Another Historic Meeting, Another Melanin Free Transgender Contingent

Once again, the age old pattern of white privilege intertwining with queer activism rears its pale, ugly head.  Recently, the White House honored LGBT Pride and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall with a reception.  Of the trans people invited to participate, not one person was African American.   In her article, Another Historic Meeting, Another Melanin Free Transgender Contingent, Monica Roberts at TransGriot says:

i went nuclear last year when there was a historic committee hearing on transgender issues and not one African-American transgender person was invited to participate.

There was another historic gathering of importance to GLBT people that took place on Monday. It was in the wake of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that took place June 28, 1969.

This time the host was none other than the POTUS, and it took place in the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that my ancestors helped construct with their unpaid labor.

So did the white transgender community learn its lesson from last year and make sure in the twelve transgender people that were selected to be there, there was some African-American representation?

Nope.

Monica adds:

This was supposed to be a commemoration of Stonewall, and Miss Major, one of the few African-American transpeople left who are Stonewall veterans is still alive and well.

Why wasn’t she there? Come to think of it, there were people in the trans community such as Vanessa Edwards Foster and Marti Abernathey who busted their derrieres in swing states like Ohio and Indiana to help get President Obama elected.

Washington DC itself is 61% African-American, which translates to Chocolate City having chocolate flavored transpeople. Where were they?

I also have to ask the question who put the list together this time or had input for it, knowing that you’ll shunt the blame to the Obama White House for the ‘oversight’?

And what pisses me and many African-American transpeople off even more about this dissing is the bitter irony that we weren’t invited to an event that an African-American president we helped to elect called to celebrate an event and a movement we helped jump off.

That about sums it up.  Go read the rest of the post at TransGriot.

A Point About Cis

Lisa at Questioning Transphobia just posted a great article about the term cis, people’s response to the word, and how privilege interrelates:

Cis is not targeted at gay white men, nor is it targeted at feminist women, nor is it targeted at any one particular demographic. Cis people are everywhere. At the most liberal interpretation we’re aware of, cis people make up ~480-495 out of  every 500 people on Earth.

Cis is not an insult, it’s not a slur. It is, however, as much of an identity as trans is, even if most cis people never stop to think about the fact that they’re cis, that they just assume that being what they are (”I’m just a person, I’m not cis/white/het/able-bodied!”) is the normal way to be.

Being cis doesn’t make anyone a bad person. Having privilege doesn’t make anyone a bad person. When you sit back and you think “that person who’s calling me cis is saying I have privilege and thus I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON” consider that the trans person who says that may be white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied, or otherwise privileged. That trans person who says that may even have come to terms with hir own privileges, and does not take it personally when her privilege is pointed out to her.

And what does this privilege really mean? It means several things. Having privilege means is that it’s something you don’t have to think about. As far as you’re concerned, culture is designed to accommodate you in this particular way, treat you as if you’re normal, the human default with regards to gender identity (if you’re a male and identify yourself as a man, or you’re a female and identify yourself as a woman). You don’t have to think about your gender identity because everyone considers it natural. People may consider how you do gender to be wrong, but they don’t question whether you are a man or a woman. They may think that a man attracted to men or a woman attracted to women is doing gender wrong because you’re not heterosexual, but that is homophobia, and is not the same thing that trans people experience. I say this as a trans woman who is also a lesbian.

Go read the rest of the article.

Edited to add:

While we are on the topic, dglenn at Speaker for the Diodes has a comprehensive post on the language concerns surrounding cis, cissexual and cisgender:

Folks, ‘cisgendered’ (or ‘cisgender’¹) and ‘cisssexual’ really are intended to be neutral terms and will be so until/unless some sort of general stigma gets attached to the concept of living / identifying / presenting as the gender society always expected of you because it was on your birth certificate. I don’t see that ever being likely. (I have a hunch that I’ll be responding to a lot of criticisms of this essay by pointing back to this very pragraph, starting at that “until”.)

It’s important to note that there’s no reclaiming of an old slur involved, nor repurposing of a word with other baggage, because ‘cisgendered’ was coined specifically for this meaning and this purpose, and wasn’t a word before that. Any baggage the word has now has to have accrued entirely over the last decade and a half.

The reason it feels jarring — “naming”? “marking”? — to you, and gets your hackles up is quite simply that y’all are accustomed to being the unmarked class, and giving you any concise name is going to feel like an imposed label that, because you’re not used to having to acknowledge a label at all, some of you start to suspect is somehow insulting or denigrating.

Dglenn also points out that being a member of an unmarked class does not justify one’s opposition to being labeled by the members of the marked class:

An argument I’ve heard is that since we transgendered people get to tell others what labels to use for us and which words are unacceptable, cisgendered people should not have a label forced upon them. But we never got to choose whether to have a label; we only got to argue about which labels we didn’t find insulting. The ‘cis’ debate appears (so far) to be about whether cis-folk should be given a label at all, which is hard to see as anything other than default-class privilege.

You don’t get to hold on to being “just plain [unmarked] men” and “just plain [unmarked] women” and not have a label for your class, because that continues to promote the idea that trans men and trans women aren’t really men and women. I sure hope that you can understand why trying to stop that meme is important enough to risk pissing off some folks we’d been on good speaking terms with before they started insisting on turning back the clock.

Please read the rest of the article at dglenn’s blog.

Religion and Bigotry

This is a story of my struggle with feelings of hatred toward religion and Christianity.  I’m not proud of these feelings and I’m doing my best to resolve them.  As with so many stories of prejudice, it starts with childhood…

As I’ve mentioned in other places on this blog, I grew up in a conservative family. I was born in 1968. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Back then, my family’s conservatism wasn’t the kind of perspective that we now associate with the Republican Party and the Religious Right. There were no conservative think tanks or megachurches guiding people’s philosophies. It was a kind of gut-level conservatism that grew out of the culture of white, blue collar enclaves in Baltimore. It had less to do with politics and religion and more to do with fitting white cultural norms and vociferously denouncing that which didn’t fit. If you were not white, Christian, and heterosexual, my hometown was not a welcoming place to live in. Hate and prejudice were common, everyday features of life.

I was raised as a Christian, a Lutheran to be precise. So far as my childhood memories tell me, the church that I went to never directly confronted the issues of homosexuality or transgender people. Nevertheless, the intolerance of my community toward sexual and gender minorities was plainly evident, even to a child. I was very aware that who I was went against social convention and that the feelings growing deep inside of me were a mortal sin. I lived with the persistent fear of hell and eternal damnation throughout most of elementary school. It was terrible. I became obsessed with death long before I entered puberty. No child should have to endure this kind of torture. To this day, I consider teaching children about hell and damnation to be a form of emotional abuse.

During my adolescence, we started to spend our summers at a family cabin in the Appalachian mountains. Since the cabin was a hundred miles away from our church, my religious education ended. I was relieved. My Sundays were now mine to do as I pleased and I no longer had to endure grueling sessions of religious instruction that bored me to tears. In the following years, I learned to let go of the fear of a wrathful god who punishes the wicked with eternal damnation. My emotions started to heal.

Violence and Masculinity, Revisited

The topic of male aggression and violence is of deep interest to me. I’ve mentioned before that I was emotionally and physically abused when I was growing up. The bulk of that abuse came from the boys I went to school with. I was expected to embody the degree of aggression and violence that my peers manifested and that expectation was a constant source of stress for me. I’m not very aggressive. I never have been. I’m not all that prone to violence either. In a confrontation, my emotions are generally of the “run away” variety than the “stand and fight” variety. I’ve had to make a conscious effort in teaching myself to be more assertive. It’s something I struggle with even though I’ve walked the planet for four decades now.

I’m not convinced that men’s emotions are much more biologically predisposed toward violence and aggression than women’s emotions. I used to live with the idealistic misconception that women were angelic beings that stood apart from violence. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize that this is far from the case. I’ve witnessed women act on aggressive and violent impulses with great regularly. The contrast lies in the tendency of expressing those impulses through different avenues than men. Those impulses tend to be expressed through social interactions. In men, those impulses tend to be expressed through social interactions and physical violence and intimidation. As far as I can tell, the impulses remain the same. The way in which people express those impulses varies across gender.

In spite of these impulses being shared between the sexes, cultural ideology ties together masculinity, aggression and violence. Aggression and violence are not simply things that men do, they are incorporated into the very sense of what it means to be masculine. Put another way, aggression and violence are incorporated into boys’ and mens’ identities.

Gender Conformity in Action

Sometimes, gender conformity can get people to do strange things.  Some students at Mississippi State University conducted a social psychology experiment in the lobby of a building:

Experiment: Conformity to gender roles. We placed common male and female signs on opposite transparent doors instructing people to walk through the correct entrance.

Here is a video of their experiment:

It’s interesting that you can manipulate people into altering their everyday behaviors through gender conformity.  Gender and its social dictates serve as a powerful, yet subtle source of influence over human behavior.  It guides everything from choices in clothing to how we relate to inanimate objects and animals.

Here’s another experiment: make a list of everyday activities or behaviors that you engage in during the course of a day that are influenced by gender.  Now, what’s on your list?

(via: The Situationist)

Edited to add: “make a list of everyday activities or behaviors“

Another Perspective on Pop

A few days ago, I related the story of a Swedish family who is raising their young child in a gender neutral way by telling very few people of the child’s sex. Holly at Feministe has a wonderful take on this story.

… all of you people who are thinking about having kids in the future? Think about raising your kids this way. The world would be a better place for it.

This choice isn’t for everyone in every situation. Some places, school districts, neighborhoods, relatives, co-parents, might make this choice a lot more difficult, fraught, or even dangerous. But part of why it’s so difficult, and turns into such a controversial choice, is that there are so few people raising their kids with freedom of gender. It doesn’t have to be a huge deal. There are pockets of society now, communities where it’s no longer outlandishly remarkable that one child hasn’t chosen their gender yet, whereas another child figured out early on that he was a boy (regardless of what’s between his legs) and loves being a boy.

I want those pockets to grow. I want schools to get used to this, so that kids who are growing up with freedom of gender, kids who don’t want to pick one yet, kids who just aren’t ready or who never want to pick one, can all be safe. Especially intersex kids, who more and more are being raised in ways that allow them time to figure out complicated choices about their bodies. There will always be kids like that, some whose families get much less choice in the matter. Won’t you support them by joining in, if you have kids? Schools need to be able to support this. Other families, who are parenting in more conventional ways, need to be able to support this.

Go there and read the rest.

Music for the Soul: Namoli Brennet

Last weekend, I hauled my lazy self down to La Crosse, Wisconsin to see Namoli Brennet perform.  She’s a folk/folk rock musician from Tucson, Arizona and she’s a trans woman. She’s amazingly talented. She writes, produces, and mixes own her music, plays multiple instruments, and generally kicks ass. Her songs take you out of your own world and place you into the life of another person while telling you a story from that character’s perspective. Soulful, wonderful, stuff. Last, but not least, she’s an Out Music Award winner. I highly recommend her.

Finding her music was a godsend for me. It was during a time in my life when I was working through a lot of internalized transphobia. Seeing an incredibly talented trans person, up on stage, being herself was just what I needed.

Anyway, it was great to see her perform again. It was nice to hang out with her and chat for a bit before the show. The cafe was small and intimate and La Crosse is a really cute town. If you ever find yourself driving along the Mississippi in southern Wisconsin, stop by for a looksee.

Namoli Brennet’s websites:
Main Webpage
Myspace

Humor: Top 10 Reasons Why Men Shouldn’t Be Ordained

Go here for the list.

I have a never ending fascination with these kinds of responses to sexism.  For me, the point is not to try to illustrate that women are somehow innately superior to men. I don’t believe that any sex or gender is innately superior or inferior to another. Rather, the point is to illustrate that stereotypes can be manipulated to justify the exclusion of virtually anyone from virtually any activity. It illustrates the arbitrary nature of how kyriarchy assigns and justifies power.

House Rules Update and Trans 101

I’ve moved the House Rules to this location.  I also modified the last rule (#8) to say:

While I often assume the role of providing information on transgender issues, ultimately, it is not my job to educate you. If it looks as though you are bogging down the flow of a comment thread with basic “Trans 101″ concerns, I may choose to ban your participation in that thread. You have plenty of options in finding this information via other sources. Read through my old posts. Follow the various links in the sidebar and read the information available on those blogs and webpages. The more you read, the more you will learn. Also, Whipping Girl by Julia Serano is an excellent primer on transgender issues, albeit from a trans woman’s perspective. I don’t agree with everything she says, but reading her book will provide an excellent start. Last but not least, Google is your friend.

OK, that may have sounded a bit snotty, but it’s not meant to.  You see, there’s a small number of trans folk who are openly discussing these issues with the rest of the world, and to put it bluntly, there are many more of you than there are of us.  We are faced with the same common questions, concerns and observations from cis people over and over again.  It gets old after a while, especially when dealing with the more obnoxious comments and tropes that come up in this context.  Please don’t be offended when one of us sighs and says, “I’m finished discussing these issues with you.  Before you return to this thread, you need to educate yourself.”  You may not realize you are being offensive, but chances are, you have said something annoying that has been heard a thousand times before.  The best thing you can do at that point is quietly extract yourself from the conversation and sequester yourself with a bunch of reading material.

In an effort to address people’s information gap, I’ve started a “Trans 101″ section in the links on my sidebar.  I’ll be adding on to it as time progresses.  Also, there is an extensive Trans 101 links section in the sidebar of Questioning Transphobia.  I highly reccomend it.

Swedish Parents Raise Child Gender-Free

Here’s an interesting story. Two parents have kept their child’s sex a secret from all but a tiny handful of people.  They are leaving it up to the child as to when s/he decides to reveal hir sex to others.  (Thanks to Rachel and Rebecca for the heads up.)

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.