender” |
“Trans is something I’m doing; not who I am.” – uttered by one of our in-person-meeting members
The FORGE meeting participants had a long discussion about the philosophical nature of if we are inherently trans/lesbian/queer/pick-your-identity, or if we actively choose to be a certain way. Talk of biological imperatives vs. conscious choice, were hotly (but politely) explored.
The “doing gender”/gender performance dialogue may create division within the trans community – some believing that drag kings and genderqueers are the ones who “do” gender, while the [more respectable (sic)] transgender and transsexual people are the gender they are transitioning to.
This division is totally unnecessary and there is ample room for each person to decide how s/he views hir gender and how hir gender is played out in private and in the world.
In the book Gender Trouble, postmodern theorist Judith Butler explores concepts of how we think about gender. She asserts that gender is not only a social construct, but rather that it is a kind of performance comprised of a set of signs/costumes/disguises we wear. She analyzes the creation of various categories (e.g. “woman” or “man”) and who decides what the qualifications are that define the grouping of “woman,” as well as who belongs and who doesn’t. In most theories, concepts of biological givens are associated with a person’s essence. Butler , like many other postmodern theorists, discards the notions of biological imperatives or other “universals” that create comprehensive categories. Butler theorizes that gender is an act, or a performance of a set of manipulated codes and there is not “real” core gender – only “drag.”
There are innumerable ways to look at and express gender. The following quotes offer a variety of non-traditional concepts.
a. Postmodern and/or non-choice quotes
- Why is everybody freaking out about it being a choice? It's a great choice. I don't know why the genetics argument is going to help us. I think it is a pathetic argument to say "I can't help it."
--JoAnn Loulan, lesbian activist, therapist, and author of the books Lesbian Sex and Lesbian Passion: Loving Ourselves and Each Other, quoted in "The Sexual Blur" by Ted Gideonse, from The Advocate, June 24, 1997
- I'm fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual orientation. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is based on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can't help being queer; we're just born that way. Thanks, but I don't want to receive my civil rights as charity bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors.
—Patrick Califia-Rice, "Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails," introduction to Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power, edited by Simon Sheppard and M. Christian, 2000
- "I'm scared, too," she continued. "If I'm not with a butch everyone just assumes I'm straight. It's like I'm passing too, against my will. I'm sick of the world thinking I'm straight. I've worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian."
—Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, p. 151, 1993
- "When did you first know you were different?" the counselor at the L.A. Free Clinic asked.
"Well," I said, "I knew I was poor and on welfare, and that was different from lots of kids at school, and I had a single mom, which was really uncommon there, and we weren't Christian, which is terribly noticeable in the South. Then later I knew I was a foster child, and in high school, I knew I was a feminist and that caused me all kinds of trouble, so I guess I always knew I was different." His facial expression tells me this isn’t what he wanted to hear, but why should I engage this idea that my gender performance has been my most important difference in my life? It hasn't, and I can't separate it from the class, race, and parentage variables through which it was mediated. Does this mean I'm not real enough for [sex change] surgery?
I've worked hard to not engage the gay childhood narrative—I never talk about tomboyish behavior as an antecedent to my lesbian identity, I don't tell stories about cross-dressing or crushes on girls, and I intentionally fuck with the assumption of it by telling people how I used to be straight and have sex with boys like any sweet trashy rural girl and some of it was fun. I see these narratives as strategic, and I've always rejected the strategy that adopts some theory of innate sexuality and forecloses the possibility that anyone, gender troubled childhood or not, could transgress sexual and gender norms at any time. I don't want to participate in an idea that only some people have to engage a struggle of learning gender norms in childhood either. So now, faced with these questions, how do I decide whether to look back on my life through the tranny childhood lens, tell the stories about being a boy for Halloween, not playing with dolls? What is the cost of participation in this selective recitation? What is the cost of not participating?
—Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, p. 32, 1998
- "Already given discourses might elide the specificities of those with firm locations within already given categories but not to the same degree that they elide the specificities of those of us who are dislocated from such categories. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so not in order to engage in high-spirited celebration or revelry. We do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, eliding, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly. When we choose to live with and in our dislocatedness, fractured from social ontology, we choose to forgo intelligibility: lost in language and in social life, we become virtually unintelligible, even to ourselves."
--C. Jacob Hale, "Consuming the Living, Dis(Re)Membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands," GLQ, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998. p. 336. (Article on pages 311-348.)
b. Resources on postmodernism and examining gender as a choice
i. Books
- Gender Trouble, by Judith Butler
Summary: “In a new introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition of Gender Trouble--among the two or three most influential books (and by far the most popular) in the field of gender studies--Judith Butler explains the complicated critical response to her groundbreaking arguments and the ways her ideas have evolved as a result. Nevertheless, she has resisted the urge to revise what has become a feminist classic (as well as an elegant defense of drag, given Butler 's emphasis on the performative nature of gender). The book was produced, according to Butler , "as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing the possibilities for a livable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual margins." An attack on the essentialism of French feminist theory and its basis in structuralist anthropology, Gender Trouble expands to address the cultural prejudices at play in genetic studies of sex determination, as well as the uses of gender parody, and also provides a critical genealogy of the naturalization of sex. A primer in gender studies--and sexy reading for college cafés.” -- Regina Marler
Publisher: Routledge; 10th Anniv edition (September, 1999)
ISBN: 0415924995
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail//0415924995/qid=/sr=/ref=cm_lm_asin/002-0006159-0816833?v=glance
- Queer Theory, Gender Theory : An Instant Primer - Riki Wilchins
Summary: A one-stop, no-nonsense introduction to the core of postmodern theory, particularly its impact on queer and gender studies. Nationally known gender activist Riki Wilchins combines straightforward prose with concrete examples from LGBT and feminist politics, as well as her own life, to guide the reader through the ideas that have forever altered our understanding of bodies, sex and desire. This is that rare postmodern theory book that combines accessibility, passion, personal experience and applied politics, noting at every turn why these ideas matter and how they can affect your daily life.
Riki Wilchins is the founding executive director of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition. The author of Read My Lips and GenderQueer. She was selected by Time magazine as one of "100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century." (From Amazon book description)
Publisher: Alyson Publications (August 15, 2004)
ISBN: 1555837980
- The Joker’s Wild: Changing Sex and Other Crimes of Passion (out of print)
by
Max Wolf Valerio
“The Joker is Wild! is about passion, identity and exploration. It's about changing sex as risk and adventure. I am a poet and writer as well as performer and this book is the story of my odessey of self discovery BOTH as a creative voice AND as a transsexual man. The Joker is Wild! traces my journey to manhood, physically, spiritually, psychologically, sexually. I take the reader through the guts of the transition, I want them to experience a "sex change" themselves. They'll be lots of wacky humor, pop culture, sex, rock and roll, poetry, as much perversion as the editor will let me cram in, also drugs, visions, and playful irreverance. I'll have a tight focus on sexual politics, especially the always confusing, exciting relations between men and women. I'll explore the slippery yet enduring nature of sexual/gender identity.
Having lived through this transition first hand, I feel that there are unique insights that transsexuals have to offer the rest of the world. My values have changed dramatically in the past six and a half years that I have lived as male. I've gone from an alienated lesbian feminist to a heterosexual man who has been branded by some lesbian feminists as "a militant heterosexual." How did this happen and what does it mean? Is it true? (ROFL) What kinds of questions does this journey answer about the nature of maleness and femaleness? What aspects of any person's experience and perceptions of men and women (male and female) are socially constructed and which aspects are biologically based? How am I treated differently and how does this affect how I act and what my values are?
This is the transsexual man remade as agent provocateur of sexual culture, a thief of technology for self discovery.”
ii. Articles
- "Kate Bornstein: A Transgender Transsexual Postmodern Tiresias." An interview with Kate Bornstein by Shannon Bell, in which the Kate proclaims, "I make it clear that I am a transsexual by choice and not by pathology. . . . Gender is a cult. Membership in gender is not based on informed consent. There is no way out without being ridiculed and harassed."
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=61
- "Blurring Boundaries, Marking Boundaries: Who is Lesbian?"
Jacob Hale
Journal of Homosexuality (1996), 32(1): 29, 40.
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