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dreamer_easyJust wanted to jot down a few notes from a 1991 essay called "Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex" by Judith Shapiro. She discusses, and I think explains, an apparent paradox of transgender, encapsulated in a quotation which I'm sure I've seen more than once:
But, as Shapiro and others have pointed out: "The gender conservatism of transsexuals is encouraged and reinforced by the medical establishment on which they are dependent for therapy. The conservatism of the doctors is in turn reinforced by their need to feel justified in undertaking as momentous a procedure as sex change surgery... It has been [largely] male surgeons' and psychiatrists' expectations about femininity that have had to be satisfied... There are reports in the literature of doctors using their own responses to a patient - that is, whether or not the doctor is attracted to the patient - to gauge the suitability of sex change surgery. Physical attractiveness seems to have provided the major basis for an optimistic prognosis in male to female sex change." (My emphasis, and may I just add, what the *&%*%?!) What's more, medics "have also felt the need to socialize male to female transsexuals into their future roles" - such as accepting lower pay.
In short, to get life-saving help, transwomen have had to subject themselves to the cookie-cutter of gender even more than ciswomen have. One pair of critics said that "the medical profession has indirectly tamed and transformed a potential wildcat strike at the gender factory".
"The way in which transsexuals go about establishing their gender in social interactions reminds us that the basis on which we are assigned a gender in the first place (that is, anatomical sex) is not what creates the reality of gender in ongoing social life. Moreover, the strategies used by transsexuals to establish their gender socially [dress, voice, behaviour, etc] are the same when they are playing the role associated with their original anatomical sex and when they are playing the role associated with their new achieved sex. In neither case is this accomplished by flashing. Transsexuals make explicit for us the usually tacit processes of gender attribution... In other words, they make us realise that we are all passing." (My emphasis again.)
Transwomen, remarks Shapiro, "would seem to be engaged in a willful act of downward mobility… we might see [transphobia] as reflecting the fact that those who intentionally move down in the system are more threatening to its values than those seeking to move up. The latter may constitute a threat to the group concerned with maintaining its privileges, but the former constitute a threat to the principles on which the hierarchy itself is based."
Critiquing what has come to be called "trans-exclusionary" feminism, Shapiro notes "there has been a somewhat unprincipled marriage of convenience between a social constructionist view of gender and an essentialist view of womanhood." Zing! Woman is made, not born - unless she's a transwoman and you want to keep her out.
This brings me to my own theory of where some of the transphobia in feminism has its origins: the second wave's reclaiming of the female body. Our foremothers did important work in fighting the disgust and loathing directed at female anatomy, and extolled the virtues which they saw as connected to femaleness, such as creativity and nurturance. But I think that for some feminists, then and now, this became an insistence that transwomen could not be real women because (to borrow Germaine Greer's in-your-face, no-apology phrases) they don't have "a big, hairy, smelly vagina" and that "If you didn't find your pants full of blood when you were 13 there's something important about being a woman you don't know."
The tension here is simply resolved, IMHO, by accepting transwomen into the category of "woman" as simply another one of its many, many sub-categories. Women everywhere share many experiences, but our experiences are not homogeneous, even when it comes to biology. Shapiro suggests that trans people be thought of as "naturalized" women and men. (ETA: This is an accepting, welcoming metaphor, but it's challenged by, for example, Fredd, the trans boy quoted in Judith Halberstamm's Female Masculinity: "No, I don't just speak French having moved there, I AM French.")
To finish, the anecdote Shapiro uses to start: "There is a story about two small children in a museum standing front of a painting of Adam and Eve. One child asks the other, 'Which is the man and which is the lady?' The other child answers, 'I can't tell - they don't have any clothes on.'"
__
Halberstamm, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998.
Kando, Thomas. Sex Change: the Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals. Springfield Illinois, Charles C. Thomas, 1973.
Shapiro, Judith. "Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex". in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds). Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Routledge, New York and London, 1991.
"Unlike various liberated groups, transsexuals are reactionary, moving back towards the core-culture rather than away from it. They are the Uncle Toms of the sexual revolution. With these individuals, the dialectic of social change comes full circle and the position of greatest deviance becomes that of the greatest conformity." — Thomas KandoThe idea being that, by changing from male to female or vice versa, transgender people may shake up the idea of the gender binary, but ultimately they reinforce it: the belief that there are exactly two genders, that genitals are the "essential sign" of gender, and so on. What's more, studies of transwomen (keep in mind the date at which Shapiro is writing) report that they are stereotypically feminine, wanting to be housewives and/or work in pink collar jobs, considering themselves nurturing and intuitive, holding even more conservative opinions about sex roles than ciswomen, and so forth. Cue much feminist ire.
But, as Shapiro and others have pointed out: "The gender conservatism of transsexuals is encouraged and reinforced by the medical establishment on which they are dependent for therapy. The conservatism of the doctors is in turn reinforced by their need to feel justified in undertaking as momentous a procedure as sex change surgery... It has been [largely] male surgeons' and psychiatrists' expectations about femininity that have had to be satisfied... There are reports in the literature of doctors using their own responses to a patient - that is, whether or not the doctor is attracted to the patient - to gauge the suitability of sex change surgery. Physical attractiveness seems to have provided the major basis for an optimistic prognosis in male to female sex change." (My emphasis, and may I just add, what the *&%*%?!) What's more, medics "have also felt the need to socialize male to female transsexuals into their future roles" - such as accepting lower pay.
In short, to get life-saving help, transwomen have had to subject themselves to the cookie-cutter of gender even more than ciswomen have. One pair of critics said that "the medical profession has indirectly tamed and transformed a potential wildcat strike at the gender factory".
"The way in which transsexuals go about establishing their gender in social interactions reminds us that the basis on which we are assigned a gender in the first place (that is, anatomical sex) is not what creates the reality of gender in ongoing social life. Moreover, the strategies used by transsexuals to establish their gender socially [dress, voice, behaviour, etc] are the same when they are playing the role associated with their original anatomical sex and when they are playing the role associated with their new achieved sex. In neither case is this accomplished by flashing. Transsexuals make explicit for us the usually tacit processes of gender attribution... In other words, they make us realise that we are all passing." (My emphasis again.)
Transwomen, remarks Shapiro, "would seem to be engaged in a willful act of downward mobility… we might see [transphobia] as reflecting the fact that those who intentionally move down in the system are more threatening to its values than those seeking to move up. The latter may constitute a threat to the group concerned with maintaining its privileges, but the former constitute a threat to the principles on which the hierarchy itself is based."
Critiquing what has come to be called "trans-exclusionary" feminism, Shapiro notes "there has been a somewhat unprincipled marriage of convenience between a social constructionist view of gender and an essentialist view of womanhood." Zing! Woman is made, not born - unless she's a transwoman and you want to keep her out.
This brings me to my own theory of where some of the transphobia in feminism has its origins: the second wave's reclaiming of the female body. Our foremothers did important work in fighting the disgust and loathing directed at female anatomy, and extolled the virtues which they saw as connected to femaleness, such as creativity and nurturance. But I think that for some feminists, then and now, this became an insistence that transwomen could not be real women because (to borrow Germaine Greer's in-your-face, no-apology phrases) they don't have "a big, hairy, smelly vagina" and that "If you didn't find your pants full of blood when you were 13 there's something important about being a woman you don't know."
The tension here is simply resolved, IMHO, by accepting transwomen into the category of "woman" as simply another one of its many, many sub-categories. Women everywhere share many experiences, but our experiences are not homogeneous, even when it comes to biology. Shapiro suggests that trans people be thought of as "naturalized" women and men. (ETA: This is an accepting, welcoming metaphor, but it's challenged by, for example, Fredd, the trans boy quoted in Judith Halberstamm's Female Masculinity: "No, I don't just speak French having moved there, I AM French.")
To finish, the anecdote Shapiro uses to start: "There is a story about two small children in a museum standing front of a painting of Adam and Eve. One child asks the other, 'Which is the man and which is the lady?' The other child answers, 'I can't tell - they don't have any clothes on.'"
__
Halberstamm, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998.
Kando, Thomas. Sex Change: the Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals. Springfield Illinois, Charles C. Thomas, 1973.
Shapiro, Judith. "Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex". in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds). Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Routledge, New York and London, 1991.
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Footnote
Date: 2016-01-23 06:36 am (UTC)Major Briggs: I'm not at liberty to reveal the nature of my work. This secrecy pains me from time to time. Any bureaucracy that functions in secret inevitably lends itself to corruption. But these rules I have pledged to uphold. I believe a pledge is sacred.
Cooper: Speaking as a man and a fellow employee of the Federal Government, so do I.
I was caught by that "man", turning it over and over in my mind - I knew just what Cooper / the writer meant; but why dioes "man" mean "person with integrity"? Shapiro spelled it out for me: "… masculinity is the unmarked category and femininity the marked category. That is, our notions of what a man should be like are linked to our notions of what a person, in general, should be like."
(Jon and I are rewatching "Twin Peaks". It was interesting to find out that the rubbishy sexist stuff in the second season was perpetrated when David Lynch (whose name I just typed three times as "Lunch", send help) was not on the show. A bit like Jimmy McGovern, what he does with female characters is questionable, but it's also complex and ambiguous, so seldom dull.
Another footnote
Date: 2016-01-23 06:37 am (UTC)Re: Another footnote
Date: 2016-01-23 07:54 am (UTC)Dictionary.com kindly points out that homo/heterogenous and homo/heterogeneous can be confused, which yes, yes they can. :-)
Especially if you're reading fast. ;-)
Re: Another footnote
Date: 2016-01-23 06:44 pm (UTC)Re: Another footnote
Date: 2016-01-30 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-23 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-23 08:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-26 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-26 10:48 am (UTC)When I spotted this passage last night (while the Apple TV was buffering) I connected it to Shapiro's discussion of whether transgender people reinforce or challenge the gender binary. Typing it in just now, I thought of the xanith of Oman - in terms of presentation and status, they're a mixture of men and women, and in certain ways neither men nor women. So there are certainly gender categories which expand on the binary, and the Mesopotamian ones might be examples. (So much has to be deduced from so little evidence! There are just "two ambiguous references" to the female -> male people.)
__
Saana Teppo, Saana. "Sacred Marriage and the Devotees of Ishtar", in Martti Nissinen and Risto Uro (eds). Sacred Marriages: the divine-human sexual metaphor from Sumer to early Christianity. Winona Lake, Indiana, Eisenbrauns, 2008.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-14 04:13 am (UTC)